Science discussion

[MonkeySage]

Guys can we please bury this thread?

I don't mean to be an a-hole... actually my request is for just the opposite reason. I was not in my right head when I posted this thread. You guys want to continue the discussion, it's cool, but I was hoping perhaps in a different thread.

[Douglas]

...He obviously has no idea just how in depth and complicated science can be.

Hmm, maybe try this: Ask him if 1000 6th graders could do the class work of 1 high school senior. Ask him to consider that this high school senior is taking classes on things like calculus, and ask him if he had any idea about, well, anything about calculus when he was in 6th grade. Did he even know that something called "calculus" existed when he was in 6th grade? Then ask him what makes him think there aren't things that are to calculus what calculus is to a 6th grader.

[MonkeySage]

Guys can we please bury this thread?

[sktarq]

To do most of the "work" of scientists? He's mostly correct. To make any sense of the results or to figure out what questions to ask and there is the issue. For the 1000 semi scientists to figure out what the results mean and to cull their 1000 ideas of what it means would require them to develop a system to do so. That system would then have to be tested against other 1000 person semi scientist teams - and best would be taught so that system wouldn't have to be reinvented. And that teaching would probably look a lot like grad school.

[Forum Explorer]

He believes that our current means of educating scientists is a waste of time, and that a scientist should be able to get by on just an associates or a high school diploma.

He believes that I am doing a bunch of extra work simply because I "refuse to delegate". By now, I believe I may be going for theoretical chemistry, with special focus on climate change and the environment.

His argument seems to be that a 1000 people with some education can do the work of a single specialist, and that graduate schools are too picky/should lower their standards.

He seems to believe humans are not the cause of global warming, that solar activity alone is to blame.

On one hand, there is a lot of waste in educating our scientists, at least in Canada (Seriously, a year and a half worth of Arts options that will not provide a scientist with any useful skills). And a lot of the full science courses are full of BS and useless information (like having me memorize the scientific name of a crow. I will never need to remember that, I can just look it up if necessary)

On the other hand, I've learned a lot in University, despite all of that. I've learned stuff that I couldn't have done in High School.

So basically, I'd say that our current method is wasteful and inefficient, but rather then just use High School education, I'd say the current method needs to be updated and upgraded to something more streamlined.

Regarding Climate Change, that's kinda irrelevant to the rest of it isn't it? IMO, I think the sheer amount of energy humanity is pumping into the climate is doing more then the CO2 we pump into the atmosphere.

[georgie_leech]

On one hand, there is a lot of waste in educating our scientists, at least in Canada (Seriously, a year and a half worth of Arts options that will not provide a scientist with any useful skills).

Part of that is trying to make sure that graduates are "well rounded" (whatever that means). I think it's going about it the wrong way, as forcing people into studying things they're not interested in is completely missing the point, but I can at least respect the attempt.


And a lot of the full science courses are full of BS and useless information (like having me memorize the scientific name of a crow. I will never need to remember that, I can just look it up if necessary)

No argument here :smalltongue:

[Brother Oni]

Part of that is trying to make sure that graduates are "well rounded" (whatever that means). I think it's going about it the wrong way, as forcing people into studying things they're not interested in is completely missing the point, but I can at least respect the attempt.

Interestingly, this isn't the case with universities in the UK where we just read one subject with assorted options to support that choice. For example, I studied Biochemistry with a fair bit of molecular chemistry, cell signalling, etc plus I took the options of bioethics and pharmaceutical science.

As for the OP's friend, he really doesn't appreciate how technical and specialised science can get. While most of the legwork can be done by people with the proposed level of training, in my experience such people often make mistakes because they don't appreciate why it's done that particular way and thus they take shortcuts which invalidate the work.

An example is preparation of samples with a high volatile organic content; our procedures say to leave them exposed to air as little as possible, yet we have people leaving them out for 10-15 minutes while they perform other tasks 'because it's more efficient that way'. The problem is, the sample evaporates, concentrating the analyte thus giving us artificially high results, which are very difficult to detect as anomalous.
When you're basing the direction of a multi-million pound project based on the results generated, you'd want them to be as scientifically sound as possible.

Even when they've performed the work correctly, it's the analysis of the results that's important and this is the bit that requires specialised training. If your friend still doesn't believe you, point him at a scientific paper and ask him to read it - he should have a high school diploma, therefore he should be able to understand it. :smalltongue:

As an example, Thermodynamics of Highly Supersaturated Aqueous Solutions of Poorly Water-Soluble Drugs—Impact of a Second Drug on the Solution Phase Behavior and Implications for Combination Products by Trasi and Taylor (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jps.24528/full) is fairly readable for me and I haven't touched oral delivery systems for over a decade (I can find papers in my specialised field that even I find fairly hard going).

[Tokay]

His argument seems to be that a 1000 people with some education can do the work of a single specialist

Even if this were true, how would that be more efficient? I'm pretty sure it's still more expensive to pay a part-time salary to a thousand people than to educate a single scientist of any kind.

[Douglas]

Even if this were true, how would that be more efficient? I'm pretty sure it's still more expensive to pay a part-time salary to a thousand people than to educate a single scientist of any kind.
Yeah, take even a minimum wage job and multiply its salary by 1000, and you get a price tag far in excess of even the most highly paid science researchers, including their lifetime education expenses. U.S. minimum wage times 1000 at standard full time hours is over $14 million per year.

[Forum Explorer]

Part of that is trying to make sure that graduates are "well rounded" (whatever that means). I think it's going about it the wrong way, as forcing people into studying things they're not interested in is completely missing the point, but I can at least respect the attempt.



No argument here :smalltongue:

I get that's the goal, but I don't see the why, or what being well rounded is actually supposed to achieve on a practical level. Also I'm really bitter that Arts students only have to take something like 2 science courses to be 'well rounded' which is such unmitigated BS.

[Murk]

Seeing how, in some of the climate change examples, the friend only notes and uses short, simple facts, I guess that is why he thinks most scientific work and education could be much easier.

Because, let's be honest, an enormous amount of scientific work goes into minuscule details of accuracy, validation, verification, falsification, in processes, in peer reviews, in considering every single option and exception no matter how ridiculous that might seem.
All of this, of course, is done to reach as high of a certainty as we can possibly reach.

However, it has almost no effect at all on the broad and general conclusions. Would we still know gravity exists and how it works if we didn't have the exact numbers? Yeah, in and about. Do we really need to know two million decimals to pi? Is it really imporant to know which dinosaur was the direct ancestor of which dinosaur, or would it be enough to know the broad lines?

I think those are valid questions, from a societal perspective. Bridges could still be build if we had a little less educated engineers. They might be a little weaker and look less fancy, but if we build the pillars twice as big and let less cars cross them, eh, it'll work out, though it might cost some more. We might not be able to send rockets to other planets, but do we really need that?
I did a master education in spatial environmental conservation. I've ploughed through thousands of researches and articles on social psychology, on policy, on laws, on detailed structure analyses of political schemes.
And, in truth, I know the world would be just OK if I hadn't done that. If no one had done that. We might have less trees, some endangered species might be extinct, heck, in the worst case we would all be living in big stinking cities.
But we'd manage. We'd manage, and all that effort and money and time could have gone to different things.

And that might be how your friend thinks: it's a lot and a lot and a lot and a lot of time and effort on very small details that he thinks are not worth it. I think it's a good thing we spend that money curing diseases, but I'll admit that it could also have been used to build a big entertainment park. Maybe he is rather entertained than healthy. I wouldn't blame him.

[Grinner]

Hmmm...Kinda wish I had gotten in on this topic a little earlier. Lots of interesting things have been said.

I'm partly inclined to agree with your friend, MonkeySage, simply because there are so many people graduating with degrees in the sciences who have trouble putting their degrees to use. From a supply-and-demand perspective, there is presently an overabundance of people able to do research but without the opportunity to do so professionally.


Hmm, maybe try this: Ask him if 1000 6th graders could do the class work of 1 high school senior.

