🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <71yPRB4w165w@netlink.cts.com>, jim@netlink.cts.com (Jim Bowery) writes:
|> Audit:  sci.physics,JBowery,1
|>  
|> On the debate between Cameron Randale Bass and Johan Wavers:
|>  
|> In large measure, they are both correct but they both suffer from
|> an impossible dilemma which, happily, is a false one:
|>  
|> Johan Wevers is correct that politicians prone to porkbarrel are 
|> very poor judges of appropriate priorities for scientific research.
|> He then chooses scientists themselves as the best arbiters.
|>  
|> Cameron Randale Base is correct that if scientists themselves are
|> the arbiters of the funding the public grants them, their lack of
|> accuntability will cause them to degenerate into politicians posing 
|> as scientists.  He then chooses openly elected politicians as the best 
|> arbiters.
|>  
|> This apparent dilemma is, fortunately, false.
|>  
|> A third and optimal alternative is laid out in legislative 
|> language of my original message.  That alternative is to designate
|> all public funding to be for pure science only, under a preexisting
|> statutory definition of pure science, and then deligate authority to
|> disperse those funds to a group which has objectively demonstrated 
|> its grasp of the laws of nature AND public utility:
|>  
|> Inventors of royalty bearing patents.

Actually, this is also not a good idea.  Funding decisions should be made
by a disinterested (not uninterested) population.  Inventors are not
disinterested.

Dan