Scientists have been looking for funding since before the scientific method existed. Leonardo Da Vinci had patrons
Hey, some of the most famous scientists were rich as fuck and were doing research basically as a hobby.
Of course. If you have to work all day there’s not much time left for sciencing
Maybe (honest maybe) it was more the reverse; Some of the most richest people also enjoyed being scientists as a hobby.
In times when no one else could afford to play along, this could make you one of the most famous scientists.
Science batman
As an artist. He was also an engineer but he wasn’t a scientist
For his arts, for sure. But for his science projects?
It’s inherent to grants. If you want scientists to choose their topics you have to fund them unconditionally.
When your future began to depend on what you were published in, and those publishers had to compete with corporate interests. Capitalism poisons nearly everything it touches, but especially academia.
This system is one of the primary reasons I decided not to go into academia
Me too. Also my lack of intellect.
If that’s what you were worried about you would have been fine, trust me
Image: Gus Fring
Text: You didn’t go into academia as a protest against the corruption of academia by capitalism.
I didn’t go into academia because brain hurty.
We are not the same.
Not hard to figure out lol.
$$$
“what happened to you, academia? You used to be about the science. Now you’re just about the money.”
For the same reason the person tweeted rather than googled this thought.
Money, money , money …
It’s a rich man’s world.
Ain’t it funny?
When they ran out of money doing it that way
Alternative idea: perform and publish misleading research to push a corporate driven narrative for money.
Isn’t that the same thing? Why work as a scientist when you don’t have interesting research to do? And if you do, then getting funding should be possible. I know that it can get quite tricky and exhausting but what exactly do those people expect? The whole job of scientists is to come up with worthwhile questions and to find answers.
The problem the tweet is pointing out is that research scientists are mostly concerned about getting and keeping funding since their jobs and the jobs of those working for them depend on it. Thus they’ll target research questions that are deemed sexy by those in control of the funds. This can lead to a few areas being over-researched and other worthy areas of inquiry being underfunded. Plus that over-researched work can be of questionable quality and importance since a lot of less-good scientists get funded due to the overabundance of funds.
No, the number of grants you get determines whether you get tenure / raises. So the government tells everyone what research ideas they will fund and everyone has to do as many of those as possible.
Usually professors come up with grants and students are solving the questions. Professors just don’t have time to do both.
What a weird take. Alternative version:
“When did authors lose sight of the fact that books should be written about story ideas they already have, instead of trying to think up stories to write about.”
Why would we want people to stop coming up with ideas that would be beneficial enough to be funded?
I take it you don’t work in academia
People will always optimize their methods to maximize resource gain. It’s a fact of life since the dawn of life. Even animals do this.
I’ve seen cancer researchers lie to people with dead loved ones to get funding. I’ve seen physicists do bogus experiments that yield nothing with a nice dark matter story just to get funding… it’s become marketing at this stage.
This is my problem with climate change research. Those who attempt to oppose the “narrative” never get funding. How are we supposed to claim science is unbiased when bias is what’s making the results come out?
That’s the same thing lol