That could work, actually. I've been listening to some lectures online instead of music lately, and I heard one on this artificial intelligence technique called "boosting". The idea is that instead of having a single strong classifier (the high school senior), you can instead combine the work of multiple weak classifiers (the sixth graders) and achieve a similar effect.

The idea breaks down when you consider the logistics of managing 1,000 sixth graders as well as the concept of diminishing returns, but the idea has some precedent. You probably don't need 1,000 sixth graders, though.

If this idea were applied, though, it'd probably look a lot like what sktarq mentioned.

Edit:

Yeah, take even a minimum wage job and multiply its salary by 1000, and you get a price tag far in excess of even the most highly paid science researchers, including their lifetime education expenses. U.S. minimum wage times 1000 at standard full time hours is over $14 million per year.

We can knock down that price tag easily. The price tag is for full-time, but the OP postulates part-time. I don't think it's unfair to knock off seven million.

Now, I think you're speaking in terms of the Bay Area of California, which I'm going to bet has a much more favorable minimum wage to minimum wage workers. Might be able to again reduce the price tag to five million.

Lastly, you don't actually need 1,000 minimum wage researchers to solve a single problem. That would be approaching the size of some medium-size companies, and it's unfair to compare a PhD to several orders of magnitude more undergraduates. No one's that good. Maybe ten undergraduates is a more comparable number.

So bump the wage back up to seven million to be fair and divide by 100, giving $70,000 per year.

[Brother Oni]

However, it has almost no effect at all on the broad and general conclusions. Would we still know gravity exists and how it works if we didn't have the exact numbers? Yeah, in and about. Do we really need to know two million decimals to pi? Is it really imporant to know which dinosaur was the direct ancestor of which dinosaur, or would it be enough to know the broad lines?

Eh, it's an optical isomer, it's still the same stuff and it tests the same. What harm can it do (http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/controversies/thalidomide.aspx)?



And that might be how your friend thinks: it's a lot and a lot and a lot and a lot of time and effort on very small details that he thinks are not worth it. I think it's a good thing we spend that money curing diseases, but I'll admit that it could also have been used to build a big entertainment park. Maybe he is rather entertained than healthy. I wouldn't blame him.

Until he comes down with a disease with a significant mortality rate. Very few people appreciate being healthy until they're injured or become sick.

As an example, vaccination. You only have to look back to the early 1900s to find significant mortality, yet it's a victim of its own success - nobody's getting sick, so people think they don't need it, failing to understand the concept of herd immunity.
The problem is, it's not the healthy people getting sick that's the problem, it's the already unhealthy people who can't get vaccinated (immunocompromised people, the very young etc) who are forced to rely on herd immunity so they don't catch it and potentially die.

http://www.skepticalob.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Vaccination-umbrellas-e1422895361587.jpg

[Caesar]

Hhahahahahaha... PhD students in advanced fields are treated like well-behaved children, and for good reason.


To do most of the "work" of scientists? He's mostly correct. To make any sense of the results or to figure out what questions to ask and there is the issue.
That statement is just so blatantly wrong... You cant even get meaningful results unless you understand how and why you are taking measurements. Then you get to interpret your results.

[Murk]

-Snip-

All true, of course. I'm not saying science is worthless. Of course not. I'm not even saying our current scientific process is flawed, because I personally value accuracy and certainty a lot.
However, I think it is a valid opinion to want to trade a little accuracy and certainty for a lot of time and money.

Having a deadly disease is terrible, of course, but with the money "science" uses yearly to cure very rare diseases, a lot of other stuff could be done. It might be cold and calculating, but I don't think it's unfair to question whether full-time scientist help the world more than [whatever else those scientists could be doing with their time].
I think not. The friend probably does.


Especially since it's a scale, not black and white. It's not: either we have scientists curing all diseases, or we have none. People five hundred years ago could cure some diseases and others not. If we only teach medicine students the stuff that was known five hundred years ago, their education would be done in about 1 or 2 years, instead of the usual 7+.
They could still cure some people, but by far not as much as normal doctors nowadays. So you sacrifice a lot of sick people for 5+ years less education (and all the time and money that saves).
If you still want to save more time and money, only teach to heal colds. If you want to save a little money but still heal the majority of people, only skip very rare, permanent diseases. There's plenty of options.

It's very cold-hearted calculation with human lifes and happiness, and not something I'd seriously consider doing on a large social scale. I do find it cool to wonder about, though: how necessary is the full-time science, and wouldn't we be better of not doing that?


EDIT: it's "playing the devil's advocate", of course. I wouldn't want to lose my scientific education and career. I love science, and I love full-time science jobs. But it seems everyone here does so, too, and I think it is healthy for scientists to wonder whether they are actually needed every now and then :smallsmile:

[HandofShadows]

To the OP. Your friend seems to have a belief that things are much simpler than they are and for some reason does not WANT to understand how hard and complex reality is. I don't know the reason but here are some possibilities.
His mind just simply does not work in a way to see the complexity. (This isn't his fault really mind you)
He does not want to see the complexity because it threatens his worldview in some way. He has some belief and seeing things as they are would erode or destroy that belief (it does NOT have to be a religious belief either)
Another possibility is that this person is willfully ignorant and likes it that way. You will not believe how many people are like this because if they knew the truth they might have to take action. So "Since I don't believe global warming is real I don't have to do anything about it."

As for his idea about scientist being over trained, it sounds like he is one of the blind men talking about the elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant).

As for why scientist need a well rounded education many times things from other unrelated fields can inspire or give some form of insight into things happening in science.

[Kato]

Why are we discussing something we all know to be wrong? To educate a person who doesn't want (or need) to be educated? If your friend think so, well, let him. He's not going to cut scientists jobs, after all...


In regard to whether or not scientific education could need an overhaul... eh, I don't know? I'm sure everyone learned a bunch of stuff he'll never need again in his school/college/university education. At least not obviously. And sure, we could save time and money if we only taught everyone the essentials they need when they need them. Then how about we start over at school and only teach people the bare minimum, kick them out after 6th or so grade and then have them only learn what they want? This couldn't possibly go wrong, right? :smalltongue:
No, more seriously, yeah, I do agree, education on many levels could be improved, but I feel you will have a hard time getting two people who agree on just how much and even harder... streamlined or broadened. Education is hard :smallsigh:

[Brother Oni]

I'd like to preface this post with the understanding that you're adopting the Devil's Advocate position, so I apologise in advance if something I write seems hostile - that isn't the intention.

I'll also be answering from my specific field (pharmaceuticals) - some points will not be valid for other fields.


All true, of course. I'm not saying science is worthless. Of course not. I'm not even saying our current scientific process is flawed, because I personally value accuracy and certainty a lot.
However, I think it is a valid opinion to want to trade a little accuracy and certainty for a lot of time and money.

The problem there is where do you draw the trade off line. How much certainty/accuracy are you willing trade for time/effort/money? In my field, certainty/accuracy is synonymous with safety a lot of the time, so how much time/money are you willing to let the pharmaceutical company save to make sure their products won't make you worse or kill you?

There is a lot of legislation in place to ensure that pharmaceutical companies don't do this legally as a result of various disasters (eg Elixir sulfanilamide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide), Thalidomide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide)); this isn't including deliberate attempts to bypass regulations and save on money (eg heparin contamination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_heparin_adulteration)).



Having a deadly disease is terrible, of course, but with the money "science" uses yearly to cure very rare diseases, a lot of other stuff could be done. It might be cold and calculating, but I don't think it's unfair to question whether full-time scientist help the world more than [whatever else those scientists could be doing with their time].
I think not. The friend probably does.


That's a perfectly valid view to take and again in my field, healthcare providers do these sorts of Quality of Life calculations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life_(healthcare)) to see what drugs they can afford to buy that provide the most benefit for their populace.

