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A comment on 20 Years Later. Parent comment

Re:20 Years Later by Godel_unicode on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @07:53PM (#25577036)
It certainly could, but should it? If that research is into something that's a dead end, should we keep researching it to avoid underemployment of researchers? It does seem to me that underemployment as a loss function by itself is particularly prone to local maximums.
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Re:20 Years Later by intended on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @08:09PM (#25577155)
I’d argue yes.

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.

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Re:20 Years Later by jeremyjh on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @09:39PM (#25577758)
No, these people should be exploring new sub-fields. When you reach the end of a vein of rich ore you don't go ask the government to pay you keep digging in that same direction. You start digging somewhere else. That is what we need string theorists to do.
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Re:20 Years Later by kortilla on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @07:51AM (#25581228)
You lost the thread. We’re not talking about eliminating funding for physics. We’re talking about not funding very specific fields that haven’t produced anything useful for decades.
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Re:20 Years Later by brigandish on Thursday December 31, 2020 @12:14AM (#25589824)
Someone with an IQ high enough to become a physics professor can't retrain, even within another sub-field of physics?

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.

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