On the one hand, I agree with a lot of what Sabine has presented here. But on the other hand, that email is sus AF… It proves her point perfectly and there’s absolutely no way to verify it. I have to assume that it was written by/for her when weighting it as evidence, as a non-institutional email could have come from literally anyone.
There’s a bigger problem here that she doesn’t touch on that surrounds these people though. If they don’t get work and the field shrinks, then it will mostly cease to exist.
SOME of this research is actually useful, and restricting funding overall will just kill the entire research community. Instead, we should have people who know better approving the funding so that it is applied to things the planet needs: clean energy, understanding and combating climate change, new materials or fuels for space exploration…etc.
R&D on any scale is speculative to begin, but I do agree there are a large number of people in this community exploiting that fact to get grant money.
Yes this basically.
I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.
But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.
A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.
Is the DUNE neutrino experiment really being constructed purely to keep particle physicists employed?
I’m not finding the video right now, but basically ozempic came from research on 2 different animals and their ways of dealing wth certain proteins. two unrelated topics from decades ago were combined to create the top drug of the moment.
So is DUNE only being constructed to keep people employed? Maybe today. We can never know in the future what their data is used for. Discriminating research by only what can be useful right away is very short-sighted
Thank you!
I’ve only watched the first minute or two, but I think I get the idea. Clickbaity generalisations etc … yea that makes sense and are obviously shitty (I guess I just expect that more from YouTubers who are otherwise reasonable people).
The whole “most research is BS” claim isinteresting though. I’ll be interested to see how the video addresses it. If we’re talking about >50%, and that it’s substantially imperfect in its constitution due to systemic issues, I dunno, I’d be interested in an actual investigation TBH.
Thanks again though!
