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This is a reflection of a crazy society that sees everything as a "product" that needs to be "advertised". If there is a scientific branch that needs no explanation of its importance is taxonomy. If a nation is stupid enough not to understand the importance of this, then it should not even label itself a modern, civilized society.

That's seems a bit unfair. It's not about "products" or "advertising", or society being stupid, there has to be communication from researchers to wider society, research has to be allied to education.

I think his point is that it should be the government job to promote these kind of things to society

To act in a stupid manner means to ignore obvious reality.

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.

Right, I fully agree with that, but that's not what the comment I was replying to said: the parent said that society (in a nation) was stupid for not recognising [what is to parent] the self-evident importance of the scientific specialisation of taxonomy. And sure, that is important, but equally so are thousands of other academic specialisations. The point is that a specialisation has to communicate their importance to wider society, has to educate. That isn't a new thing, or capitalism, or a creeping anti-elitism, or productisation of universities, or whatever. It's just something that has to be done. Calling people idiots because they don't pay attention to a specific specialisation among thousands -- what is gained from that? It feels good to do that, but it doesn't help, it doesn't change people's bearing. It may be that people are just really, really thick! We'll just say that instead of communicating the importance of something!

And I get that ignorance may be societally self destructive. That there are cultural/economic/societal systems that actively suppress communication

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.

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).

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.

> * 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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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...

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

Your observation is bang on. I have expressed and argued this point of view to our community as well. I'm not sure there is an easy answer. I advocate strongly for a system that rewards doing something well, as an expert, and not being asked to do more. I don't want to be asked to design Mars landers, gourmet food (well, that might be fun), flight control systems, car brakes, etc. I do want to have pride and recognition for my hard work.

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 like your TaxonWorks platform. It feels like an important step towards a general empirical research infrastructure, eg the basic framework seems like it might be applicable in numerous non-bio fields, from (say) geology to sociology.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. There are certainly generalizations that have arrisen, we're not building this out of thin air but with reference to a lot of work done over decades (semantics, standards, pre-existing tools). It's open source, there is significant infrastructure there that could be grabbed and re-factored or extended to meet other needs. Of course the whole project is also a test of the oft stated, rarely proven "open-source it and people will join/contribute" too ;).

But the stupid people asking stupid questions are also the poor dudes with barely a future for their children giving a bit of what they earn so you can focus.

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.

I'm not sure that comparing the derivative products of very rich people to a fundemantal understanding of the Earth we live on is a fair comparison.

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...)

You just sold it to me, though. Before, I thought only lemons mattered.

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 :)

This is one of the reasons I support basic income. It will be an unshackling for the intellectually curious. They may be small in numbers but they’re the ones who move everyone forward.

I don't expect the average person to be fully appreciative of every Science! thing that I find interesting. But I do think that an important goal of education and of a polity is to communicate and inculcate the value of intellectual inquiry for the common good.

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.

Maybe we should have people collectively decide on who they want to represent them and then those representatives could allocate funding depending on what societies broader strategic goals are.

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.

Because that's unfortunately how the world works: you have to sell to people the importance of what you do.

> 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').

Sounds like life to me, I don't see the problem.

I think it's moving in the right direction in countries with national parks. I certainly can see that in France we still have working taxonomists, and that they even band to create FOSS for managing their work (TaxHub, Geonature 2, Geonature Citizen, etc).

Knowledge for knowledges sake is noble, but someone always pays for it out of their pocket meaning that even super educated researchers have to justify why they are worth someone’s dime.

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.