Society is the collective sum of its individuals.
Our collective sum of individuals is acting in a way which ignores the very obvious reality that it's quickly destroying the biome on which we are dependent.
Therefore, I would say that our society is being stupid.
And I get that ignorance may be societally self destructive. That there are cultural/economic/societal systems that actively suppress communication
We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded.
Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).
It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.
This might be how it was before, but in a lot of fields, your success going forward is directly proportional to the valuation of the impact of your work so far. This as you note invites perverse incentives.
So it is also part of that process that someone there provides the politicians good reasons to spend money. Now how to do this sanely is complex question, but it is step of process that needs to exist. Or we might end up funding astrology and likes...
Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected.
However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail.
Should we guard against this?
Probably, yes.
Could it be crowdsourced?
Probably, yes.
And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.
The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia, not academy.
It's either that or they naturally grow their own Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye to popularize their cause.
The bottom line is they're essentially living off the government, so they need to compete with everyone else looking for tax money.
Maybe they should do it, yes, and I'm being 100% serious.
That would solve a lot of newspapers abuse, always delighted to sell a history about crazy eccentric being chased by bees in some jungle, fourty years after falling in a pond at 8Yo.
Journals seen politics or sports(wo)man as clients (they pay), but scientists... are products. They don't pay. Is a never-ending caricature.
Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they would need to fork out more money for taxes?
How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on their pension funds?
And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?
Science making is bound to go wrong if it needs regular people's approval to be done.
Electricity would never have been a thing if we adopted that behavior from the get go
No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only people that have actually worked toward solutions to the current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields have already done their part.
Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone not care about plants and animals. This along with similar corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made everyone go crazy.
Tangentially I expressed the frustrations of being asked to do more at a recent meeting. Talk slides for the curious [0]
[0](https://github.com/mjy/presentations/blob/master/2020/tdwg_t...)
I mean, people hate rich banking elites so far removed from society providing obscure services to each others. What do you think they think of intellectual elites complaining of stupid questions by the people who paid them ?
You want funding you explain why. You don't want to explain why, accept nobody cares. It's because there's no absolute good in nature, nothing an expert can do to increase global knowledge is as necessary as the same guy growing lemons if society desires lemons more than knowledge. Make them desire knowledge more than lemon, THAT is part of the job.
Suggesting we must sell everything feels short-sighted. Knowledge of the Earth benefits everyone in the long run. We should collectively have the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this.
For example [0] there are cases where a semingly-obscure wasp, describe by a seemingly obscure person, for an audience of seemingly a handful of people, turns out to be critical to the lives and livelihoods of many, many people. The knowledge that lead to this discovery came from the passion of the taxonomists who dedicate their lives to this gathering of foundational knowledge, not from those who best knew how to sell themselves as useful.
[0](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201124-the-tiny-parasit...)
See my point ? You have to tell your taxpayers why you spend their taxes, they can't guess it. And if they know nothing abt what you do with it, they'll just vote for the next magical unicorn telling them they're actually stolen by a conspiracy of elitist universities.
Expecting people to be clever just because they exist is optimistic at best :)
That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.
We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.
We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.
The reason for the mocking tone of the above is that we have always solved this problem centuries ago yet somehow now everyone has decided they want to live in a crypto-neo-feudalist society that cares only for profit and stock price and screw everything else. Government will never work if we do everything we can to sabotage it at every corner. Enough is enough. We either fix this now or we resign ourselves to a dark future.
Sounds like life to me, I don't see the problem.
This isn’t a capitalist thing, or even a modern idea by any stretch. Science, as far as I can tell, has always been a matter of pragmatism, and science for science’s sake seems like a recent idea stemming from Cold War fears of falling behind stoking heavy investment and public messaging romanticizing science. For all of human history, science has almost always been public ally funded and often for military or otherwise strategic gain.
So yes, even the most educated among us have to prove their value, because science isn’t some religious function or human right - it’s a discipline with pragmatic purposes to society.
Without disputing your claim, why is this taxonomists' job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become the world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon').
If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics' goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.