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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Well, we can reduce every human activity to 0 value and take it from there: if there’s no value in understanding there’s no place for humans in the process, we can just go back to worshipping stones and let the AIs burn tokens deluding themselves chasing their hallucinations

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yeah, this MBA-brained philosophy that 'everything must have KPIs' is so incredibly short-term. research looking for directly, immediately quantifiable production results goes against the entire grain of why we push for bleeding edge research

like, ask yourself, in Newton's time, was there much application for calculus? what about today? this is almost universally applicable to all research because even null findings are a map marker of where not-to-look

Take the tax system and the state out of the picture. How does a mathematician convince his fellow citizens that they should fund their work? Newton didn’t have to do that, he had income from other sources and did most of his mathematical research as a hobby

because it could lead to something. the whole point of academic research is to uncover, as closely as possible, truths about how all of our myriad, hyper-complex systems work. not every truth uncovered is convertable to direct improvements on people's quality of life. like, how does understanding evolutionary biology matter to your average person? or finding the Higgs boson? should we just drop these research avenues because your average person won't benefit? or can we trust, based on historical precedence, that the slow march of research has created many of the luxuries we enjoy today?

I don't think anyone is doing that? The value of entertainment is obviously not zero from the perspective of life quality. The point is that we should be honest about what is done for the sake of output, and what is done for the sake of entertaining the people doing it. If math becomes a hobby, then it's entertainment. There's nothing wrong about it as such (indeed, the ideal world is one where everyone only does things because they are fun for that person to do, not because they have to). But the people who are paying for it deserve to know.

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