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...)