A lot of people question why we bother with the various space programs when the money could be better spent elsewhere, however the advancements from working at the very edge of human knowledge has yielded massive returns in mainstream fields (link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies)). This is not accounting for the cultural impact the space race has had.

A better example would be defence spending - if every country agreed to be nice to each other then they wouldn't need to spend all that money on such large militaries. :smalltongue:

Edit: Was listening to Inside Science on BBC Radio 4 on the way home and someone mentioned that the Human Genome Project and its subsequent projects have generated ~64 dollars of economic value for every dollar invested. It's hard to see people performing, running then (especially) interpreting such work with only the equivalent of a High School diploma in education.



Especially since it's a scale, not black and white. It's not: either we have scientists curing all diseases, or we have none. People five hundred years ago could cure some diseases and others not. If we only teach medicine students the stuff that was known five hundred years ago, their education would be done in about 1 or 2 years, instead of the usual 7+.
They could still cure some people, but by far not as much as normal doctors nowadays. So you sacrifice a lot of sick people for 5+ years less education (and all the time and money that saves).
If you still want to save more time and money, only teach to heal colds. If you want to save a little money but still heal the majority of people, only skip very rare, permanent diseases. There's plenty of options.


I agree that it's a scale of numbers rather than a binary choice, but given that its comparatively rare for someone to be a medical doctor and a research scientist, it's a bit of a false equivalence to say that medical students are scientists in this case. Doctors often don't research the cures they use on patients (they're busy treating patients) and scientists don't have the training to diagnose disease states (bedside manner? What's that?).

The problem with shortening and limiting education is that technology and advancements move very quickly. I had textbooks I bought in my first year that were obsolete three years later. There's also the sheer breadth of knowledge that doctors have to learn.
In any case there are medical professionals with more limited training than doctors - they're known as nurses and paramedics. Their primary goals are very different however; the former take care of the routine tasks that don't require a doctor, while the latter stabilise patients until they can get to real help (hospitals and doctors).

As for limiting knowledge back to 500 years ago, vaccination didn't start to become commonplace until comparatively recently, within the last 200 hundred years or so, so teaching only early Modern era cures wouldn't be effective. Take diphtheria - in 1921, there were 206,000 cases of diphtheria in the US alone, with 15,520 fatalities. Since the vaccine was introduced, cases have plummeted - between 2004 and 2008, no cases were reported in the US.

Taking another disease, cystic fibrosis was a death sentence until as late as 1959, with the median age of survival being 6 months. These days, the life expectancy is much higher up to around 37-40 years, although they have to take a whole raft of medications their entire lives (somewhere in the region of 28 separate ones). CF is comparatively rare, with an only 0.03% incidence rate, however this skews the actual number of sufferers.
In the US with its population of 319 million, there's somewhere in the region of 30,000 people with CF - claiming that the money spent on trying to find a cure for CF is better spent elsewhere is pretty much condemning them and the ~1,000 new cases diagnosed every year to death.

Is that a decision a supposed civilised culture should make - "It's not cost effective to treat you, so you're going to die"? Should cost efficiency and money/time saving be the primary cultural value for a civilisation?
Edit: The aforementioned Inside Science programme mentions this in fascinating detail with regard to the British government, although it's too political to discuss on this board. If you're interested (and can get access to the BBC), here's a link (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036f7w2/episodes/downloads).

Incidentally, left to their own devices, pharmaceutical companies would be unwilling to pursue cures for such rare diseases as they wouldn't be able to recoup their investment. Equally though, governments and regulators can't ignore the requirements of their citizens, both ethically and morally, thus they offer incentives for companies to invest into developing cures for such rare diseases (known as orphan diseases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_disease) and orphan drugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug)).


Why are we discussing something we all know to be wrong? To educate a person who doesn't want (or need) to be educated? If your friend think so, well, let him. He's not going to cut scientists jobs, after all...

I view it more as providing the OP with ammunition to throw at his friend. :smallbiggrin:

In any case, I think it's an interesting debate and even I agree with a part of the viewpoint. It's a matter of where do you draw the line.

[LibraryOgre]

I tend to agree that our educational system is wasteful and inefficient, but a lot of his other stuff is not terribly... scientific.

[BannedInSchool]

I wouldn't want to fly in a plane designed and built by 1000 people with one semester of high school shop class. :smalltongue:

[Brother Oni]

Even if this were true, how would that be more efficient? I'm pretty sure it's still more expensive to pay a part-time salary to a thousand people than to educate a single scientist of any kind.

Probably not as much as you think as if they don't work more than 29 hours each, they don't qualify for benefits. :smalltongue:

[Kato]

I wouldn't want to fly in a plane designed and built by 1000 people with one semester of high school shop class. :smalltongue:
Well, while it seems more risky, since we already have designed the planes by properly educated people, I think you could specialize enough people to build it based on existing plans. Though, I'm not sure how many scientists are actually involved in building a plane...


I view it more as providing the OP with ammunition to throw at his friend. :smallbiggrin:


Personally I just always feel like wasting my time shooting at walls which refuse to listen. But maybe I'll just keep out of it and let you gather ammunition. Hey, maybe something WILL work.

[Icewraith]

When it comes to science and engineering, in many cases it's not about building something that works. It's about building something that will last X years and withstand Y conditions, and definitely won't break if you do Z to it.

It's also about saying to whoever is going to use the thing you're working on, "this is safe" and having the consequences be on you if it turns out to be otherwise.

An experienced engineer in many cases will just look at something and go "it's fine". Easy, right? No! That guy has years of experience and training that means that when he looks at something for five seconds and says "it's fine", it is most likely fine. Partially because one of the things you learn about is the sad history of people who went "it's fine" and it turns out not to have been fine. Also, the sad history of people who convince other people they know what they're doing when they don't actually have the training and still tell them "it's fine".

My attitude towards people who over-simplify science is "if it's so easy, go get a degree and do it". Seriously- if it's that easy and simple and you don't see why we need to have all this education for science, put your money where your mouth is! Show everyone else how much the current generation of scientists has been slacking off! Go get a degree and see if you can even keep your head above water. If I'm right, but you're actually capable of doing good science, I'll see you in 4-6 years and accept your apology regarding your previous thoughtlessness. If I'm right and you're not capable of doing good science, I'll see you in six months and accept the same apology. If you're right, then you'll have made some amazing contributions to the progress of science in about six months and the benefit to humanity will outweight my embarassment. But I'm pretty confident I won't be the one apologizing.

Re: Planes. You can't just build a plane based on how another plane looks. There have been a number of recent real life examples when it comes to copycat aircraft building, and I'll leave it at that.

[thorgrim29]

Yeah.... no.

Recent example, yesterday I visited the end of degree project expo of Sherbrooke University's engineering programs because my brother was showing his. There were a ton of project, and I will never believe most of them would have been built by a bunch of high-schoolers.

There was a submarine, a proposal for an electric fishing boat, robots playing soccer, and exoskeleton capable of lifting 400 pounds, drones, and my brother's project, an electric vehicle for the shell eco-marathon running essentially on a potato with a 98% energy efficient engine.

Now I'm a smart guy, probably even a very smart guy, with a good layman's understanding science and a facility for grasping new subjects. 1000 of me would not be able to build what him and his 15 friends built without actually studying engineering.

[HandofShadows]

Now I'm a smart guy, probably even a very smart guy, with a good layman's understanding science and a facility for grasping new subjects. 1000 of me would not be able to build what him and his 15 friends built without actually studying engineering.

Oh, you can bet they studied engineering and a LOT of it. They certainly spent a great deal of time researching and then experimenting to build those projects.

[thorgrim29]

Well yeah, they just spent the last 4 years at college, that's my point. The 1000 of me would have to study it too, it was awkwardly phrased.

[Telonius]

I generally try to keep my work and gaming life separate, but I'm going to break that rule here. I work at a science journal (though I'm not a scientist myself - I generally help authors use the website and troubleshoot when things go wrong). We make our whole archives freely available to everyone after 6 months.

