A lab exercise like that could really just be selecting for chutzpah (feeling charitable) or arrogance (less charitable).
Very valuable lesson, although it sure did suck at the time.
He got criticized for it.
Robocall scams are very high on the profit:human misery scale, but their hardly going to end civilization. Pollution, corruption, theft etc all make things worse, but we never see the better world without such things so it all feels very abstract. Of course you need to lock your doors etc that’s just the way things are.
It has to work well enough to… work… and reproduce. That’s it. It’s not “survival of the fittest.” It’s “survival of a randomized subset of the fit.”
There’s even a set of thermodynamic arguments to the effect that systems are unlikely to exceed such minimum requirements for a given threshold. For example, if we are visited by interstellar travelers they are likely to be the absolute dumbest and most dysfunctional possible examples of beings capable of interstellar travel since anything more is a less likely thermodynamic state.
So much for Star Trek toga wearing utopian aliens.
Otoh, they would be aware about that, and they might have spent some time improving how genes (or what they have) and evolutionary selection works for them, so that, say, their species with time becomes brighter and brighter than what's actually needed. If they wanted to do that.
Also more intelligence does not equal better ideas. The world is full of crazy or amoral people with apparently very high IQs. Your average flat Earther probably has an above average IQ.
Improvement is a war against entropy and n^n^n^… combinatorics any way you slice it.
Slowly across hundreds and thousands of generations.
By adding evolutionary pressure, for what they want -- it'd be up to those space traveling aliens to decide -- they can change their species, generations into the future.
> Improvement is a war against entropy ...
Reasoning in that way, the humans would not have gotten brighter than the chimpanzee monkeys. There's been evolutionary pressure for the humans to get brighter, and it would be possible for you (I mean the humans), or the space travelers, to add artificial ev. pressure.
Anyway never mind all this, maybe talking about space travelers and the humans and their genes isn't the best way to spend the day. Have a nice day btw
So after a certain time spent, you are left with a choice of ‘massaging’ the data to get some results, or not and getting left behind those that do or were luckier in their research.
That can end up being just as time consuming as doing the research to begin with. Often there is no time and no money to go back and do that. If your 'budget' is 6 month you're going to spend 6 month trying to get your experiment to work. You're not going to 'give up' after 4 month and spend 2 month putting together a "why we failed" paper.
For example, I imagine that archeological work is extremely high impact if excavation efforts led to discovery of ancient city.
Archeology paper would probably be less interesting if the paper said “we dug this area, found nothing”.
If one were to judge those two papers, obviously the discovery paper is higher impact than the negative result.
Not as valuable as a discovery, but very far off zero value. Yet the reward in academia would be near-zero.
Ultimately, this is the problem.
When I got into university and started alternating studying and work, I realised just how incredibly clueless even adults are. The "let's just try something and hope nothing bad happens" attitude permeates everything.
It's really a miracle the civilisation works as well as it does.
The upshot is that if something seems stupid, it probably is and can be improved.