[dunkelheit]

When I was reading the essay I was immediately reminded of the concept of paradigm shift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift). The gist is that during periods of "normal science" most scientists are working within the framework of the dominant paradigm which, among other things, determines what kind of problems are worth working on. But every once in a while the paradigm shifts (which happens comparatively rarely, on the time scale of decades), old problems are deemed irrelevant and everybody piles on to work on the new stuff. The original example is physics but other fields are pretty similar (in our field current AI craze comes to mind).