I would defy him to get through a single one of our chemistry research articles (http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18.toc) while even understanding what the topic is about, let alone trying to replicate it.

Have him circulate it to a thousand of his friends. They will get no closer to understanding it.

I'm not a trained scientist, but I am a pretty smart guy. Perfect score on the SAT verbal, 730 out of 800 on the math section, got my degree from Georgetown undergrad. I've been working with these guys for over 12 years, and I still only have a vague idea what most of these papers are about.

[Flickerdart]

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18.toc
Hurr hurr, you said pnas. :smallbiggrin:

[georgie_leech]

Is it possible that the belief that 1000 less skilled people could do the work of one specialist is a post hoc justification for his feeling that grad schools should lower their standards?

[Tyndmyr]

He believes that our current means of educating scientists is a waste of time, and that a scientist should be able to get by on just an associates or a high school diploma.

It depends what you are studying. Some stuff, sure, a high school degree or whatever will suffice. Sometimes you need more knowledge. Knowledge isn't something where a bunch of people with high school diplomas are exactly like a specialist, for the same reason that a whole bunch of children are not like a high school graduate.


He believes that I am doing a bunch of extra work simply because I "refuse to delegate". By now, I believe I may be going for theoretical chemistry, with special focus on climate change and the environment.

His argument seems to be that a 1000 people with some education can do the work of a single specialist, and that graduate schools are too picky/should lower their standards.

Even if this were true, why would that be desirable? 1000 people to do the job of one? Sounds like a ridiculous waste of people's time.


He has stated that no evidence will convince him that humans are the cause of climate change until someone explains to him why other planets are heating up too... doesn't seem to matter that earth is heating up at an unnatural rate.

The other planets are not all heating up. Yes, a given planet may be heating or cooling at the time, due to orbital factors or whatever, but there is no general heating trend that matches earths. Nor is solar output changing accordingly.


Part of that is trying to make sure that graduates are "well rounded" (whatever that means). I think it's going about it the wrong way, as forcing people into studying things they're not interested in is completely missing the point, but I can at least respect the attempt.

That I can agree with. I took a ton of BS classes that were mandatory and of little value to me. This doesn't mean that school overall was bad, just...less focused than it coulda been.

[NichG]

Not exactly sure what the productive direction to take this discussion in is. Discussion of the ideas? Discussion of the friend? Discussion of the aspects of society that cause opinions like these to form and flourish?

MonkeySage, is there a particular thing that you'd want to focus on?

[Tvtyrant]

First: I think full time scientists are absolutely worth the time and effort. They have fundamentally altered the world (possibly in bad ways) beyond a point where returning to technology without science would be devastating.

Was science needed in the first place? No, not really. Humanity was much more likely to survive as a species before the invention/discovery of science, what with not having nukes and global warming. Coal isn't quite as impressive without steam technology, for instance.

But technology is now past the point where intuitive judgement and anecdotal knowledge could have taken it, and the cat is sprinting from the bag at a million miles an hour.

[georgie_leech]

Was science needed in the first place? No, not really. Humanity was much more likely to survive as a species before the invention/discovery of science, what with not having nukes and global warming. Coal isn't quite as impressive without steam technology, for instance.


Worth noting that we had a bit of a problem with staying alive on a more individual level. Medicine and Agriculture in particular have made astounding leaps and bounds that have vastly increased both life expectancy and quality of life across the globe. The Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixing (named after the chemists of the same name) has been estimated to have been responsible for the lives of nearly three billion people.

[Tvtyrant]

Worth noting that we had a bit of a problem with staying alive on a more individual level. Medicine and Agriculture in particular have made astounding leaps and bounds that have vastly increased both life expectancy and quality of life across the globe. The Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixing (named after the chemists of the same name) has been estimated to have been responsible for the lives of nearly three billion people.

It also makes it so that we have 3 billion more people than we can feed without it, so disruptions in world trade can lead to mass starvation on an unprecedented scale.

[KillianHawkeye]

Sounds like the OP's friend is suffering from the terrible condition known as "Doesn't Get It," also known as cluelessness.

It seems to me that anyone who is not himself a highly trained scientist has no business making assumptions about the educational requirements of a highly trained scientist, or about how many untrained amateurs it would take to be equivalent to one.

[georgie_leech]

It also makes it so that we have 3 billion more people than we can feed without it, so disruptions in world trade can lead to mass starvation on an unprecedented scale.

And agriculture itself led to a boom in population. I have a hard time seeing 3 billion people that otherwise wouldn't be alive as a bad thing.

[Forum Explorer]

And agriculture itself led to a boom in population. I have a hard time seeing 3 billion people that otherwise wouldn't be alive as a bad thing.

I don't know. If we had 3 billion less people, I think that'd actually go a long way to fixing many of our environmental problems. (Assuming the population stopped growing at ~3-4 billion).

[gomipile]

He believes that our current means of educating scientists is a waste of time, and that a scientist should be able to get by on just an associates or a high school diploma.

He believes that I am doing a bunch of extra work simply because I "refuse to delegate". By now, I believe I may be going for theoretical chemistry, with special focus on climate change and the environment.

His argument seems to be that a 1000 people with some education can do the work of a single specialist, and that graduate schools are too picky/should lower their standards.

He seems to believe humans are not the cause of global warming, that solar activity alone is to blame.

Ask him to try to teach quantum field theory or general relativity to someone with only an associate's degree or less. He might say that general relativity and quantum field theory aren't important on a day to day basis in science. If he does, then use the following:

Point out that general relativity is used in the calibration of every satellite and probe which needs an accurate clock, or whose position needs to be accurately known. Further, point out that quantum field theory isn't only used in particle physics, it's also used in the theory of solids and liquids. Thus, quantum field theory is important in the design of semiconductor electronics, and in the superconductors used in medical imaging equipment, among other places.

[gomipile]

Humanity was much more likely to survive as a species before the invention/discovery of science, what with not having nukes and global warming.

This point of yours becomes invalid as soon as our technology allows us to put our eggs in multiple baskets by spreading across the solar system and beyond.

Also, we're about to become the first species we know of which can both detect and protect ourselves from killer asteroids.

[Brother Oni]

I've been working with these guys for over 12 years, and I still only have a vague idea what most of these papers are about.

It's easier than you think once you know how to fillet out the key information from the abstract, for example:

Investigations of heme distortion, low-frequency vibrational excitations, and electron transfer in cytochrome c, aka "How Cytochrome C shakes its money maker haeme group".

How oxygen reacts with oxygen-tolerant respiratory [NiFe]-hydrogenases, aka "How oxygen affects hydrogen splitting".

Effects of side chains in helix nucleation differ from helix propagation, aka "It's protein folding Jim, but not as we know it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE)".


I don't know. If we had 3 billion less people, I think that'd actually go a long way to fixing many of our environmental problems. (Assuming the population stopped growing at ~3-4 billion).

By that yardstick, the Black Death killing between 30-60% of the population of Europe was a good thing.

I agree that's there's a difference between 3 billion people not being born and between 223 - 446 million people (based on 2015 European population figures) dying, at least in terms of societal disruption, but capping the population at ~3-4 billion would require some ruthless social policies or some other form of stringent population control (even more untreatable influenza for example).

[Grinner]

By that yardstick, the Black Death killing between 30-60% of the population of Europe was a good thing.

Well...It wasn't terrible for most of the survivors. Due to a dearth of laborers, the Black Death gave the remaining work force enough mechanical lean to be able to make demands upon nobility. For instance, the weekly wages for unskilled labor rose from 2 shillings to 10 shillings 6 pence in one manor in the space of just three years. You could make an argument that the Black Death was partially responsible for the abandonment of feudalism.

So sure, you might have lost your dog, your cat, and your Aunt Sally (along with 2/3 of your other family), but it did set the stage for a grand social upheaval in favor of the common man.

You lose some, and you win some.

[Forum Explorer]

By that yardstick, the Black Death killing between 30-60% of the population of Europe was a good thing.

