[js8]

The point is it's about time horizon. The parent would decide that in early days of Higgs' career, he wasn't productive enough, and thus he would prevent him making the discovery for which he is famous. Likewise, at the time Verlaine, it would be more productive if he was just sent to war.

But from a longer time horizon, nobody really cares about those people in the 1950s having to support Peter Higgs living, or about people not having Verlaine in the army. We care about their results differently now.

I wish that timescale is the one thing that people who use the word "productivity" or "efficiency" would understand. There is no universal optimum, it depends on the time horizon you're looking at.

And while I am at it, let me make another comment to the article. I think today, we are so obsessed about efficiency of other people working, because there simply aren't enough jobs for everybody (due to automation). Since having a job (in a general sense) is customarily a requirement to being fed, most humans optimize towards not actual productivity, but an appearance of productivity. All these attempts to measure productivity are just a symptom of this problem - we desperately need something with which we can bang people in control of resources over their heads with, so that we could eat.

In other words, most jobs are changing from doing actual work into proving to other people in society that you did, ever so diminishing, amount of work. It's a shift in the focus of the competition, and unless we collectively realize that we can just lay back and don't need to actually compete, it won't get any better.

[bvv]

> The parent would decide that in early days of Higgs' career, he wasn't productive enough, and thus he would prevent him making the discovery for which he is famous.

You are stretching the meaning of my comment. Did you know that he published three papers in the three years before getting hired in Edinburgh in 1960? I only pointed out that (on any 'time horizon') his scientific productivity after 1964 was basically non-existent.

In fact I agree on some level with a lot of the comments here, including yours. I just think that Peter Higgs is not the right example to justify the cause.

> and unless we collectively realize that we can just lay back and don't need to actually compete, it won't get any better.

And therefore, sadly, it won't.

[js8]

Ah, OK. But I am not sure what cause are we justifying here - the tenure? I guess the idea of tenure is predicated on beating somebody enough to have him go through graduate and postgraduate studies, so then only people who are likely to really want to work in the field will remain and they will continue working on their own.

It seems to me that there is tradeoff. We can look today at Peter Higgs and say, whoah, what a failure he was after 1964. But could that have been said in 1974? I am not sure. What if in 1975 he would come up with another breakthrough?

So the trade-off is in the timescale on which we judge the scientist's output. If you shorten the timescale, you decrease your accepted risk, and you can miss some rare wins (and I think that's where the Higgs example shines, because it is an example of such rare event). If you make the time scale longer, you accept greater risk of people turning badly. Idea of tenure advocates maximal practical timescale of such trust - one human lifespan, because with tenures arguably the wins are worth more than the accrued losses.