[truth777]

I see a few major problems in the pursuit of modern scientific inquiry.

- Bureaucratization. The modern university model is basically the DMV. It functions to sustain the lifestyle of the administrators in charge and to prevent them from losing power, money, status. And no one enjoys it, not the employees, not the customers, etc. and yet who can change it for the better? It can and does only get worse, more bureaucratic, more soul sucking. Ask the post-docs.

- Feminization of academia and science. This is related to the bureaucratization. Process, safety, paperwork, meetings and community consensus are paramount. All becomes politics. Everyone must agree. Only small questions can be answered. You need permission for everything. Anything truly novel is considered a threat to the scientific community. Modern day "scientism" and other beliefs are the replacement to christianity in the west, and women are more religious (look it up), and academe is the modern day church. All dissent or inquiry is squashed.

- Denial of Great Man Theory. Great men invented modernity, and of course our modern industrial state requires many layers of managers due to the huge complexity, so sizes of labs, colleges, corporations, assembly lines, supply chains have exploded, and no one person can manage it all in their mind.

The false belief is thus: modern industrial society requires the managerial class to function, therefore the managerial class invented it, and it requires the managerial class to progress. Therefore great man theory, or the idea of the innovative genius, is supposedly debunked.

And yet you see nearly all major advances come from tech bros like Elon Musk et al who are trailblazers, ignore complaints of the bureacracy, etc.

- Could the university system have produced facebook, spacex, tesla, microsoft, apple? You can go on and on.

Please don't interpret this as an attack on women or femininity. Society requires everyone for it to function properly, and everyone has a positive contribution to make, but we have to be able to iterate and change when we realize certain modes of endeavor simply do.not.work.

[fastaguy88]

Interesting political philosophy, but little that speaks to the pursuit of science. Universities may be bureaucratic, but those bureaucracies have almost nothing to do with scientific agendas. Likewise, grant review panels work hard to find innovative, not consensus, proposals. Again, the main thing the management does is demand more external funding, it does not set scientific direction. And, of course, Facebook, Microsoft, etc is not science- at best it is engineering.

[logicalmonster]

> Likewise, grant review panels work hard to find innovative, not consensus, proposals.

I don't want to give specific examples of research topics to avoid poisoning the well, but could you argue with a straight face that an academic that wanted to do research into some topics that could be likely to yield certain types of politically incorrect conclusions wouldn't face extreme difficulty getting funding or extreme risk to their career?

I think it's easy to see how much scientific research on certain topics could be stuck within a narrow range of opinion because people are more concerned with what gets funding or doesn't get them shunned.

[fastaguy88]

I do not know anything about grant panels outside my field of biology. But I am certain that the overwhelming majority of grant money is spent on scientific questions that have virtually no obvious political dimension. I’m sure there are grant applications that have a substantial political component, but I would be surprised if they accounted for even 5% of research funds. Social and political science receives a very small fraction of research funds, and while one might argue that allocations of health research budgets are politically shaped, viruses and oncogenes have no politics.

[p0pcult]

>"Feminization"...[bad stuff]...[dubious, gender essentialization]

>Denial of Great Men...[bad stuff]

>Please don't interpret this as an attack on women or femininity

[poulpy123]

> - Bureaucratization

Bureaucratization is the consequence of wanting to control that taxes are "properly" used.

> - Feminization of academia and science.

That's abolutely moronic viewpoint if you ever worked in science

> - Denial of Great Man Theory

All scientific works, even by genius, lie on the works of others, predecessors or colleagues.

> And yet you see nearly all major advances come from tech bros like Elon Musk et al who are trailblazers, ignore complaints of the bureacracy

lol what scientific progress Elon Musk did except giving material for the sociology of internet trolls ?

> - Could the university system have produced facebook, spacex, tesla, microsoft, apple?

You're so close to understand that university and industry are not the same and have not the same goals

[p0pcult]

Apparently, the sexism is rampant in here.