Yes, we do that. I think the way to think of it is that science sets its own agenda. To tell the truth, thats why the appropriations committees dont like us very much.
Why?
Because they hold the purse strings, honey. And theyre very jealous of that power. Ive had senators who believe the Earth is flat say to me, Are you trying to tell me that you know whats good for science better than I do? And of course thats exactly what Im trying to tell them, because its true, but what can you say? Thats the kind of person we sometimes have to deal with. Even with the best of committees, theres a basic dislike for sciences autonomy.
But were only free to study things.
I dont know what you mean.
Anna sighed. I dont either. Listen Sophie, thanks for that. Ill get back to you when I have a better idea what Im trying to ask.
Always here. Check out NSFs history pages on the website, youll learn some things you didnt know.
Anna hung up, and then did that very thing.
She had never gone to the websites history pages before; she was not much for looking back. But she valued Sophies advice, and as she read, she realized Sophie had been right; because she had worked there for so long, unconsciously she had felt that she knew the Foundations story. But it wasnt true.
Basically it was a story of science struggling to extend its reach in the world, with mixed success. After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, advocated a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was their basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being.
After that it was one battle after another, with both Congress and the President, contesting how much say scientists would have in setting national policy. President Truman forcing a presidentially selected board of directors on the Foundation in the beginning. President Nixon abolishing the Office of Science and Technology, which NSF had in effect staffed, replacing it with a single scientific advisor. The Gingrich Congress abolishing its Office of Technology Assessment. The Bush administrations zeroing out major science programs in every single budget. On it went.
Only occasionally in this political battle did science rally and win a few. After Sputnik, scientists were begged to take over again; NSFs budget had ballooned. Then in the 1960s, when everyone was an activist, NSF had created a program called Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society. What a name from its time that was!
Although, come to think of it, the phrase described very well what Anna had had in mind when querying Sophie in the first place. Interdisciplinary research, relevant to problems of our societywas that really such a sixties joke of an idea?
Back then, IRRPOS had morphed into RANN, Research Applied to National Needs. RANN had then gotten killed for being too applied; President Nixon had not liked its objections to his antiballistic missile defense. At the same time he preemptively established the EPA so that it would be under him rather than Congress.
The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadnt wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didnt want to know.
For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didnt want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joes logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?
She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the piece. No agency operates in a vacuum, it said. That was one way to put it! The NSF had been buffeted, grown, stagnated, adapteddone the best it could. Throughout all, its basic purposes and methods had held fast: to support basic research; to award grants rather than purchase contracts; to decide things by peer-review rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the expert cutting edges in every field.
Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the influence of science in human affairs.
She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yetthinking over the state of the worldsomehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider doing something more.
* * *
Primates in the drivers seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming one another in huge demolition derbies, a global auto-da-fé.
But they were primates, they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned to its current size precisely to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the almost subliminal satisfactions of winning a competition, or the grudging solidarities of cooperating to mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off in the overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.
When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game of prisoners dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both defect against the other, they each get one point; and if one defects and the other doesnt, the defector gets five points and the sap gets zero points. Using this scoring system to play the game time after time, there is a first iteration which says, it is best always to defect. Thats the strategy that will gain the most points over the long haul, the computer simulations saidif you are only playing strangers once, and never seeing them again. And of course traffic looked as if it were that situation.
But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out you drove into the same traffic jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you, then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than always defect. The first version of the more successful strategy was called tit for tat, in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This out-competed always defect, which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit for tat was not the perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud. Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit for tat, like generous tit for tat, in which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or always generous, which in certain limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit for tat, where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various versions of these firm but fair irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same opponent over and over.
In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kindsocial life was nothing but a series of prisoners dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas came to many at an even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your strategy a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.
Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. He wondered how it was that certain turn-signal indicators managed to express a great desperation to change lanes, while others seemed patient and dignified. The speed of blinking, perhaps, or how close the car hugged the lane line it wanted to cross. Although rapid blinking did look insistent and whiny, while slow blinking bespoke a determined inertia.
It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. On the West Coast they played tit for tat, or even firm but fair, because it moved things along faster. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more freeway traffic jams. People had learned the game from birth, sitting in their baby seats, and so in California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Even young males cooperated. In that sense if none other, California was indeed the edge of history, the evolutionary edge of Homo automobilicus.
Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up to get one point in a crash. Every SUV was a defection. Then there were the little cars that always gave way, the saps. A terrible combination. It was so slow, so unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.
And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction of traffic: you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was like witnessing magic, the technological sublime people spoke of, which was the emotion experienced when the primate mind could not find a natural explanation for what it saw.
And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and just curse someone ferociously, from a few feet away, and yet have no ramifications to such a grave social transgression. It was not much compared to the satisfactions of cooperation, but perhaps rarer. It was something, anyway.
He crept forward in his car, cursing. He should not have gotten onto the Beltway. It was often badly overloaded at this hour. Stop and go, inch along. Curse defectors and saps. Inch along.
It stayed so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to get there for the panel to start on time; there was no slack in the schedule. The panel members were all in town, having spent a boring night the night before, probably. And the Holiday Inn in the Ballston complex often did not have enough hot water to supply everyone showering at that hour of the morning, so some of the panelists would be grumpy about that. Some would be gathering at this very moment in their third floor conference room, ready to go and feeling that there wasnt enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded it on purpose, and they had flights home late the next day that they could not miss. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed, no matter traffic on the Beltway. There would be looks, or perhaps a joke or two from Pritchard or Lee; he would have to explain himself, make excuses. It could interfere with his plan. He cursed the driver of a car cutting uselessly in front of him.
Then he was coming on Route 66, and impulsively he decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was restricted to High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but feeling a little desperate, he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of multiply occupied vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didnt like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway as far as arriving late was concerned.
He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.
A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemens view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.
Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror had been entirely filled by the front grille of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lanes tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.
Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Franks left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadnt slowed down. What a jerk!
Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up: Frank would have hit windshield first.
What the fuck! Frank said, shocked. Fuck you! I didnt come anywhere near you!
The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit.
Jesus, you fucking idiot! Frank shouted.
Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck and pulled out a crowbar.
Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive and spun his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup trucks right side. People behind them were honking, but they didnt know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.
Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.