Sorry but who actually thinks that being a scientist is the “key to prosperity”?
I think far and away most scientists become researchers despite the fact that it’s generally not at all a prosperous venture.
I think far and away most scientists become researchers despite the fact that it’s generally not at all a prosperous venture.
Science is seen as the road to human (not just personal) propsperity by people educated in the last 100-ish years, which is mostly everybody now, which puts extreme pressure to perform/produce on what was once a pure little hobby sport whose spectators were almost all invested as players themselves.
If you factor in all future humans in your utility calculations, then science is by far the #1 noblest pursuit humans can ever undertake. We're talking about scientific advancements potentially helping trillions of people before all is said and heat-deathed. Great works of art can also be enjoyed by all future humans, but science has a super-linear (if not actually exponential) growth curve where every advancement makes future advancements a little easier.
The question is whether the noble pursuit of "science" and the day-to-day activities of "being a scientist" have diverged or not. There is mounting evidence that the institution of science has been subverted to the extent that many people who are professional scientists are not actually contributing to the pursuit of science. Or, far worse, detracting from it, as we see here. It's one of the great tragedies of our era.
How exactly do you know this civilization will not crash too? (and take with it that highly localized habitat)
Everything is temporary on a large enough scale and everyone w/i that golden era also thought it would last and that belief is part of why it didn't.
Humans will never build anything that truly lasts for a very simple reason. The lessons learned get forgotten after 2 generations (3 at most). Stop and consider how the US fought for its freedom and how nowadays many people from the US would vote to have more limitations on speech.
What are you talking about? Did we all forget the Pythagorean Theorem after 3 generations? Did we forget the force-multiplying effect of levers and pullies a few generations after Archimedes died? How can you sit here with Wikipedia at your fingertips and tell me that the collective sum of humanity remembers nothing from over 100 years ago?
> everyone w/i that golden era also thought it would last and that belief is part of why it didn't
Yet from almost every collapsed golden era, scientific progress from that era made its way back to collective knowledge (sometimes very slowly, admittedly). People in this modern age have this extremely simplified view of what "collapse" actually looked like.
What's the difference between data and information?
data is data
information is data with context
The values and lessons learned to build something that truly lasts gets forgotten over time until the thing that was built gets changed into a weaker form as the people involved stop valuing the things that gave it the stronger form.
The vast majority of established science will outlive mere nations and petty politics. There are too many copies of Wikipedia, too many printed textbooks and encyclopedias, to lose a significant portion of established science. The possibility of worldwide humanity-destroying events does not disprove this at all. In fact, if we ever faced a humanity-destroying event, then it would be nothing less than our collective scientific progress that would have any chance of seeing us through it.
What do you mean by many? As an institution, I sincerely doubt that science is exploited to a similar degree as basically any others.
I don’t really accept these ridiculous trumpisms. “Many people are saying”.
How many people are *doing*? I’ll wager it’s far and away a major minority.
Can you back up your “many” with actual numbers as a percentage of investment?
The world being shitty in other ways does not diminish the tragedy that we are only a fraction of how effective we could be at pursuing science.
> Can you back up your “many” with actual numbers as a percentage of investment?
"A 2011 analysis by researchers with pharmaceutical company Bayer found that, at most, a quarter of Bayer's in-house findings replicated the original results."
"In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies"
"The ... paper examined the reproducibility rates and effect sizes by journal and discipline. Study replication rates were 23% for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48% for Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and 38% for Psychological Science"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
> I don’t really accept these ridiculous trumpisms. “Many people are saying”.
I didn't say "many people are saying", and comparing me to Trump is a much greater insult than things comments get flagged and removed for. Respond to what I actually said and avoid the (extreme) personal insults.
After PhD there will be nobody telling, and often not even caring, what to do. But that may mean that you don't get your PhD or you don't get another grant to live on. If you get a tenure it almost literally means that you can't be fired even if you do nothing at all. What is surprising is that almost all with tenure keep running the rat race even though they don't really get anything at least material out of it.
(Nitpick: I think serious research is the fun one. The one churned to get another grant is neither serious nor fun.)
> After PhD there will be nobody telling, and often not even caring, what to do.
If you make the hiring cut in you’re in for about 5 years of grunt work and committees as an assistant prof, right?
By “serious research” I mean the one they do for career advancement and hiring.
I am a postdoc, just have been for quite a while (on four different grants at least). In Finnish academia it's not that uncommon to stay a postdoc even until retirement.
> That’s not true. If you make the hiring cut in you’re in for about 5 years of grunt work as an assistant prof.
For teaching and admin yes. But at least in fields I know, what research you do or whether you do at all is all up to you. Of course the risk is that you'll be unemployed after the assistant prof. term ends. My point is that if you don't care about that, you're quite free to do whatever research-wise.