I agree that's there's a difference between 3 billion people not being born and between 223 - 446 million people (based on 2015 European population figures) dying, at least in terms of societal disruption, but capping the population at ~3-4 billion would require some ruthless social policies or some other form of stringent population control (even more untreatable influenza for example).

Overpopulation and population control is a complicated subject ethically.

I do think we need to encourage people to have less kids (as opposed to have kids like society currently does), in order for humanity to not experience a population crash and massive chaos due to lack or resources and environmental damage.

Note, I don't think a population crash would wipe out humanity, but it would be worse then social population controls. Also the process of getting to a population crash would wipe out some other species I'm fond of.

Now the optimal solution is if we can make space travel cheap and easy enough to simply send some 3 billion people to colonize new planets and space stations. But that's far beyond our current technology, so I think we need to be taking a less dramatic solution now, rather then putting it off til later.

[Lethologica]

This is the problem outlined in The Mythical Man-Month, applied to one of the largest and most complicated human endeavors. One high schooler is grossly inadequate to a PhD project; but adding more high schoolers makes the problem worse, not better.


All true, of course. I'm not saying science is worthless. Of course not. I'm not even saying our current scientific process is flawed, because I personally value accuracy and certainty a lot.
However, I think it is a valid opinion to want to trade a little accuracy and certainty for a lot of time and money.

Having a deadly disease is terrible, of course, but with the money "science" uses yearly to cure very rare diseases, a lot of other stuff could be done. It might be cold and calculating, but I don't think it's unfair to question whether full-time scientist help the world more than [whatever else those scientists could be doing with their time].
I think not. The friend probably does.


Especially since it's a scale, not black and white. It's not: either we have scientists curing all diseases, or we have none. People five hundred years ago could cure some diseases and others not. If we only teach medicine students the stuff that was known five hundred years ago, their education would be done in about 1 or 2 years, instead of the usual 7+.
They could still cure some people, but by far not as much as normal doctors nowadays. So you sacrifice a lot of sick people for 5+ years less education (and all the time and money that saves).
If you still want to save more time and money, only teach to heal colds. If you want to save a little money but still heal the majority of people, only skip very rare, permanent diseases. There's plenty of options.

It's very cold-hearted calculation with human lifes and happiness, and not something I'd seriously consider doing on a large social scale. I do find it cool to wonder about, though: how necessary is the full-time science, and wouldn't we be better of not doing that?


EDIT: it's "playing the devil's advocate", of course. I wouldn't want to lose my scientific education and career. I love science, and I love full-time science jobs. But it seems everyone here does so, too, and I think it is healthy for scientists to wonder whether they are actually needed every now and then :smallsmile:
There's another problem that isn't quite being appreciated here, which is that we don't know ahead of time which "inaccuracies" and "uncertainties" arising from ignorance will turn out to be insignificant, and which will turn out to be devastating. A little ignorance about the structural qualities of bridges could result in a little extra money spent on concrete pillars, or it could result in the Tacoma Narrows collapse. A little ignorance about the properties of rubber across the temperature spectrum could lead to sticky tires, or it could lead to the Challenger explosion. A little ignorance about prime numbers could lead to some mathematicians in an ivory tower somewhere tearing their hair out, or it could lead to a complete collapse of the global economy. These are not problems that can be solved in a timely fashion when they arise; and we're not great at predicting where those problems will arise, because we can't be. Looking back into history and subtracting specific pieces of knowledge where we know how much difference that knowledge has ended up making so far is a completely different exercise.

This is just a more specific version of the problem of knowing the importance of knowledge you don't even know yet. Society already tries to attack this problem as much as we can, which is (ideally, perhaps not in practice) why writing grant applications is such a large part of academic work. We don't have all scientists curing all diseases; we have triage.

[Kato]

I'm always wary when I hear "we're totally overpopulated" arguments. We're not running short of resources, and we're not likely to do so soon. (Well, "soon" is relative) Yeah, some places are a bit crowded but others are mostly empty. And it's not like we have food shortages in densely populated, well developed areas. Food shortages occur in places where there's lacking infrastructure or bad climate, maybe soil. We could fix this, but it's a matter of money, not ability. There are really few good reasons to say, we need to restrict population growth (not saying we should push for faster growth, if we wanted to we could pretty easily increase our birth rates by quite a bit, but that might actually have consequences).
Also... uhm, kind of uncomfortable to say this, but the new problem in the world is not so much too many births, it is too few deaths, largely due to improved medical systems. We cut death rates in half in the last about 50 years according to the UN (http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=PopDiv&f=variableID%3A65), we have huge numbers of people who are... well, how do I put that nicely... not fit enough to contribute (much) to society. Obviously, no one is calling for weeding out humanity, but in the immediate future, our problem is not that some people have to many kids, it's that not enough people die. (And yes, I know this makes me sound like a ****, and I'm not saying we should change anything about it. But this is, I think, what will cause more problems in the near future)

[Brother Oni]

So sure, you might have lost your dog, your cat, and your Aunt Sally (along with 2/3 of your other family)...

If you're taking the statistical view of the death toll sure. In reality, it killed entire communities and left empty villages, completely devoid of life.


Overpopulation and population control is a complicated subject ethically.

I do think we need to encourage people to have less kids (as opposed to have kids like society currently does), in order for humanity to not experience a population crash and massive chaos due to lack or resources and environmental damage.


I agree to the first statement, but with the second, many First World countries already have non-sustainable or even negative population growth - it's all the lesser developed countries that are having children. Even in China which had a famously stringent population control measures, wasn't entirely successful (see the massive bias towards male offspring).



Back to the original post of scientists with limited training, I met a former colleague this evening who went back to Uni to study for his PhD, studying (of all things) battery technology. I remember having a fairly in-depth discussion of his research (to the complete eye rolls of his non-scientist partner), particularly regarding the optimal penetration of oxygen to the internal lithium and how surface area affects this (particularly lithium polymer batteries).

Now this is despite (or in aid of) both of us having copious amounts to drink - I'm personally on pint 6 and counting (I think; I lost count after 4). I'm of the belief that the level of knowledge is so embedded in us that we can discuss on it a superficial level despite being impaired, something that someone with lesser training couldn't do.

[halfeye]

Even in China which had a famously stringent population control measures, wasn't entirely successful (see the massive bias towards male offspring).
That sons bias is present in India too, and it's just beginning to bite, there aren't enough women now, big dowrys are going to be going to the women's parents soon.

[Sith_Happens]

I don't know. If we had 3 billion less people, I think that'd actually go a long way to fixing many of our environmental problems. (Assuming the population stopped growing at ~3-4 billion).

Sure, but I'm pretty sure none of those environmental trends have gotten to the point that more than, say, 3 billion lives are ultimately at stake. So the whole thing's a washout really.:smalltongue:


I do think we need to encourage people to have less kids (as opposed to have kids like society currently does), in order for humanity to not experience a population crash and massive chaos due to lack or resources and environmental damage.

Economic development will likely accomplish that without anyone deliberately doing anything.

[NichG]

With birth rate vs death rate, part of the reason why I'd like there to be an overall lower birth rate even if we aren't straining against our resource limits is that then we can support an overall lower death rate. But it was an important point that lowering the death rate is not the same as reducing aging - that is to say, a greater proportion of non-working individuals in the population. That said, we're also gaining the ability to reduce the number of jobs needed as technology advances, so its not like there aren't solutions.

The big problem might be that many (all?) economies are tuned to only work given a certain average rate of growth. How to be non-growing but non-stagnant is perhaps tricky (or, how to find forms of growth that aren't just an increase in the number of customers).

[SaintRidley]

He believes that I am doing a bunch of extra work simply because I "refuse to delegate".

Your friend sounds like an idiot who thinks a business degree is the epitome of education.

[Tyndmyr]

Ask him what he's accomplished as a part time scientist.

