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by hankman86
1482 days ago
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Not as much as it used to it would seem. And that has got to do with some major misalignment in academic institutions. I don’t even want to sound off on all the BS “research” that’s going on in humanities (and which worryingly spills into STEM at an alarming rate). But even STEM research itself wastes too much time with costly self-serving objectives, rather than shooting for breakthroughs that lead to actual applications. Take CERNs large hadron collider, which has produced preciously few new insights, despite costing a fortune in taxpayer money. The Higgs boson is all well and good, but it’s hardly a new finding. Or take mathematics’ famous millennium problems, where only a subset (eg. P vs NP) would lead to practically useful new insights. By contrast, solving some obscure numbers theory problem would benefit humanity how exactly? |
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For a few decades, the prevailing school of thought in public administration has focused on justifications. You must always justify how the public will benefit from the proposed use of money. Then you must report that you used the money for justified reasons. The administrators will also audit you to ensure that you didn't use the money for frivolous purposes.
As a consequence, you can't get funding for studying something you find interesting. Instead, you must always justify how your research will benefit the public. If you manage to get funding, you must spend a lot of time reporting how you used that money and what it did enable you to do. Those reporting requirements are also one of the major reasons for the administrative bloat in the academia.
The general public does not want to fund BS research, and science stagnates largely as an unintended consequence of that.