Pamela, hi
I actually thought it was extremely interesting, but have no knowledge
of my own to contribute.
Somebody you might like is a Swedish economist (now emeritus) named
Gunnar Eliasson, wwho has spent much of his career studying the
detailed planning and mechanics by which government-sponsored research
can either support a strong transition to a private sector or can
essentially leave no progeny.
This is not exactly to the center of your question about relative
priorities in the two as separate entities, but it has seemed to me
that the initial conditions and seeding that publicly funded research
creates can have a significant period of influence on what the private
sector is able to do with it.
In any case, Sweden is an interesting example, because they do a
limited set of things, but have done several of them quite well, and
they are not afraid to talk about either the public or the private
sector as a relevant player.
I don't have electronic links ready at hand on Gunnar, but he has
written a lot, including some books, which should be possible to find.
All best,
Eric
On Mar 3, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from
government led innovation to private sector led innovation was
interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I’m going
to forward this piece from Dave Farber’s list which also addresses
the issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have
consequences.
From: John Day <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists
Scott,
You have hit the nail on the head. We are not doing fundamental
research. The sciences are turning into craft. Lee Smolin first
brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book,
"The Trouble with Physics."
In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons
you outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar. I also think to
some degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur
C. Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable
from science.' We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law
that we don't see that what we are doing is craft.
The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.
The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.
See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree,
Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in
pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no
abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together.
(By their own admission, this problem still plagues China and
India. There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized
problem.)
By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were
losing knowledge. Needham says that it is because merchants
(capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap. The government power
structure controlled everything. I also believe it is because
there was no Euclid. There was no example of an axiomatic system.
The Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did
to geometry. Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on
geometry book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the
concept of proof. Other civilizations have mathematics, they have
recipes, algorithms; but not proof. Proof is at the root of
building theory. Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they
relate in ways you didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in
your knowledge are. The quest for theory is more important to
avoiding stagnation as the pull of capitalism.
Needham didn't live to see it. But we now have the example of how
the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation. That drive is fine
for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the
next one. And we have seen the example of that as well.
And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS. One sees the same the
same papers on about a 5 years cycle. The "time constants" have
changed but they are the same papers.
Early CS was much more scientific. We went about things much more
methodically, we were more concerned with methodically
understanding the fundamentals than just building something that
worked. (BTW to your comment: We *did* do a lot of RJE on the
early ARPANET. We had many scientific users submitting jobs on
particle physics, economics, weather simulation, etc. However, we
never saw it as the future. We had much bigger ideas in mind, for
distributed computing (ask Dave). It is really depressing that 40
years later, things really haven't moved anywhere. The hardware is
10s of thousands times faster and bigger. You are right. We have
re-labeled RJE, cloud computing, and never gotten past the 3270/
Mainframe days.)
You are right. We do have to get back to this. And there I am
afraid it gets disheartening. We have 30 years of conditioning the
field toward everything else but. I don't see many who even when
they say we need to do it, know how to do it. We have selected
against the ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students
(and professors) have trouble with abstraction. For a field that
one could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.
Take care,
John Day
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