[Lorsa]

Let's assume just for the sake of argument that it takes 10 years of education past a high school diploma to become a scientist.

This means that it takes 1000 people to save 10 years of time for 1 single person. Basically, 1000 lifetimes of work = 1 lifetime -10, where a lifetime of "work" in this case is approximately 45 years. 10/45 = 0.22222, which means that 1 educated individual = 999.78 uneducated individuals if my maths is correct. I would say that is a VERY efficient education system. In fact, it's so incredibly efficient that we really should educate everyone. Just imagine what these 1000 people would accomplish if they simply didn't perform the work of 1.2222 scienstist but instead became scientists themselves.

Also, what type of person doesn't believe humans can cause gobal climate change? The type that would accept "I don't believe that you will die if I shoot you with this gun so let me try"?

[Lorsa]

As for overpopulation, we can already produce food for about 10 billion people, which also happens to be the projected peak population. That is, if we can actually get rid of extreme poverty, end the most lethal conflicts and make sure child mortality drops in all countries. Funnily enough, when people expect every child to survive, they tend to only get 2 of them.

[Bobbybobby99]

Well, 10 billion not accounting for the possible colonization of other planets, which could easily lead to a population boom. But the requisites for that are unlikely to come soon, so meh.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Well, while it seems more risky, since we already have designed the planes by properly educated people, I think you could specialize enough people to build it based on existing plans. Though, I'm not sure how many scientists are actually involved in building a plane...

As someone with an engineering degree, I'd say that engineers are applied scientists. :smallamused:

More seriously, engineers do have to be somewhat more omni-disciplinary than scientists, so they can consider a lot of variables - let's take a bridge as an example, you've not only got to try and work out how the loads on it are going to change over it's expected lifetime, but also things like the nature of the ground you're siting it on and how deep you'd need to sink the supporting structures to hold it up, how the environment will affect the materials it's made of (see the Forth road bridge, which is closed to traffic at this moment because the weather has degraded the strength of the structure), or even the structure itself (see the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse), and add a contingency factor on top of that (for civil engineering projects, it's 2x expected, for aeronautical engineering, it's about 1.2x - do you now feel a little more nervous about flying? :smallwink:), make it look as close as possible to what the concept artist came up with (sometimes without impaling him with his pencil for coming up with something that could only be built by completely redefining the laws of physics) and then bring it all in under whatever budget (money and time) you've been given. And in some cases, you might have other things to consider - for instance, when Seattle's Century Link stadium was built to replace the Kingdome, they reused most of the demolished Kingdome material for the foundations to limit the amount of material that would be brought in and out of the area, which would have had a massive effect on the roads in the area.

And even then, you might still make assumptions or miss things out that later come and bite you - such as the Millennium Bridge in London, which they actually knew had issues with resonant frequencies from people walking causing it to shake, but they assumed that people would be walking randomly and cancel each other out. However, the vibrations actually made people walk in step with each other and thus amplified the effect, so they eventually had to close it for a while to fit dampening springs.

The good news is you can talk to meteorologists to identify prevailing weather patterns, hire a wind tunnel or do computer modelling for airflows, get your geologist on site to dig some very deep holes and so on, so your engineer(s) don't have to do all the work by themselves, but they still have to know how to interpret all that information and redesign accordingly.

To the OP, there is a little sense in your friends position, in that, as I suggested in my previous paragraph, a lot of modern systems and structures are built by teams of people working on their little bits to be integrated together, and no one person can really create them on their own, but you still need people with the deep knowledge to lead those teams, and others with the omni-disciplinary skills at the required level to be able to understand what's going on with the parts and combine them into something approaching the end goal, rather than everyone having the same, basic, level of understanding.

Otherwise, it'd be like you needing, say, an appendectomy, but finding out that everyone has only passed a basic first aid course. :smalleek:

[Lorsa]

Now I am going to have a small rant, as the title "the world doesn't need full time scientists" has bugged me to no end since yesterday.

Scientists are in essence knowledge-creators. While an exact definition of "science" eludes scientists, in general, and from old epistemology, it refers to knowledge. I would argue that while knowledge can refer to each individual, science refers to the knowledge carried out by humanity as a species, our collective knowledge.

Our ability to, as a species, hold collective knowledge, and pass it on to later generations, often defined as collective learning, is THE evolutionary advantage that makes us different from basically all other animals. There are hints of it in other species, but the scale on which we do it is so mindbogglingly different compared to them that we can safely say that we are the only ones with collective learning. So, science is our only real evolutionary advantage. It's been shown to be the most powerful tool on the planet.

Collective learning is so good, so awesome, that I don't even have words to describe how I feel about people that say "the world doesn't need full time scientists". The only thing that statement proves, is that the learning process obviously failed in this individual case. Please refrain from making any large-scale decisions that affect a multitude of people.

Science is what makes more than 50% of children survive to adulthood. Science is what makes it possible for us to live in houses and drive cars. Science is what makes it possible for us to do basically ANYTHING other than living lives identical to the ones of Chimpanzees (nothing bad about them, many of them are probably very happy). So you basically have two options, either go live as a Chimpanzee, or accept that science is THE most important of human endevours, and offer the ones that choose to pursue it your highest respect.

To end this with some numbers, Wikipedia says that the global spending on research and development in 2010 was about 1 trillion dollars. The very same year, GWP was listed as about 62 trillion dollars. This means that science only got about 1.6% of the total resources of the world. So look around you and try to sum up all the knowledge, all the great inventions that differs us from Chimpanzees. If that's what we get for 1.6% of the global resources, imagine what we could do with 3%.

The world needs MORE full time scientists, not less. Science is the largest value-creator known to man. It is the only thing that gives us even a sliver of possibility of surviving our own planet. More science is never wrong.

[NichG]

From time to time - mostly when I get annoyed at the culture surrounding grant applications in science - I get curious how well a scientist might fare using something like Patreon for their funding. Wouldn't work for a serious experimentalist, but theorists are quite cheap and in the US at least are slowly getting squeezed out of academia by the way that the tenure system interacts with grant priorities (favoring a small number of large grants associated with massive collaborations or expensive experiments rather than a larger number of smaller grants; basically, if you ask for several million you can get it, but if you ask for $50k you can't).

[Grinner]

From time to time - mostly when I get annoyed at the culture surrounding grant applications in science - I get curious how well a scientist might fare using something like Patreon for their funding. Wouldn't work for a serious experimentalist, but theorists are quite cheap and in the US at least are slowly getting squeezed out of academia by the way that the tenure system interacts with grant priorities (favoring a small number of large grants associated with massive collaborations or expensive experiments rather than a larger number of smaller grants; basically, if you ask for several million you can get it, but if you ask for $50k you can't).

This is a really interesting idea.

I have to get going soon, so I'll keep my thoughts brief for the moment. You would need to examine motivations people have for funding others via a patron system. Some people just throw a few dollars around, but they are normally still getting something out of it in the form of free online content (i.e. webcomics). I have seen one individual (who I feel hasn't really accomplished much) who has received large amounts of money from Patreon after some brief Internet fame, but their cashflow slackened after they fell out of the limelight. And then there's all the other ignominious folk who get maybe a couple bucks a month.

Crowdfunding like Kickstarter might be a little more viable, but that comes with its own set of challenges which I'll post about later.

[sktarq]

That statement is just so blatantly wrong... You cant even get meaningful results unless you understand how and why you are taking measurements. Then you get to interpret your results.

