can you imagine chucking all of computer science away because Babbage's thinking machines and Lovelace's programming cards didn't really result in meaningful capital gains here in FY26Q3? or, a more realistic example - imagine biology and genetics today if Mendel's discoveries had been published in a more widely read journal, if he hadn't been outright dismissed for his mathematical approach. or Semmelweis' advocacy of antispetic procedures that flew in the face of the then humors-based understanding of medicine in the 1800s - how many lives would have been saved between then and when Germ Theory finally took off decades later?
it's ironic to me that it's often the same people who'll adopt the logic of banning reproductive rights on the off chance that someone very unprepared to have a child might birth someone who can cure cancer in spite of the probabilistic evidence of SES being highly correlated with educational attainment (eg that graph of the income bracket that the parents of all Nobel Prize winners start with). and yet when it comes to the actual nascent research and development required to pave the way for larger discoveries, that's seen as totally pointless and not worthy of funding. it's truly flabbergasting
In saying that, in the spirit of a good faith argument, is there value in temporarily deprioritising pure research in (current) times of funding drought?