There's a presumption you're open to discussing on a discussion forum, not just grandstanding.  Strong downvoted much of this thread for the amount of my time you've wasted trolling.

Bell labs, Xerox park, etc were AFAIK were mostly privately funded research labs that existed for decades and churned out patents that may as well have been money printers.  When AT&T (Bell Labs) was broken up, that research all but started the modern telecom and tech industry, which is now something like 20%+ of the stock market.  If you attribute even a tiny fraction of that to Bell Labs it's enough to fund another 1000 times over.

The missing piece arguably is executive teams with a 25 year vision instead of a 25 week vision, AND the institutional support to see it through; cost cutting is in fashion with investors too.  Private equity is in theory well positioned to repeat this elsewhere, but for reasons I don't entirely understand has become too short sighted and/or has significantly shortened horizons on returns.  IBM, Qualcom, TSMC, ASML, and Intel all seem to have research operations of that same near-legendary caliber, mostly privately funded (albeit treated as a national treasure of strategic importance); what they have in common of course, is they're all tech.  Semiconductor fabrication is extremely research intensive and world class R&D operations are table stakes just to survive to the next process node.

Maybe a good followup question is why hasn't this model spread outside of semiconductors and tech?  Is a functional monopoly a requirement for the model to work? (ASML has a functional monopoly on leading edge photo-lithography machines that power modern semiconductor fabs).  Do these labs ever start independently without a clear lineage to 100 billion+ dollar govt research initiatives?  Electronics and tech is probably many trillions in US govt funding since WWII once you include military R&D and contracts.

Govt. spending is a ratchet that only goes one direction, replacing dysfunctional agencies costs jobs and makes political enemies.  Reform might be more practical, but much like people, very hard to reform an agency that doesn't want to change.  You'd be talking about sustained expenditure of political capital, the sort of thing that requires an agency head who's invested in the change and popular enough with both parties to get to spend a few administrations working at it.

Edit: I answered separately above with regards to private industry.

Again you're saying that without engaging with any of my arguments or giving me any more of your reasoning to consider.  Unless you care to share substantially more of your reasoning, I don't see much point continuing this?

That is a big part of the threat here.  Many of the current deployments are many steps removed from anyone reading research papers.  E.g. sure, people at MS and OpenAI involved with that roll-out are presumably up on the literature.  But the IT director deciding when and how to deploy copilot, what controls need to be in place, etc?  Trade publications, blogs, maybe they ask around on Reddit to see what others are doing.

Related, how does spin-off subcultures fit into this model?  E.g. in music you have people that consume an innovation in one genre, then reinvent it in their own scene where they're a creator.  I think there's similar dynamics in various LW adjacent subcultures, though I'm not up enough on detailed histories to comment.

For less loaded terms, maybe Create, Consume, Exploit or Create, Enjoy, Exploit as the set of actions available.  Looks like loosely what was settled on above.

Where exploit more naturally captures things like soulless commercialization and others low key taking advantage of those enjoying the scene.

Consume in the context or rationalists would more be people who read the best techniques on offer and then go try to use them for things that aren't "advancing the art" itself, like addressing x-risk.

You're still hammering on stuff I never disagreed with in the first place.  In so far as I don't already understand all the math (or math notation) I'd need to follow this, that's a me problem not a you problem, and having a pile of cool papers I want to grok is prime motivation for brushing up on some more math.  I'm definitely not down-voting merely on that.

What I'm mostly trying to get across is just how large of a leap of logic you're making from [post got 2 or 3 downvotes] => [everyone here hates math].  There's got to be at least 3 or 4 major inferences there you haven't articulated here and I'm still not sure what you're reacting so strongly to.  Your post with the lowest karma is the first one and it's sitting at neutral, based on a grand total of 3 votes besides yours.  You are definitely sophisticated enough on math to understand the hazards of reasoning from a sample size that small.

Any conversation about karma would necessarily involve talking about what does and doesn't factor into votes, likely both here and in the internet or society at large.  Not thinking we're getting anywhere on that point.

I've already said clearly and repeatedly I don't have a problem with math posts and I don't think others do either.  You're not going to get what you want by continuing to straw-man myself and others.  I disagree with your premise you've thus far failed to acknowledge or engage with any of those points.

Ah, gotcha.  I had gotten the other impression from the thread in aggregate.