We don’t really have a metric for meaning or impact though.
And even if we had decent metrics they would gain value with time since the impact of a discovery becomes evident only after a while (think patents, landmark papers, new disciplines).
For the most part it seems to me that people are scared to work on problems that are actually meaningful.
It appears to me that the incentives system is the real issue here. UBI or some basic job might release a lot of people from their publishing cages, allowing them to work on research fundamentals: gathering good data, working on theory and methodology, replicating studies.
Meaningful is an interesting word here. Most PHD students don’t do work that has very much meaning or potential to have impact on the world.
If people want to work on jobs with a lot of meaning, why did Hamming need to as them why they didn’t work on the most meaningful problems?
For the most part it seems to me that people are scared to work on problems that are actually meaningful.
We don’t really have a metric for meaning or impact though.
And even if we had decent metrics they would gain value with time since the impact of a discovery becomes evident only after a while (think patents, landmark papers, new disciplines).
It appears to me that the incentives system is the real issue here. UBI or some basic job might release a lot of people from their publishing cages, allowing them to work on research fundamentals: gathering good data, working on theory and methodology, replicating studies.