[ExI] Private and government R&D

[Dan]

--- On Mon, 6/29/09, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Dan<dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Actually, no.  In the present world, there are people
>> like you, most people on this list, me, etc. who want such
>> research.  If, let's say, tomorrow, the world turned
>> completely libertarian -- i.e., no more coerced funding for
>> anything, including the research you know and love -- would
>> that mean no one would step up and fund the stuff?  I
>> hardly think that'd be the case.  Do you?  Why?
> 
> No. I think on the contrary that if we manage to establish
> a
> transhumanist Zeitgeist, research gets funded, no matter
> what economic
> system is in place. If we do not, neither economic system
> is going to help. :-)

I'm saying that we don't need to do that at all under a voluntary system: there are enough transhumanists and other people interested in techno-progress to make it happen under a voluntary.

But even if every last human were a transhumanist, under a completely socialized system, yes, they'd get transhumanist projects, but these would be done less efficiently.  They'd run into the socialist calculation problem.  (Mixed systems suffer this more or less and their efficiency is likewise lower.)
 
> With a caveat, however: a world with plural legal systems,
> communities
> and sovereing entities, gives transhumanism (and
> transhumanists, who
> can always relocate, legally or otherwise) more chances
> than one-wolrdism... :-)

Well, we agree on that.  I tend to think one-worldism is the epitome of the statist approach.
 
>> *  That, as we can see, it looks like tokamak
>> research is a dead end.  I could be wrong about that, but
>> after half a century of research, how come we don't see
>> tokamaks powering up entire nations?  Now we don't have a
>> crystal ball, so nobody circa 1960 probably could've known
>> that the tokamak resources might have been better used on
>> other projects, but it's funny how this publicly funded
>> project keeps on going...  I'd almost bet that tokamaks
>> will never work but will continue to be funded for the next
>> five decades.
> 
> I am not in love with tokamaks (actually, inertial or
> polywell
> confinement might be the way to go...) but what about the
> ridiculous
> level of the investments involved? To make ITER, for a
> budget which is
> less than 1/80 of the costs of the Iraq adventure, it took
> ten major
> countries plus years and years...

And was the Iraq adventure an example of public coerced or private voluntary investment in action?  :/  Since the state isn't worried about costs -- it foists them on the tax base or inflates its way out of them (which is just indirect taxation of money holders) -- it can spend hundreds of billons of dollars on a fiasco like that.

Regards,

Dan