DD Support Board and Research Team

[shajandr]

Ein sehr bedeutendes Problem: https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-to-accelerate-science

Military-industrial complex has nuffin on the academic research-university overhead complex. Doing science has become an industrial activity with internecine competitive rapaciousness that puts the worst of the Gilded Age robber-barons to shame. I see it getting worse, nott better, as far as one can project forward. The funding paradigm needs to change - how I don't know - butt the incentive structure is all phucced upp, IMO, largely due to U administrators grossly overcharging for "overhead" to parasitize off grantholders and finagling things to keep the grantholders on the plantation. Grants ought to be made extremely portable so that U's become much less able to extort "overhead" from grantees. This may cause lower efficiency of large capital equipment assets that are now a shared, common asset owned by the U or the institution affiliated with the U, because grantees may need to hold title to the large capital assets so they have greater freedom of switching institutions, and that will lead to inefficient use and duplication of said large capital assets. Butt net-net it may pay off positively. However, this is only one of many issues that has, IMO, lead to stagnation. There are a lott, and no easy nor necessarily effective remedies - so long as people like munny and stuff a whole lot. It is nott just the lab rats (real rats!) that are in a rat race. Imagine Don Draper of Mad Men as a principal investigator scientist - this is where academic science is at - just a branch of advertising - or at least well on the road to that. I have no great ideas on how to fix that. It used to be that prestige and innate curiousity (as Feynman wrote "the joy of finding things ~OUTT") ~OUTTweighed munny, butt that is changing and has changed, and nott just in Western countries - China is even worse because there grantsmanship is overtly political wiff~OUTT even a semblance or patina of meritocratic funding.

I'm gladd that I've lived when I did. Looking forward I see Brazil (the movie from the 1980s) and that is about as appealing as Stalinist Soviet era apartment building architecture. Nott fun and ganz demotivating.