Moreover, the quote has no infomation at all about signaling impressive abilities, or the relation between basic research and signaling impressive abilities, all it does have, relevant to your claim, is evidence directly contrary to your claim, namely gates’ statement that the institute was created to do great research.

So the quote you are claiming as evidence for your claim provides no evidence for it, only evidence against it.

In what way can evidence against your claim be interpreted as evidence for your claim? Do you see what I am saying?

Robin: Basic research would go on even with no government or charity funding. Its main function is not research progress, however, but signaling impressive abilities.

About signaling abilities. Here is some data, that might be useful to analyze. If you look at some average measures, the number of science citations in in Italy and France are rather similar, yet, proportionally, the France government inputs about two times Italy’s government of GDP into basic research. Italy has almost no basic research in the private sector, either. Some explanation? The only two explanations I’ve found is that First: Italy is unusual in the amount of support that the families give to their children. Most Italian scientists I know are living in property that were either given to them, or acquired with substantial familial financial support, so in essence, the Italian families are subsidizing Italian science. Second: After decades of steady decrease in government funding, those who remain in the country are unusually passionate about their subject.

Where do you get signalling of impressive abilities from that?

You have to have some counter-evidence to his claim, don’t you?

Or can you just state the contradiction and leave it at that?

But if you leave it at that, then all the evidence is against you.

And Gates is of course the prime authority on why he is funding basic research, as only he can have access to his motives.

Is there something in the quote that I have missed?

So far that is the only evidence we have, as far as I know, except other anecdotes.

When I look at that post, what would be interpreted as ‘evidence’ for your claim?

I’m not expecting some bold claim in the quote from the media report on Gates’ trip to China, like

‘Gates announced today that the main function of basic research is signalling of impressive abilities.’

But I would like to see something in the quote that I can interpret as evidence for your claim. You must be looking at something in the quote when you conclude that, and I don’t see what it could be.

Could you tell me please where the evidence is?

I don’t know if the Corner allows comments, but have you tried mentioning to other bloggers what you see as corruption in their writings? Or do you only see folks here or at Marginal Revolution (recalling the nanny-state comment) as possibly being receptive? I tried telling Sailer once that he was acting petty, but it got other commenters irritated. The comments section there does tend to be rather deranged.

Peter, yes, this one case is by itself weak evidence.

Eliezer, I think you mean that many researchers would like to be paid to do more ambitious basic research. The fact that that they do not pay for such research themselves, however, is important evidence about their primary motivations.

Marvin Minsky, speaking at the recent annual convention of the World Transhumanist Association, said that it is no longer possible to get funding for genuinely basic research in Artificial Intelligence. If this was an exaggeration, it was only a slight one, from what I’ve seen.

Oh, there’s plenty of programs out there which say they want to fund brilliant, innovative, fundamental, outside-the-box research, but what they actually fund is research with a high probability of a small return. The committee members who vote to approve a genuinely basic grant – meaning that there’s a 90% subjective probability it will fail – do not share in the profits if the grant creates ten billion dollars of value. Their incentive is solely to protect their resumes. As long as committee members are not fired for failing to produce major revolutions, they have no incentive to fund major revolutions.

I have seen nothing to contradict the belief that many researchers would like to do more basic research with a longer-term time horizon.

I have seen plenty to support the belief that the top echelons of grantmaking agencies want to be seen as doing blue-sky research and put out PR to this effect, while the middle echelons have no incentive for supporting anything that looks weird or that doesn’t have a 90% probability of producing at least some results.

All these comments apply to government and charity funding just as much to corporate funding, if not more so. The only return to government bureaucrats is PR. Very few philanthropists can look beyond reputational returns to actual utilons created (Peter Thiel is the only example that springs to mind). Corporations have at least some chance of capturing the value of a Black Swan from basic research.

Your statement that “research would go on even with no government” seems superfluous if bias is your only interest, but not superfluous if you are also interested in signaling libertarian sympathies. But HA appears to exaggerate when he calls this part of a trend.