I think some nuance can be useful. Contemporary science is quite good at pushing boundaries in existing research directions, somewhat less at creating new directions. (Once a field becomes larger than some critical size, it is ok.)
Academia (not science itself) in fact does a lot of synthesizing, distillation and aggregation work. Usually in the form of creating courses and writing textbooks. Some of the inadequacies are
Usually this happens at some later stage of researcher’s careers, people are not trained to do it
Knowledge up to something like “mainstream graduate lever course” is usually distilled and refactored to some user-friendly format somewhere. Beyond that, it gets much worse.
New fields fare even worse than in science
None of this is usually done with policy in mind
(Btw this model leads to an actionable suggestion—if you want more aggregation work done in a field by academia, cause it to be taught somewhere.)
I think one important thing which science and academic institutions do is provide spaces/jobs where people can have time to think about whatever they want, speak with smart people, and have open conversations. (From some anecdotal evidence I would guess this is more the case at some less prestigious places than at the top places where the daemons of competition rule over people without tenure with all their might.)
I think some nuance can be useful. Contemporary science is quite good at pushing boundaries in existing research directions, somewhat less at creating new directions. (Once a field becomes larger than some critical size, it is ok.)
Academia (not science itself) in fact does a lot of synthesizing, distillation and aggregation work. Usually in the form of creating courses and writing textbooks. Some of the inadequacies are
Usually this happens at some later stage of researcher’s careers, people are not trained to do it
Knowledge up to something like “mainstream graduate lever course” is usually distilled and refactored to some user-friendly format somewhere. Beyond that, it gets much worse.
New fields fare even worse than in science
None of this is usually done with policy in mind
(Btw this model leads to an actionable suggestion—if you want more aggregation work done in a field by academia, cause it to be taught somewhere.)
I think one important thing which science and academic institutions do is provide spaces/jobs where people can have time to think about whatever they want, speak with smart people, and have open conversations. (From some anecdotal evidence I would guess this is more the case at some less prestigious places than at the top places where the daemons of competition rule over people without tenure with all their might.)