Hav­ing spent some days pon­der­ing the frac­tion of what I man­aged to see at GECCO, I’m con­coct­ing a num­ber of posts. But before I dive into the neat­ness and amaz­ing stuff I was told about, let me ask that sim­ple ques­tion again:

Is there a basic research crisis?

Now, I’ve been hang­ing around the Acad­emy well past my per­sonal best-​​by date, and I know that peo­ple have been com­plain­ing about lack and loss of fund­ing for Their Impor­tant Eso­ter­ica since time long-​​past. Immemo­r­ial, even.

And my wife spent some years work­ing in cor­po­rate research, and my own twisted path through life has taken me (in a pro­fes­sional, anti-​​academic capac­ity) to the Main Research Cam­puses of a hand­ful of For­tune Dozen com­pa­nies, and more of the For­tune 100. Researchers and mid-​​level project man­agers and tech­ni­cal con­trib­u­tors, no less than pro­fes­sors both tenured and un-​​, bitch all the time about lack of appre­ci­a­tion and money.

And they’re right. Most of the really inter­est­ing sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is not incre­men­tal devel­op­ment: it’s basic stuff. Abstruse math, over­ar­ch­ing mod­el­ing, bleeding-​​edge sci­ence fic­tional tech­nol­ogy. The world changes because these peo­ple do their work. And tra­di­tion­ally the gov­ern­ment (in the US) pays for that work. Either that, or Big Com­pa­nies pay their researchers to sit in their fancy-​​dancy Research Cam­puses and put­ter.

I think I’m hear­ing more sto­ries of loss. Not the nor­mal quota, but an anecdotally-​​verifiable decrease in the amount of actual bucks paid out for sci­ence and engineering.

And don’t even get me started on the human­i­ties and social sci­ences. They’re used to it, though they’re at least as important.

Yet. And yet. I know peo­ple who are (a) rich, and (b) want to pay smart peo­ple money. They can­not. They can con­tribute or donate or per­haps occa­sion­ally set up a chair or a fund or some­thing, but they can­not buy smart peo­ple and their ideas. Because that would con­t­a­m­i­nate the Life of the Mind, I’m told.

But which Life of the Mind are we talk­ing about, any­way? The one that rewards remark­able young under­grad­u­ates with sure-​​fire “tenure schol­ar­ships”? The one that refuses to let work inter­fere with fam­ily and social life, because it knows how impor­tant those aspects of life are to thought­ful inter­pre­ta­tion and deep rea­son­ing? Or, wait, maybe we mean the Life of the Mind where peo­ple share all their ideas in a mas­sively pro­duc­tive roil of col­lab­o­ra­tion and fruit­ful dis­course, with­out regard to per­sonal stake and one-​​upsmanship.

That one, surely.

And then there’s cor­po­rate research. At least there, you get to go home at 6pm. But the rewards—of The Mind—are so much sparser. The other rewards, well… that’s dif­fer­ent. Not what we’re look­ing for. Jobs and money and free time go such a short way towards acknowl­edg­ing the loss one feels at being excluded from the Tour Ivoire itself.

No, what I saw and shared at GECCO was the deep, pas­sion­ate thrill of dis­cov­ery. Those peo­ple got more from their con­ver­sa­tions and pub trips and Q-​​and-​​A ses­sions than a year’s worth of stipend. We solved each other’s problems.

And then we all went home.

So that, I think, is what’s bro­ken. That, I think, is the threat to basic research: we all go home at the end of the con­fer­ence.

Per­haps the deep­est threat to basic research is the social envi­ron­ment in which it is sup­pos­edly husbanded.