[accurrent]

I really think a lot of it falls on the funding agencies. While communication is key, there need to be some real questions answered. If a professor has 100 researchers under him and is churning out 2 papers per day how much is he really an expert? If his cousin is getting a PhD under him without doing the legwork shouldn't he be fired? Should we keep funding the same person excessively? It doesnt help that professors often rely on immigrant labor meaning that they can have a real choke hold over the lives of their staff. I really think there should be upper limits of what a professor can get away with, they need to be answerable to how tax payer money is being burned.

[nickff]

I think you’re pointing out a very important point; it seems like everyone pretends that you can ‘scale up’ scientific research, when it’s more like a service (that doesn’t scale). One problem might be that the people allocating the funding also stand to gain from pretending that they can “supervise” infinite amounts of research with no diminution of quality.