There’s a bigger problem here that she doesn’t touch on that surrounds these people though. If they don’t get work and the field shrinks, then it will mostly cease to exist.
SOME of this research is actually useful, and restricting funding overall will just kill the entire research community. Instead, we should have people who know better approving the funding so that it is applied to things the planet needs: clean energy, understanding and combating climate change, new materials or fuels for space exploration…etc.
R&D on any scale is speculative to begin, but I do agree there are a large number of people in this community exploiting that fact to get grant money.
I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.
But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.
A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.
There’s a bigger problem here that she doesn’t touch on that surrounds these people though. If they don’t get work and the field shrinks, then it will mostly cease to exist.
SOME of this research is actually useful, and restricting funding overall will just kill the entire research community. Instead, we should have people who know better approving the funding so that it is applied to things the planet needs: clean energy, understanding and combating climate change, new materials or fuels for space exploration…etc.
R&D on any scale is speculative to begin, but I do agree there are a large number of people in this community exploiting that fact to get grant money.
Yes this basically.
I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.
But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.
A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.