> I'm sorry you've somehow become so jaded, but why do you insist on parading your ignorance as informed skepticism?
Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?
> Medical imaging has been revolutionized by advances made by astronomers, both in hardware and software. I'll give CT scans as just one of the examples of direct transfer of knowledge/tools from astronomy to medicine.
Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
> Security scanning (eg. scanners in airports) is another example of direct transfer. The technology comes directly from astronomy and, in fact, an astronomer from the Space Telescope Science Institute, a govt. funded basic research institution, holds one of the main patents for this technology.
Again, not an argument that this wouldn't have happened without publicly funded astronomy, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This is exactly the problem in this sphere, all of conversations are rife with fallacious arguments. "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future, and this pervasive assumption that we must be in one the best possible worlds that can only be better if we funded more public science is naive.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a great deal of it in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?
Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.
> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.
> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).
Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?
> Medical imaging has been revolutionized by advances made by astronomers, both in hardware and software. I'll give CT scans as just one of the examples of direct transfer of knowledge/tools from astronomy to medicine.
Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
> Security scanning (eg. scanners in airports) is another example of direct transfer. The technology comes directly from astronomy and, in fact, an astronomer from the Space Telescope Science Institute, a govt. funded basic research institution, holds one of the main patents for this technology.
Again, not an argument that this wouldn't have happened without publicly funded astronomy, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This is exactly the problem in this sphere, all of conversations are rife with fallacious arguments. "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future, and this pervasive assumption that we must be in one the best possible worlds that can only be better if we funded more public science is naive.