The developments in science are so cool that they can only lead to more young people interested in careers in science. Unfortunately, as a society, we have to back up this ambition with funding so they can make a decent living in their vocation.
https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1384098362513760262
I wish I could do science full time. It is absolutely true that to make real progress, people have to be doing science full time. Most scientists are encumbered with having to do a ton of administrivia.
To do science well you have to be unencumbered. Not just from the bureaucracy but also from the groupthink that pervades most institutions and fields. Unfortunately only a few are financially wealthy enough to do this.
Different fields have different costs of research. The mathematicians perhaps have the lowest cost structure. Of course, that also might be changing due to the use of proof systems.
However, the more involved science becomes with experimentation. That is with interacting and engaging with the real world, the higher the costs. Only nation states can afford space exploration or super colliders.
Let's not pretend that private industry has the kind of financial heft to fund science. A reason for the success of science is because breakthroughs are discovered elsewhere.
Elsewhere meaning that someone was financially secure enough to focus on pursuing their own unorthodox theory.
Society has this bias that smart people can easily make money. Unfortunately, breakthroughs require scientists to be focused on narrow domains that most likely will not make anyone money.
There are only a very small fraction of scientific domains that perhaps have a direct link to generating wealth. But should we as a society only focus on these kinds of domains? Science doesn't work because it only addresses the immediate. It works because of long term vision.
When you are pushing at the boundaries of the known unknowns, you do not know if there is gold in that unknown. In fact, you don't care if there is gold. You only care that the unknown becomes known.
The most undiscovered unknowns also happen in the interdisciplinary areas. Areas were it can be career suicide if one focuses on it. That's because the practice of science also involves social dynamics.
There is no money in interdisciplinary areas because there are so few people that are involved in that interdisciplinary area. It's at the very long tail of obscurity.
But progress is made by people making a bold hunch that the less-traveled path has more promise than the overly grazed field. Unfortunately, scientists are like cows that seek safety in numbers and always graze the same fields and seek the most mundane of existence.
Very few scientists are like lone predators that survive on nothing but their own wits. Where there's no safety in numbers and you must everyday innovate every day to find the next food source.
This is the crux of the problem. Science is not about finding food (or energy). It is about discovering knowledge and most of the time, you can't feed yourself with knowledge.
Unfortunately, knowledge cannot be quantified hence it cannot be commoditized and hence monetized. Knowledge is non-fungible and hence the economics of it is very different from the economics that drives today's civilization.
One can make the analogy that the economics of science is like the economics of art. People can make a living creating art if it is within the domain of the common. That is fashion, furniture, architecture, graphic design, computer games etc.
Just like science, one makes a living inside an established field. Unfortunately, unlike art where fields are tied to human experience, the variety of scientific fields are much richer than that of human experience.
It is indeed odd that the 'starving artist' is a lot more common stereotype than the 'starving scientist'. Perhaps artists have more passion than scientists. Perhaps it's because to be truly passionate about science you need a ton of education.
The barrier of entry to science is tremendously high. God forbid that you spend your most valuable years of your life pursuing a PhD and finding yourself in your late 20s without any funding!
Even worse, earning minimum wage as a post-doc doing someone else's b*llsh*t science. Yes, because a ton of science is actually also BS and the smart people know this.
But so many are playing pretend because they know that it brings food to the table. This is why a lot of science is simply mundane existence. No different from the daily grind in an interior design architecture firm.
A newly published paper is no different from the rearrangement of furniture. The big hope is that that said rearrangement is cited in the most read architectural magazine.
Money is made through social recognition. The bigger that social group the more wealth can be gained. So that's why wealthy scientists are those who have written popular science books!
Popular science is like philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is to introduce a new kind of thinking and perspective to common knowledge. Popular science introduces to many people a new way of seeing reality.
It is how all of society perceives reality that drives its evolution. Therefore, if we are serious about addressing the underfunding of science then we should be serious about presenting a new narrative about science.
The problem is, the pervasive narrative of science is not just wrong but is in fact what sets up the condition of underfunding. The entire practice of science is broken at its core. In fact, the entire concept of civilization is broken at its core.
Because how we've model both science and civilization is based on a model of a machine. The reason why the dangers of AI are inevitable is because everything we do is modeled like a machine. We cannot extricate ourselves from the problem because we are in and are the problem.
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