Since Edge has just released another one of their questions you’ve likely been thinking about science. To the average Joe science might seem to just happen and give us stuff like gravity and rocket ships (presumably in that order). But scientists have reasons for doing whatever sciencey stuff they do, and money presumably plays a part of that. Recently I came across two bloggers that took a critical eye to the supplying of science. First is Bruce Charlton. In Kealey on scientific motivations and incentives he discusses scientific research as a public vs private good and the crowding out involved in public investment. Terence Kealey argues that scientists are primarily motivated to attain status among their peers (sounds like something Robin Hanson might say). A funny bit is his labeling of academic journals as “vanity publishing”, like the company that published Steve Sailer’s book. It also resembles some of what Eric S. Raymond has said about the “gift-economy” among open-source hackers (I’m strictly proprietary and not talented enough to be considered a hacker, so I don’t know how accurate Eric is).
Cheap-skate self-experimenter Seth Robert’s shouldn’t be worried about getting grants, but he’s talking about them anyway here. Apparently even in these belt-tightening times there’s still money to be had. What I find interesting about the post is his use of Jane Jacob’s two moralities from Systems of Survival: the taking (aka guardian) based on loyalty and the trading based on honesty. Seth thinks that reliance on grants will make scientists more concerned with loyalty than honesty and afraid to publish results that Seth (who ain’t afraid of no McCloskey) wouldn’t think twice about.
On an unrelated note, the Growthology blog has a post on the brain drain from EU to US. I’ve long been interested in examining the “foot-vote”, especially among relatively advanced countries harder to distinguish from each other compared to the Third World. As my comment there indicates though, I’m still left hungry.
On a final note, expect a significant change at this blog. What it is I won’t say quite yet.
Entitled to an Opinion 
January 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm
With the exception of NASA, very little science funded by the government ever enters the mainstream and has any real impact on society. When it does, it is invariably by accident. The Internet being birthed as part of a particle physics experiment is a good example.
Industry-driven science also never results in the kinds of “revolutions” that Thomas Kuhn talked about that overturn our understanding of the universe(s), but they do take a bunch of baby steps towards better procedures to solve existing problems. All scientific revolutions that I know of came from outsiders, people who had no loyalties to the established “system” and therefore could push their viewpoint without much fear of losing their reputation. A reputation is much easier to wager when you don’t have one.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that modern scientists don’t value honesty, but it is a commodity of decreasing importance. It doesn’t hurt that very few people outside the establishment actually understand enough about what’s going on to legitimately challenge some conclusion.
January 7, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I didn’t know NASA was that different. And didn’t the internet start out as ARPANET, part of DARPA?
All scientific revolutions that I know of came from outsiders, people who had no loyalties to the established “system” and therefore could push their viewpoint without much fear of losing their reputation.
That sounds wrong to me. What about quantum mechanics?
January 7, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I haven’t followed the links, but I’ve often wondered if there might be a systemic funding bias that favors positive results generally. If so, the increasing reliance on meta-analysis could be dramatically skewed against null-hypotheses. Anything in your reading?
January 7, 2009 at 7:01 pm
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/09/why-most-publis.html
January 8, 2009 at 11:59 am
I think the root problem is that most people in the career-paths we label as ‘scientists’ are really just technicians.
You don’t need to be professional to be a scientist, but fewer and fewer people actually are.
January 8, 2009 at 6:28 pm
What constitutes a “professional” in your book? What separates a technician from a scientist?
January 8, 2009 at 9:38 pm
NASA isn’t any different from the NSF or NIH in terms of bureaucratic wastefulness and bloat, but they are the leading world science organization for anything involving space. Satellites are NASA’s most significant contribution to society, but lots of zero-gravity experiments have resulted in odd innovations as well. Even though they have a virtual monopoly on the real estate and thus can’t be compared to any truly worthy competitors, NASA still deserves credit for what they do.
