This is a tragedy.
Academia and research needs a new broom. Presently incentives are peverse. Impact factors, publisher corruption, grant applications and funding are a blight on science.
Academia and research needs a new broom. Presently incentives are peverse. Impact factors, publisher corruption, grant applications and funding are a blight on science.
Also remember that Kickstarter found it necessary to write a blog post “Kickstarter is not a store“, because people were expecting projects to return fast, reliable, tangible results. By its nature, science will be even further from that revealed preference of funders
Neither solutions are perfect as most things in life, I guess the question is, will it be better enough compared to what we have now ?
My opinion: capitalism has corrupted literally every single thing it has touched.
> "The suspicion that something was more than a little wrong with the model that is getting almost all Alzheimer’s research funding ($1.6 billion in the last year alone) began with a fight over the drug Simufilam. The drug was being pushed into trials by its manufacturer, Cassava Sciences, but a group of scientists who reviewed the drug maker’s claims about Simufilam believed that it was exaggerating the potential. So they did what any reasonable person would do: They purchased short sell positions in Cassava Sciences stock, filed a letter with the FDA calling for a review before allowing the drug to go to trial, and hired an investigator to provide some support for this position."
However, the desire to gain a profit by pushing a questionable drug through trials was also involved. I'd note however, that in the Soviet Union, the likes of Lysenko also pushed fraudulent research in order to improve their standing in the Soviet heirarchy, which came with various rewards.
People like wealth and power, and some will do anything to get it, regardless of the nature of the society they live in.
Funding for these projects is often disconnected from the market.
They are usually dispersed by massive bureaucratic agents with incentive structures that have nothing to do with profit (more internal politics and prestige).
Imagine if the human body didn’t have a dozen different organs each producing a specialized product for your body and instead had one organ that tried to do everything?
I think capitalism facilitates specialization - and that quite effectively at scale. Specialization can occur without capitalism, too. There are other systems to coordinate specialists.
Just because capitalism has generated good things doesn’t mean it’s perfect. We need to acknowledge the damage it’s causing and think of ways to move beyond it.
Unless you want this to be the way things are for the rest of humanity.
Blaming “capitalism” is just the “old man yelling at cloud” if you are 20.
Some people latch onto whatever they can to gain power to exploit people.
Using failed dictatorships to prove 'communism is worse than capitalism' (which in the West we heavily curtail, but only to the point where we avoid uprisings against those holding power) is exactly the sort of shallow, illogical thinking you seem to rail against.
Communism fails because it doesn't account for human greed; it assumes everyone is onboard with improving society. Capitalism succeeds inasmuch as it panders to human greed to the point of evil and ignores the vast majority whom it fails.
Mind you, anarcho-syndicalism is where it's at, you can expect to wield supreme executive power just because some water tart gives you a sword ... /montypython
I don't think capitalism corrupts everything it touches - but I'm pretty sure it corrupts saturated markets, and these days that's an awful lot of things.
I think that's a strong take and agree somewhat. It's not at odds with the fact that capitalism has created more innovation, wealth and raised standards of living more than any other period in history. The problem is not capitalism, it's that capitalism is over.
In the long tail of diminishing returns all that's really left for people holding obscene sums of money to do amidst shocking inequality is to lie, cheat, steal and rat-fuck one another over the remaining opportunities to die on the biggest pile of ostentatious wealth.
Capitalism was a great system that ran out of fuel. I don't think we expected it to stall so soon, but it's hit some internal limit. We should be as worried about that as climate. These problems are bound up together. If we are going to preserve the liberty, opportunity, and democracy that have naturally ridden along with it we had better figure out a way to creatively re-invent the industrious ethic underpinning capitalism because, frankly, the Chinese model of consumer-communism is nothing to celebrate or hope for.
Clearly institutional competition for grant money has increased and changed what it means to be a successful researcher. Incentives are displacing virtues. But it's hard to find incentives, especially financial ones, that are fully aligned with honest research. Maybe we are trying too hard to find those.
Really, the whole point of academia is that it's not capitalism. It's much closer to communism. Resources are allocated by committee according to the priorities of the state. There are no price or market signals anywhere, and who gets ahead is largely related to how well they project their own work upwards. Plus of course, it seems to be strongly ideological. Academia is completely dominated by the left to the extent that in some departments there are almost no conservatives at all.