[habitue]

> the price we pay to afford the top-notch.

So, usually when people say this about sturgeon's law type stuff, it's because we genuinely don't know how to determine what's crap and what's not overall. For example, if we're talking about 90% of academic papers are crap, ok, it's true, but we pay the cost because we don't apriori which 10% will be the good ones.

The issue is that in academics, we actually have a pretty good idea which programs produce the best and most impactful work. Now it doesn't seem like a cost we have to pay, but rather a conscious decision not to cut out the crap (or to keep funding the crap).

I think the ideal outcome is that the culture and resources of all programs are approximately the same, and each produces 90% crap, and 10% good stuff.

[lambdatronics]

There's a difference between high-impact and high quality. You'd hope that the peer review process selects for high quality and then the impact is TBD by history, but it's usually the other way around.