Packet switching networking began as a DARPA project but lounged in relative obscurity in academia and the military until CERN adopted TCP/IP in order to process data from particle collisions more quickly across more computers. That was the point at which it stopped being an ordinary computer network and became something resembling the current-day Internet. See here for more background.
The history of quantum mechanics is tricky to discuss because so many people were involved with its creation. Albert Einstein was still working as a lowly patent clerk in Berne in 1905 when he wrote his paper on the photoelectric effect which postulated that light may be composed of individual quanta. However, Niels Bohr proposed his electron-quantized model of the atom in 1913 while a postdoc under Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester, so he counts as a professional.
January 8, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Isaac Newton was a professor at Cambridge. I don’t think Liebniz, Kepler or Copernicus can really be thought of as “outsiders” either.
January 8, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Now you’re jumping too far back in time for the distinction between outsider and insider to mean anything at all. Before the mid-1850’s, science was a hobby for the extremely rich, equivalent to owning a yacht today. There were no “professional” scientists because it was impossible to make a living doing science or even teaching it. Not enough people cared about it. Universities existed only for the rich, and they were far less important to scientific discovery than the various clubs and societies where wealthy people who were curious about the world around them congregated. The Royal Society did more for science than Oxbridge and the Ivy League combined, at least before the 1900’s.
January 8, 2009 at 11:38 pm
When science was restricted only to wealthy insiders, were scientific revolutions so much less common than afterward?
January 9, 2009 at 12:01 am
No, you misunderstood my point. Before the 1850’s, there was no organized system which doled out research money or employed scientists. No one did science for a living. It was a hobby paid for with one’s own money or with an inheritance. Newton, Liebniz, etc. were not wealthy insiders. They may have not even been wealthy outsiders in the strict sense that there was no system to exist outside of.
However, they were “outsiders” in the sense that they were not beholden to any institutionalized financial lifeline. There was therefore less pressure to agree with the prevailing conventional wisdom. The core leadership groups of the Royal Society and other scientific societies were usually composed of smart enough and humble enough people that they awarded prestige based on worthwhile innovation instead of on conformity.
And there were more scientific revolutions per year under this system than under the current one. In the 20th century it is hard to distinguish between a scientific revolution and a technological one, but by my count the only two significant scientific revolutions during this period were quantum mechanics and plate tectonics. Most of the 20th century’s new technology was driven by advances in engineering, not hard science.
January 9, 2009 at 12:36 am
I forgot one big scientific revolution in the 20th century: genetics. So that makes three.
January 9, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Relativity doesn’t count as a scientific revolution?
January 10, 2009 at 1:55 am
You guys are stuck on paradigmatic romance. Science is skunkwork, and a way of knowing. Bayesian models matter in the modern context. Stats and labs and publishing rights, which are almost always underwritten. This is where and why bias and money enter the frame. Anthropogenic global warming? Maybe. I’ll even say “probably,” in deference to my ignorance, and expert consensus. But I still wonder who’s writing the checks, and why.
January 10, 2009 at 2:12 am
Reminds me of a Robin Hanson post:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/funding-bias.html
also this one:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/anthropology-pa.html
January 10, 2009 at 11:07 am
“What constitutes a ‘professional’ in your book?”
A professional is one who does a thing as a profession, that is, as a means of supporting themselves by exchanging the product of their work for goods or money.
In contrast, an amateur is one who does a thing merely because they love doing it.
In modern times, the word ‘professional’ has come to be associated with discipline and quality, while ‘amateur’ is associated with haphazardness and lack of quality; however, these associations do not follow from the original meanings.
“What separates a technician from a scientist?”
A technician knows what should be done. A scientist knows why it should be done; they understand the methodology that requires the action.
January 10, 2009 at 11:47 am
Why would you say “fewer and fewer” actually are professionals? In the past weren’t most scientists amateurs, while today a lot more people are paid to do it?
