[ghjv]

How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"

Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.

[conartist6]

work to restore public trust in science and technology. look at the ways that trust has been lost.

[Starman_Jones]

There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.

[arunabha]

That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.

The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.

Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.

We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Trust was "lost" through naked demagoguery.

[sseagull]

I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.

Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.

[SoftTalker]

Why is "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself" off the table?

Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?

[ghjv]

It's certainly on the table, I'm only pre-empting it as a clever answer since it's one I'm already aware of.

[light_hue_1]

Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.

The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.

Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.

[thrance]

In the end, charity, philanthropy and patronage can't achieve much more than help us feel good about massive inequalities. Not that it is completely useless, but if we want to have actual institutions carrying serious research we need public funding.

[limagnolia]

Become a politician or a lobbyist? Possibly work in a charity that funds research, as a fundraiser for them?

[the__alchemist]

I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.

I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.

[SoftTalker]

You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.

Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.

[davidw]

There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.

[JeremyNT]

Run for election on this platform.

The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.

[asoplata]

I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.

[jltsiren]

There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.

Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.

I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.

[mdhb]

Move to Europe.

[ghjv]

Elaborate?

[brightball]

Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.

Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.

[thinkcontext]

There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.

[thfuran]

No, they really haven't.

[SpicyLemonZest]

DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.

[hombre_fatal]

That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.

Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.

[ghjv]

reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.

optimizing processes =/= removing goals