Re:How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Inn...
by dredmorbius on Saturday March 01, 2014 @03:40PM
(#7326000)
Look up the phrase "catabolic collapse". It's one I only ran across in the past year, but it explains much of what I've seen for the past two decades and some.
About a quarter century ago, the following thoughts struck me:
• Are we going to hell in a handbasket?
• Why are we going to hell in a handbasket?
• Is this what's supposed to be happening?
• Who else has figured this out?
• Is it better to be a tree or a mushroom?
It seemed clear to me that the huge resource troves which had fueled the past couple of centuries of growth were expiring. And that without them we'd likely at best be holding ground, if not losing it, by and by.
My own constitution is to be a tree: I'd rather build things up than tear them down. I catted around for a bit looking for work in renewables, transit, or anything remotely similar, but found the jobs were very few and the pay worse. I opted for the next-best thing and ended up in one of the two great catabolic endeavors: software and IT (the other is, of course, finance). I've been very disenchanted with what Silicon Valley's turned out over the past decade.
And so long as we're relying on the naive market principle to guide us, I think that's the best we can hope for. I'm not sure alternatives can do a whole lot better, but some level of guided state or higher-level directed investment and planning might help. Or not.
As for the patronage funding model: I suspect that's going to be what's increasingly common, particularly for science and the arts, possibly also technical ventures. If you think about it, it's a regression back about 150 - 200 years.
It'll be interesting, though, over the next 10 - 200 years.
About a quarter century ago, the following thoughts struck me:
• Are we going to hell in a handbasket?
• Why are we going to hell in a handbasket?
• Is this what's supposed to be happening?
• Who else has figured this out?
• Is it better to be a tree or a mushroom?
It seemed clear to me that the huge resource troves which had fueled the past couple of centuries of growth were expiring. And that without them we'd likely at best be holding ground, if not losing it, by and by.
My own constitution is to be a tree: I'd rather build things up than tear them down. I catted around for a bit looking for work in renewables, transit, or anything remotely similar, but found the jobs were very few and the pay worse. I opted for the next-best thing and ended up in one of the two great catabolic endeavors: software and IT (the other is, of course, finance). I've been very disenchanted with what Silicon Valley's turned out over the past decade.
And so long as we're relying on the naive market principle to guide us, I think that's the best we can hope for. I'm not sure alternatives can do a whole lot better, but some level of guided state or higher-level directed investment and planning might help. Or not.
As for the patronage funding model: I suspect that's going to be what's increasingly common, particularly for science and the arts, possibly also technical ventures. If you think about it, it's a regression back about 150 - 200 years.
It'll be interesting, though, over the next 10 - 200 years.