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Aral Balkan

You want people to trust science? Remove the profit motive. Decouple science from capitalism. Do away with patents. Do away with closed silos. Ensure 100% transparency and openness. Create and share in the open for the common good.

Practice science and not capitalism and you might be surprised by just how much people trust the former and not the latter.

@aral this is just common sense

@robots Sadly, there’s nothing common about it.

@aral Nice points, whats your take on Sci hub and #openaccess

@pavi Should be the norm.

@aral At the minimum, make publicly funded research open!

And stop private spin-offs.

@aral we can only dream of times like that. I would drop everything I do and jump straight into real science.

@aral I agree to a certain extend.
The main reason why science does the science is because there is a profit to be had.
You know? Be the first to make a treatment for something == no competition for a while == cash.

I'm quite sure that if for-profit science would be banned out and everything would be non-profit, it would take a lot longer to discover treatments for a lot of things :|

I'm sure some would do it because they love science but they'd lack the funds to do so (or motivation).

(1/2)

@finlaydag33k @aral People who think innovation can't happen without profit must lead sad, stifled, inspiration-free lives.

@locrian Never said it *can't* happen, just that it'll take a lot longer, there is a difference there.

@finlaydag33k You're posting this on a decentralized FOSS social media service hosted on a free website.
@aral What if my President is all into capitalism and cutting funds from scientists? What if a French representative has pushed for such a doctrine at the European union level?

@aral
As someone who just got back into academia, I agree with this.
The amount of obstacles to publishing research from "industrial partners"(in the UK, you jst say "customers"), and the ability of industry to determine what is researched at, has grown like crazy in the last 20 years, and based on older colleagues' stories, at least since the early 1990's.

Incentives for "relevant" research are not per se bad but it's been going too far for quite some time now.

@ArneBab @aral
Competition in Academia can be ugly and stupid... It's not all bad to have some competition, but there's no need to artificilly foster it. There're enough egos in the field that even without competition for grant money, there would be plenty of competition. Of ideas and methods, for the prestige of being the first to work out something important.

These days, academia does double duty as industry's research lab because most Ltd. can't "afford" medium-term research anymore...

@ArneBab @aral
... which brings us back to the topic of neoliberal capitalism.
Back in the 1980s, we had a "social market economy" ("Soziale Martkwirtschaft") in West Germany, and "capitalism" was only used in East German/Russian propaganda. Since 1990, it seems like our economy started turning into its own caricature.

@Mr_Teatime @ArneBab @aral When I worked at a technical university (CH), we were basically selling our products (some hardware, some source code) plus technical support. Some of the work was normal technical consulting (paid by the customer), and some was working on new standards driven by industrial partners (our time mostly paid by taxpayers, code to be sold "under fair conditions"). Not sure I'd call this science, or a bad setup, but really it should be "public money => public code".

@maxy
Yes, exactly.

In my field, it's a bit different, but the essence is the same.

Most projects I worked on over the last few years are funded 50:50 public/industry, and the industrial partners supply internal data, but get a veto on publications involving that data, so you need to work around that by normalizing in weird ways, omitting axis labels, or repeating things with generic inputs, but @ArneBab @aral - 1/4

unreproducible

The worse aspect in my view, though, is that Industey determines what topic is addressed. And most of them are short to medium term and very applied. And if you do them, you're basically married to that industrial partner. They wouldn't let you work with the competition because they gave you insider knowledge, and you can't make their products look bad, no matter your findings.

I don't mind applied research, but there needs to be more space for more theoretical - 2/3

long-term projects, based on what's good for society, not one company, and open publicatiim/discussion of outcomes, methods and data. I don't even mind industry collaborating, but it should be clear that results may be published, whether they rhyme with business strategy or not.
@ArneBab @aral - 3/3

@ArneBab @Mr_Teatime I don’t call it “institutional corruption” for nothing :)

@aral That's a very black and white approach. Capitalism isn't necessary evil and incentivizes progress. The common good usually isn't a great incentive. What's missing is oversight that protects the interest of the rest of us. Sadly that's lobbied away giving large monopolistic corporations almost complete freedom. As with many things in life the right balance should be the goal.

@4l3x @aral
Tying progress to capitalism : how to leave the poor behind 101
The goal of capitalism is by definition profit, not "let's make the world a better place". There's no such thing as ethical capitalism.