But this "capitalist science" has already existed for ages, hasn't it? Plenty of companies do science, monopolize the results through patents, and exploit them for private profit. That's capitalist science.

> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large.

Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.

> Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests,

No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations.

> channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life.

Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.

Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite.

Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process.

Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for.

Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap.

(Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)

Don't we already have both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated.

(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)

If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.

> channel more money into basic science

This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.

I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity forever.

"The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large."

Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.

I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model.

Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete.

This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence.

I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this.

Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either.

Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement.

I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs.

Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!

Is this supposed to be a scientific research paper?

> "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible"

What's up with the citation to the above paragraph:

> "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example."

I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand.

This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?

Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...

"Basic science is currently a socialist enterprise, funded by the taxpayer, with the results available to society at large."

One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that.

"Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research."

Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.

Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it.

That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.

Maybe we should crowd-fund science projects like we do Kickstarter projects. In the Internet Age, that's about as capitalistic as you can get.

Article starts off with brushes that are too wide, but gets interesting around Appendix B where he talks about a sort of "Market for Hypotheses". Interesting concept, but doesn't talk much about the incentive structure needed for companies to play the game fairly. Also the market would have to be government created and run, a responsibility the ACA should make anyone skeptic of.

Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???

This is daft.