[potamic]

I suppose the question of how to prioritize scientific funding is itself a scientific problem, so we would first need to decide how much to allocate to the scientific funding sub-discipline so that all of scientific funding is as efficient as possible!

In all seriousness, I don't know how science policy works but I expect it is more goal-oriented than objective-oriented. Science rarely starts with, "What are the biggest problems faced by humanity", and then tries to take them up. Rather what it's saying is, "I know this and this about something. Given this, I think I can figure out what is that", and then tries to figure out "that". There is no greater objective to figuring out "that", other than it is there to be found. You could perhaps say the ultimate objective of science is simply to know, and so you take whatever steps are in front of you that will help you know more.

It might seem kinda wasteful on the outset, but 400 years back nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help understand tides on earth, which in turn leads to understanding tidal currents, which in turn leads to understanding climate at a given place. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases lie in finding invisible things moving around in the air. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive studying why tiny flecks of dust jiggle about when floating on a drop of water, would lead to unlocking immense reserves of energy for civilization. Everything we are today, everything we can do, all the scientific and technological progress we have achieved is a result of this very process. It happened simply because many thousands of curious minds tried to take the next step in front of them. If some of them didn't because they were told it wasn't a worthwhile investment of resources, where would we be today?

[trueno]

the itch of curiosity can take someone to great heights... and glorious useless rabbit holes. us nerd programmers should be intimately familiar with this. i sort of do get a little irked at how a lot of the things discovered at the furthest reaches of our universe are just simply just trying to figure out that for the sake of figuring that out. don't get me wrong i'm a huge proponent of sciences in general im mostly just bewildered at the widespread collective belief that science can only be beneficial if you let it move at a glacial pace with lots of time and resources spent answering questions that should potentially be deprioritized. even writing software im constantly compelled to shake off the wild goose chases that are just me trying to find an answer to that and get back to doing something else, and i'm constantly hungry for ways to add my capacities to something that is beneficial for at least a handful of people.

we tend to give sciences a huge sort of "let them cook" pass about many things even though sometimes it's just resources spent on some giga niche corner of science to get to an answer that settles a 25 year old argument or theory no one knows or cares about. i don't think it hurts to get back occasionally to "ok guys let's try to focus on something of importance" and acknowledging even a little bit that some of the goose chases have been utterly pointless. is there some kind of unspoken rule that scientific discovery should only come from one giant leaky bucket exercise but the bucket is never ending? aligned research goals with some outcomes that aren't some super autistic itch-scratch only one or two people on earth understand are.. not a bad thing.

scientists of some levels sometimes terrify me. human, sure, but the relentless pursuit of finding that has throughout history caused many scientists and researchers to cross moral boundaries. sometimes i wonder if people looking the traces of hundred billion year old invisible invisible gamma stinky fart rays at the edge of our universe give any shits about the world and the people in it at all. its just harder now than ever to care about their laundry list of meaningless discoveries when we're in desperate need of here and now discoveries to solve problems we face today. in some respects staring at a scope into the edge of the universe is sometimes not any different than the kid who's just trying to escape the noise of life by throwing a video game on. i get it, i do. but i don't always wrap it in nobility because the sciences are filled with humans who are as imperfect as you and i, and sometimes they straight up aren't cooking much and seem a little directionless.

[potamic]

The people looking at invisible gamma farts at the edge of our universe is what led to understanding of supernovas, and the research on supernovas is what enabled ASML to build an EUV light source for their machines. EUV machines are arguably the most important machines on earth right now, responsible for modern GPUs and the recent growth of AI. If somebody told all those researchers in the 20th century to "focus on something of importance" instead, we may easily be a couple of decades behind with the state of semi-conductor technology today.