As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research.

First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years.

Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.

I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.

Or you’ll dump the theoretical physics and spend on hair growth products and techniques.

The market doesn’t care for the long term- it’s an optimization system for competing needs, often with immediate needs overwhelming long term.

Markets also use regulatory forces to ensure that everyone isn’t mainlining addictive chemicals or dis-incentives are created for not wearing seatbelts.

Though how big institutes work i do not know.

Universities and higher learning isn’t and shouldn’t be a market. I’d argue that one of the reasons for the sad state of academia today is that too many MBA are running everything, including those things that aren’t businesses and shouldn’t be run like such. If researchers didn’t need to always chase after the next grant, a lot of the shortsightedness and lock in into specialities wouldn’t even be a problem in the first place.

It says something about how thorough neoliberalism won that few people react today when, again, it is taken for granted that everything is a market and what the market decides is right.

Lose your job as a foreman at a factory, and you can switch to being a manager at Mc D.

Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

This is all optimization of resources and ownership of course so it’s essentially a question of how the share of the new efficiency derived surplus is split.

Part of which could go to things like keeping theoretical research programs alive.

I mean these are physics and mathematical specialists.

I’d rather have a country that can keep such people engaged and active than lose them.

I mean what other options do you see? They could join hedge funds. Open an ML based startup.

In the end someone else has to work on this material- the problem isn’t going to go away.

And it sounds like this requires tools to do measurements of astral phenomena. Considering that America lost its telescope recently, and further investment is unlikely, I don’t think the investment in ancillary fields is high either.

Moving about a bit is not losing people, and if they're not providing something useful then they've already been lost anyway, and the opportunity cost of what they might be doing usefully elsewhere is also spent. May as well employ them at McDonalds, except they'd probably be rubbish at it.

An economist visits Communist China and they proudly show him a railway being built. He notices the workers are using shovels to dig the holes, instead of construction machines.

- Why don't you use construction machines?

- We care a lot about the workers here, using construction machines would make some of them unemployed!

- Well, in that case, I suggest you make them use spoons instead.

Sounds like a textbook groupthink environment.

No one is going to lead a scientific revolution in that environment.

The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive")

And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem?

No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.

This is very close to "There must be a pony in there somewhere". [1] If the question is whether the field is worth continuing to fund, the answer can't be, "Well since people are still funding it, it must be worth funding." By the same logic, we should just keep putting billions into WeWork.

Research is hard to value, and fundamental research especially so. The logic of "if people buy it, it must be good" only patchily applies to normal commerce, where results are relatively easy to measure and feedback loops are short. It's wholly inadequate for feedback loops on the scale of decades.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=the...

Not that that’s a good or bad thing. You wouldn’t want a “non-expert” to evaluate the proposal. And perhaps a tapering of the funding is better indicator of interest/progress of the field?