Not really. Give people specific instructions of how to do X procedure and let them run. Do you need to understand why it works-no only how to perform the actions. Does an auto assembler on a line need to understand the chemistry, metallurgy, geology (for material collection etc), aerodynamics, and mechanical engineering that goes into the vehicle that they are making? No-and for working at scale the benefits of not investing in that assembly line worker's aerodynamic engineering degree works because much (not all-Quality control for ex) of the judgment portion of the vehicle has been separated out. Scientific research rarely has the sort of scale where that partitioning of the judgment portion is of very much use. Thus the system used to create the research, partition it to the many semi-scientists, collect results, compare interpretations etc would require the in depth understanding of a fully trained scientist. And what I'm describing happens all the time in science. Many key parts of science are run by specialized technicians (many of whom do not have advanced scientific degrees) that were once the perview only of research scientists themselves. Prepping and slicing the samples for an electron microscope in the plastic pill era for example. The idea that most scientific research "legwork" could be done by people who are trained in only one tiny job isn't farfetched at all - just massively stupid for the type of highly variable and customizable system used in scientific research. I bring it back to the auto example-in a shop that builds one off custom cars (or tiny runs) it does make sense to have the "assembly line" worker have a couple of those degrees I mentioned earlier and if you go to many "Shed Car" type companies that is what you'll find.

[halfeye]

Now I am going to have a small rant, as the title "the world doesn't need full time scientists" has bugged me to no end since yesterday.

Scientists are in essence knowledge-creators. While an exact definition of "science" eludes scientists, in general, and from old epistemology, it refers to knowledge. I would argue that while knowledge can refer to each individual, science refers to the knowledge carried out by humanity as a species, our collective knowledge.

Our ability to, as a species, hold collective knowledge, and pass it on to later generations, often defined as collective learning, is THE evolutionary advantage that makes us different from basically all other animals. There are hints of it in other species, but the scale on which we do it is so mindbogglingly different compared to them that we can safely say that we are the only ones with collective learning. So, science is our only real evolutionary advantage. It's been shown to be the most powerful tool on the planet.

Collective learning is so good, so awesome, that I don't even have words to describe how I feel about people that say "the world doesn't need full time scientists". The only thing that statement proves, is that the learning process obviously failed in this individual case. Please refrain from making any large-scale decisions that affect a multitude of people.

Science is what makes more than 50% of children survive to adulthood. Science is what makes it possible for us to live in houses and drive cars. Science is what makes it possible for us to do basically ANYTHING other than living lives identical to the ones of Chimpanzees (nothing bad about them, many of them are probably very happy). So you basically have two options, either go live as a Chimpanzee, or accept that science is THE most important of human endevours, and offer the ones that choose to pursue it your highest respect.

To end this with some numbers, Wikipedia says that the global spending on research and development in 2010 was about 1 trillion dollars. The very same year, GWP was listed as about 62 trillion dollars. This means that science only got about 1.6% of the total resources of the world. So look around you and try to sum up all the knowledge, all the great inventions that differs us from Chimpanzees. If that's what we get for 1.6% of the global resources, imagine what we could do with 3%.

The world needs MORE full time scientists, not less. Science is the largest value-creator known to man. It is the only thing that gives us even a sliver of possibility of surviving our own planet. More science is never wrong.

I suspect the idea is that if it isn't in <religious book> it is wrong. Which means we are supposed to be chimpanzees or lesser, and we're supposed to like it.

In case anyone didn't notice, I don't agree with that opinion.

[NichG]

This is a really interesting idea.

I have to get going soon, so I'll keep my thoughts brief for the moment. You would need to examine motivations people have for funding others via a patron system. Some people just throw a few dollars around, but they are normally still getting something out of it in the form of free online content (i.e. webcomics). I have seen one individual (who I feel hasn't really accomplished much) who has received large amounts of money from Patreon after some brief Internet fame, but their cashflow slackened after they fell out of the limelight. And then there's all the other ignominious folk who get maybe a couple bucks a month.

Crowdfunding like Kickstarter might be a little more viable, but that comes with its own set of challenges which I'll post about later.

I guess if I were doing it, I'd offer the base level as being something like a science blog post every two weeks about whatever I was researching at the time, aimed at a non-scientist but technically adept target audience (something like John Baez' posts), along with open-sourcing all of the codes I work with or develop and publishing any results of the research in an open-access format, and generally giving short updates whenever there's something particularly cool (neat visualization, interesting result, even just a realization or idea) to make the research process itself more interactive and transparent. At higher rates of funding, I would increase the frequency to weekly, maybe include monthly presentations or panel discussion/AMA sorts of things. If the funding got to the level that it would actually be full-time support equivalent, I might do something like propose three topics each month and have the funders choose between them based on what they're most interested in, or even take specific requests for 'I'd like you to figure out why X happens' or 'I'd like you to try modelling X', though that would have to be heavily constrained based on what I thought I could actually provide.

Mentorship might be an interesting thing to include, but I'd be leery of having that be a funding reward.

If I assume that in a standard academic environment I can expect 50% of time to be taken up by non-research tasks (usually 25% teaching, 25% admin), any fulfillment-related things should never take up more than 50% of the researcher's time or they might as well just go the standard path. Ideally it should probably be under 20% due to intrinsic limitations such as the unreliability of the funding, lack of facility support, access to students, etc that would argue in favor of the usual model - so there has to be a significant time saving considering that you effectively would lose a lot of advantages.

I think also in practice there needs to be a communication infrastructure to prevent researchers going this route from becoming isolated. At a university or company, you can talk to colleagues to keep ideas circulating - it's not just sounding board stuff, but having contact with someone else who is actively researching a tangentially related thing is just very helpful for avoiding stagnation.

Numbers-wise, a postdoc makes something like $4000 a month before tax. You probably also want a minimum of $5000 a year extra for a theorist to remain scientifically relevant, between publication fees, conferences, and equipment/computer time. So the target funding level would be around $5000/month in contributions in order to be competitive with a traditional career path. You could still be functional at $2000/month, but at that point you're likely not going to have much contact with the rest of the scientific community - conferences and publications in high impact-factor journals are both about $1500 a pop.

[Kato]

The world needs MORE full time scientists, not less. Science is the largest value-creator known to man. It is the only thing that gives us even a sliver of possibility of surviving our own planet. More science is never wrong.
(emphasis mine)
Not that I disagree but while science has helped a lot in improving basically any field of living, science on its own creates nothing. Applying science to certain aspects of human society helps. (*insert argument about research into fields where no simple/short-term profit/improvement can be foreseen*)
Also... sex is the largest value-creator because it makes more humans (for better or worse, but until we figure out immortality, we need more humans). Without sex, there would be no science. And science hasn't done much to improve sex yet. (Okay, reducing mortality rates, but I'd say that's not entirely sex related)

[Lethologica]

Also... sex is the largest value-creator because it makes more humans (for better or worse, but until we figure out immortality, we need more humans). Without sex, there would be no science. And science hasn't done much to improve sex yet. (Okay, reducing mortality rates, but I'd say that's not entirely sex related)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present safe, reliable birth control.

[Kato]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present safe, reliable birth control.

So... you are suggesting something that prevents births increases value? :smalltongue:
No, jk. Okay, more seriously, I see your point but it's not exactly increasing the value of sex to have birth control, does it? Yes, I can see how it would, given a certain point of view. I am more willing to concede the point about less worry about STDs, though.

[thorgrim29]

Well, if you're talking about economic value safe birth control allows women to join the job market, producing much more value and creating a few industries outright (such as daycare).

[gomipile]

So... you are suggesting something that prevents births increases value? :smalltongue:
No, jk. Okay, more seriously, I see your point but it's not exactly increasing the value of sex to have birth control, does it? Yes, I can see how it would, given a certain point of view. I am more willing to concede the point about less worry about STDs, though.

There's an economic argument with a fair amount of evidence backing it up. It's more that the ability to delay births increases the value contributed to society by those births.

"Unwantedness" as a child is a strong predictor of lots of bad outcomes, including criminal behavior. When mothers in a society are able to easily delay childbirth until they want the child, economic indicators go up and crime goes down one generation later.

The main problems with this line of reasoning are the ones that come along with most hypotheses which can't be ethically or practically tested under completely controlled conditions.

