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Notes -
It’s a quantity AND a quality problem. Bear in mind that academia is universal, so one a problem is solved it stays solved and the first to solve gets 99% of the credit.
In most fields, there are a few approaches that look like they will bear fruit. I refer to these as ‘plausible’ above. The thing is, if you are not top-tier, you really don’t want to work on these, because other better-funded labs with cleverer researchers are already on it. But you don’t want to take the chance of going out on a limb either. What you want is something closely enough related to the sexy thing that it will get you money and prestige, without getting you steamrollered. In the same way that you wouldn’t try to DIY your own internet search algorithm these days, but you might try to make something useful that has slipped under Google’s notice and get them to buy you out.
The funders, who are somewhat out of touch, have to allocate research money in this environment.
One stable equilibrium is to only fund the top-tier people, on the assumption they are the most likely to make plausible breakthroughs. This is sort of what we already do. The downside is that you get groupthink in the big players and you miss out on the occasional transformative upstart. The other downside is that research is prestigious enough, and requires so much investment from would-be researchers, that you have a vast pool of no-hopers who will destroy themselves trying to make to top-tier.
What happens in practice is therefore that we funnel almost all the money to the big players and keep a secondary fund for any interesting-looking second tier work. The second tier is therefore a desperate scrambling mess of people trying to prove that their unlikely discovery will change the world. Many of them even delude themselves into thinking it’s true.
The decline in academia you note is mostly a function of the number of plausible research directions going down as the number of academics goes up. The result is a bunch of second-raters competing for scraps.
(Sorry, this is longer and ramblier than I hoped. Also, I should clarify that I was one of said second-raters. It’s not meant as an insult, just the sad result of hope meeting reality.)
EDIT: you got two replies in 10 minutes. Can you spot the triggered (former) academics?
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