Interestingly enough, James Watson (as in Watson & Crick) does literally think that the problem with biology is that biologists today don’t work hard enough, that they just don’t spend enough hours a week in the lab.
I’m not sure this is true. But even if it were true, you could still view it as an incentive problem rather than a character problem. (The fact that there’s enough money & prestige in science for it to serve as an even remotely plausible career to go into for reasons of vanilla personal advancement means that it’ll attract some people who are vanilla upper-middle-class strivers rather than obsessive truth-seekers, and those people will work less intensely.) You wouldn’t fix the problem by injecting ten workaholics into the pool of researchers.
Interestingly enough, James Watson (as in Watson & Crick) does literally think that the problem with biology is that biologists today don’t work hard enough, that they just don’t spend enough hours a week in the lab.
I’m not sure this is true. But even if it were true, you could still view it as an incentive problem rather than a character problem. (The fact that there’s enough money & prestige in science for it to serve as an even remotely plausible career to go into for reasons of vanilla personal advancement means that it’ll attract some people who are vanilla upper-middle-class strivers rather than obsessive truth-seekers, and those people will work less intensely.) You wouldn’t fix the problem by injecting ten workaholics into the pool of researchers.