I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.
Depends on how you define “academic”. There are suddenly going to be a lot of “academics” showing up for their free handouts once there is no bar.
>I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.
Selection bias. The academics you are thinking of are the ones willing to put all of the work into getting grants, teaching, etc. There are an order of magnitude more PhD holders that nope out of academia after graduation because of the grim prospects.
No, they're motivated by safety. And there's nothing safer than the ivory tower. Academics would work on self-referential research until the end of time if they could get funding for it.
They create academia children in a perpetual loop trying their very hardest to avoid life and all its complexities (especially those of people, of which they are ludicrously blind) by living in their theoretical world of nothingness.
If that's the case, you're inevitably going to need some way to decide which of the many worthy opportunities merit sufficient investment and which ones do not.
Good point, becoming an academic may already represent enough of a hoop, though that’s just the CS perspective. In other fields there may not be much of a lucrative industry, so I’m not sure whether this will hold generally.
If you have a country rewarding intellectual effort, that’s a good country to be a part of.
I’m betting that there will be more smart people trying more smart things that will end up positive than not.
I mean we are on a hackers and startups forum - it’s the fundamental premise of a majority of people visiting this site.
Honestly this seems like an issues of not having testable hypotheses. I’d love to see how it gets to a testable state.
Perhaps rather than prescribing areas of research, we should just ban or severely limit areas that haven’t shown any promise.
2. The above might upset people but string theory is a good example - partly yes people are held hostage by funding (much like it's hard to avoid being typecast as an actor). But the solution to that is to fund lots more (experimental) movies, not to hope studio heads can pick better winners.
I am perfectly happy for a slice of my tax dollar to go on someone thinking about Pram theory (#) for a decade simply because we have no idea whatsoever how to tackle the big ones in physics, so spray and pray is going to be a lot better than most other options.
(#) Red Dwarf episode. worth watching episode just for this joke.