The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target.

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.

> whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing

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.

But we still need to somehow allocate funds to that insulating academy. We can't just give them blank checks to spend on whatever they want.(In current economy maybe we could, but that is beside the point)

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...

That’s not the point of higher education.

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.

Academy is not the same as higher education. The other part is people doing research and no teaching. These are people who then publishes their findings in journals for others to see.

And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.

In the US there is no academy, to my knowledge. It’s another word for school.

Right, I was reading it as academia, so, sure strictly speaking, there's academy which is just a school, and academia which connotes fundamental researcher, literature scholars etc who may never teach.

The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia, not academy.

This is an argument against specialization. You can’t do extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a week on business management, public outreach, and fundraising. Since that’s the world were living in, might it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive in the last 2 decades?

So it is somebody's job to sell to the public, but it may not be the researchers'.

So they should band together and hire a PR firm, it's possible for something to be your responsibility without having to do the work yourself.

So now you propose that scientific researchers fight each other using advertisement and PR campaigns, and spend more of their already small grants, just to do what they were trained to do? Who would benefit from this other than PR companies?

In this case a PR firm would be mostly about getting articles like this written, so maybe they already started.

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.

> they should band together and hire a PR firm

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.

Isn't your hypothesis dependent on the fact that there is a way to convince the public at all? The alternative tends to be more enticing.

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?

Words cannot describe how much I disagree with this point of view. If we’ve let capitalism devalue non-profitable knowledge and rot society to the point that what you say is the general consensus we have truly started our decline as a civilisation and the only way from here is down.

I agree with you.

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

> * Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.*

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.