January 10, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I’m not the same “Michael” as posted earlier in this comment section.
On melendwyr’s remark that most ‘scientists’ are just technicians, I have to say that the use of the word ‘scientist’ is rather peculiar compared to that of analogous descriptions. For example, if I have a degree in philosophy, or teach philosophy at a university, does that make me a ‘philosopher’? To make such a claim would seem pretentious, I think. Socrates was a philosopher; Aquinas was a philosopher; someone who teaches philosophy at XYZ University is just a philosophy teacher. Similarly, if I have a degree in English literature, or teach English literature, that does not make me a ‘man of letters,’ etc.
Those who practice operative learned professsions like law or medicine have titles such as ‘lawyer’ or ‘physician’ (from the archaic ‘physick,’ meaning medicine), but academic or industrial science is not quite comparable to these disciplines. Newton and Einstein were ‘scientists,’ but Joe Bloggs, who is a science instructor at a state university, or a formulator of adhesives or dyes at some manufacturing business, is not.
Michael of post 9 is not quite correct in dating the historical advent of ‘professional’ science and the emergence of people who made a living teaching it at universities. Chemistry was taught as early as the late seventeenth century in the Netherlands. It was considered to fall under the jurisdiction of the medical faculty, and medicine was from mediæval times part of the university. At Utrecht, J.C. Barchusen taught chemistry; I have an example of his textbook, “Pyrosophia, succincte atque breviter iatro-chemiam, rem metallicam et chrysopoieiam pervestigans” (1698). The famous Herman Boerhaave taught chemistry at Leyden from 1704, being made professor of medicine and botany in 1709 and of chemistry in 1718, succeeding LeMort in that post. In France, chemical research and lectures took place primarily under the aegis of the Académie royale des sciences at the Jardin du Roi in Paris – the tie to medicine again being evident, since a main function of the Jardin was to supply medicinal plants. Wilhelm Homberg, who had worked with Boyle in England, became one of the chief chemists at the Académie in 1691 and continued there until his death in 1715. One of his successors was G.F. Rouelle, who was ‘demonstrator’ (a presenter of lectures illustrated by experiments) at the Jardin from 1742 through 1768. Many French chemists were taught by Rouelle (Lavoisier was his pupil in 1763).
It is also not quite true that only ‘the rich’ were students of the sciences. Boyle, Cavendish, and Lavoisier certainly were men of leisured wealth, but Scheele, Priestley, and Dalton were not. Davy and Berzelius ended their lives as men of wealth and distinction, ennobled by their sovereigns, but both began in comparatively humble circumstances.
Practical laboratory instruction in the sciences is a nineteenth-century introduction; Justus von Liebig began the first student laboratory at the university of Giessen in 1825; he had been appointed professor the preceding year. Before this time the student had either to obtain access to his teacher’s private laboratory or to possess the means to set up his own. Michael of the earlier posts correctly identifies the 1850s as the beginning of this sort of instruction if we are considering only Britain, which was a latecomer to it. And he is certainly correct that the Royal Society was more important to the sciences in Britain than Oxford or Cambridge until the twentieth century. The Royal Institution (not the same thing!) was maybe even more so in the nineteenth century; unlike the Royal Society, it offered regular instruction in the sciences. Davy and Faraday (who began as Davy’s laboratory assistant) were professors there, as well as Fellows of the Royal Society.
January 12, 2009 at 9:33 am
“Why would you say “fewer and fewer” actually are professionals?”
No. Fewer and fewer are scientists.
January 12, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Ah, thanks for clearing that up.
February 22, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Michael #7:
Packet switching networking began as a DARPA project but lounged in relative obscurity in academia and the military until CERN adopted TCP/IP in order to process data from particle collisions more quickly across more computers. That was the point at which it stopped being an ordinary computer network and became something resembling the current-day Internet.
pretty much just wrong. certainly the link is not relevant to the obvious interpretation of these statements.