From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue May 18 1999 - 17:40:22 MDT
jonwill <jonwill@erols.com> writes:
> Efficiency of funds spent on R&D could be increased through a
> global research consortium that monitors all such activity to help
> coordinate and guide all R&D efforts. Such a system could eliminate
> wasteful duplication of effort, and provide a mechanism for sharing
> of available research knowledge with and between the different R&D
> undertakings. The consortium could fund a committee of experts to
> track promising technologies and provide guidance in spending
> allocations.
Hehehehe... I hope you are aware that you have given half of the
oldtimers a heart attack. Fancy hearing that view on this list :-)
Seriously, this proposal is seriously flawed by its centralism: beside
the obvious problem of corruption and waste (which increases at least
proportionally to the amount of money/resources a central bureaucracy
handles) the consortium would also have little incentive to be good at
what it is doing; if research doesn't progress as fast as it could,
the consortium would just shrug and say that it needs more
resources. The problem of generally predicting which areas will become
useful is likely impossible to solve in practice and in principle, the
centralized structure will limit the information flow to the expert
comittees.
This is not just a matter of opinion or organisational theory,
experience seems to have borne out that centrally planned research
initiatives have been less efficient than free research (the obvious
example is Soviet research, although the EU framework programs are
looking more and more worrying too).
It is better to have groups that independently select what to study
and invest in, based on their knowledge (which they have a strong
incentive to do the most with, since it is their money). Collaboration
and avoiding duplication can be achieved in a decentralized fashion
such as the current scientific networking or net databases of "who's
doing what".
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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