[Grinner]

*snip*

Numbers-wise, a postdoc makes something like $4000 a month before tax. You probably also want a minimum of $5000 a year extra for a theorist to remain scientifically relevant, between publication fees, conferences, and equipment/computer time. So the target funding level would be around $5000/month in contributions in order to be competitive with a traditional career path. You could still be functional at $2000/month, but at that point you're likely not going to have much contact with the rest of the scientific community - conferences and publications in high impact-factor journals are both about $1500 a pop.

Those numbers strain credibility. It's not impossible that you could pull something like that off, but from just idly paging through Patreon, most "successful" accounts get between $500 and $1,500 (I'm kinda making those numbers up. Again, it's just the broad impression I got.) A small fraction are pulling up to $5,000, and I saw one with almost $20,000 a month (That must be some damn good comedy).

The good news is that there's a YouTube channel with a mathematics focus that is getting a little more than $3,293 a month from Patreon, which means there's at least some public interest in science-y stuff. The bad news is that it has 1.5 million subscribers, which means you may have to be an Internet celebrity in order for this to work.

On that note, to be an Internet celebrity, you have to be entertaining. I'm gonna go ahead and bet that most people working in an academic research environment aren't Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'll also bet that the day-to-day tasks of research is just a bunch of legwork, not exactly the sort of thing the general public would find exciting.

It may be viable to mirror the traditional career path. Instead of teaching, a researcher could do a webshow wherein they teach science at a more technical level and release a regular update on their research. The proceeds from the show (advertising and/or patronage) could then be used to fund their research. I can immediately spot two flaws in this business model, though. First, this can only be viable for a very small percentage of researchers, as they would need to be charismatic and have a unique focus for their show. Second, this is all predicated on the idea that the general public has more than a passing interest in technical instruction over bread and circuses (I'm gonna bet we don't).

Kickstarter could be more viable, but then you have both the issues of backer rewards and the ever-lingering trouble of public disinterest. On the bright side, should someone attempt this, it's possible that we'd get increasingly bizarre technologies invented as their backers progressively push them more towards ludicrous ideas born from science fiction. I have seen academics who have successfully published instructional books in this way, and a prospective independent researcher might consider writing to pay the bills.

As to the issue of equipment....Well, let me get back to that in a moment. First, why would someone wish to leave not only the material advantages presented by an institution, but also the comfort and security of regular income. There's a long history of creative types struggling to balance their creative drives with the need to eat. Even if they are ever successful (i.e. able to pay the bills with their creative skills alone), it's my understanding that they tend to operate in the mode of feast-or-famine. When they're popular, cash rolls in, and when they're not, they'd better hope they left something in the bank. My point here is that you need to have a really good reason for striking out on your own to justify the extra stress. There are some students who have attempted something like this, but they've tried primarily because they're young and can't actually get the positions which would enable them to pursue their own research. Which leads me to equipment...

There's an ongoing trend among young, academic types to band together and form independent labs (perhaps you've heard of hackerspaces?). Judging from wikis for various spaces, you could probably do just as well with a spare bedroom or a finished basement, and a few hundred dollars in equipment (except for that one lab in California and maybe one lab in...New York?), but what these spaces would provide is that contact with other researchers you were talking about.

To wrap this up, it's an intriguing idea fraught with numerous perils that probably only a select few individuals could ever hope to pull off professionally. And yes, definitely avoid mentorship. The fact that they're funding the researcher would create obligations and complicate the relationship.

[Lethologica]

So... you are suggesting something that prevents births increases value? :smalltongue:
No, jk. Okay, more seriously, I see your point but it's not exactly increasing the value of sex to have birth control, does it? Yes, I can see how it would, given a certain point of view. I am more willing to concede the point about less worry about STDs, though.
It's absolutely increasing the value of sex to have safe, reliable birth control, as others have discussed. Of course, there's also a lot of procreative value from advanced medical science making pregnancy safer and reducing infant/child mortality, so it's not like we need to die on this hill.

[NichG]

Those numbers strain credibility. It's not impossible that you could pull something like that off, but from just idly paging through Patreon, most "successful" accounts get between $500 and $1,500 (I'm kinda making those numbers up. Again, it's just the broad impression I got.) A small fraction are pulling up to $5,000, and I saw one with almost $20,000 a month (That must be some damn good comedy).

The good news is that there's a YouTube channel with a mathematics focus that is getting a little more than $3,293 a month from Patreon, which means there's at least some public interest in science-y stuff. The bad news is that it has 1.5 million subscribers, which means you may have to be an Internet celebrity in order for this to work.

On that note, to be an Internet celebrity, you have to be entertaining. I'm gonna go ahead and bet that most people working in an academic research environment aren't Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'll also bet that the day-to-day tasks of research is just a bunch of legwork, not exactly the sort of thing the general public would find exciting.

It may be viable to mirror the traditional career path. Instead of teaching, a researcher could do a webshow wherein they teach science at a more technical level and release a regular update on their research. The proceeds from the show (advertising and/or patronage) could then be used to fund their research. I can immediately spot two flaws in this business model, though. First, this can only be viable for a very small percentage of researchers, as they would need to be charismatic and have a unique focus for their show. Second, this is all predicated on the idea that the general public has more than a passing interest in technical instruction over bread and circuses (I'm gonna bet we don't).

Kickstarter could be more viable, but then you have both the issues of backer rewards and the ever-lingering trouble of public disinterest. On the bright side, should someone attempt this, it's possible that we'd get increasingly bizarre technologies invented as their backers progressively push them more towards ludicrous ideas born from science fiction. I have seen academics who have successfully published instructional books in this way, and a prospective independent researcher might consider writing to pay the bills.

As to the issue of equipment....Well, let me get back to that in a moment. First, why would someone wish to leave not only the material advantages presented by an institution, but also the comfort and security of regular income. There's a long history of creative types struggling to balance their creative drives with the need to eat. Even if they are ever successful (i.e. able to pay the bills with their creative skills alone), it's my understanding that they tend to operate in the mode of feast-or-famine. When they're popular, cash rolls in, and when they're not, they'd better hope they left something in the bank. My point here is that you need to have a really good reason for striking out on your own to justify the extra stress. There are some students who have attempted something like this, but they've tried primarily because they're young and can't actually get the positions which would enable them to pursue their own research. Which leads me to equipment...

There's an ongoing trend among young, academic types to band together and form independent labs (perhaps you've heard of hackerspaces?). Judging from wikis for various spaces, you could probably do just as well with a spare bedroom or a finished basement, and a few hundred dollars in equipment (except for that one lab in California and maybe one lab in...New York?), but what these spaces would provide is that contact with other researchers you were talking about.

To wrap this up, it's an intriguing idea fraught with numerous perils that probably only a select few individuals could ever hope to pull off professionally. And yes, definitely avoid mentorship. The fact that they're funding the researcher would create obligations and complicate the relationship.

One thing that tends to happen in academia is that you get pushed towards administration the older you get. For younger people, being a graduate student or postdoc is probably more productive. So we're looking at 30-somethings as being the target group.

Maybe it'd be a good blend with consultancy, which tends to pay well but also be intermittent?

I guess another possibility is to just ignore the conference and journal circuits to cut down costs, and focus on internet fame to get other researchers to know about your work. That seems to work in machine learning these days. Karpathy is pretty well known for things like tutorial blog posts and making public starter codes.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Delegation is an important part of science. But you don't want the people you're delegating to be worse trained. Why would you ever want anyone else to be less trained unless you're in a ridiculously competitive labour market and a self centred jerk?

Less specialised scientists would be a good thing, but I don't mean scientists should focus less, I mean its always beneficial for them to branch out a little as well as doing all the specialised work that they're needed for.


I don't know. If we had 3 billion less people, I think that'd actually go a long way to fixing many of our environmental problems. (Assuming the population stopped growing at ~3-4 billion).

Not by itself.

If we had 3 billion people living like the richest 1 billion of us alive today but didn't have anyone living like the other 6 billion the environment might be a lot worse.

If we had 20 billion all living like the poorest 1 billion then our environment might not be suffering much but we would be.


By that yardstick, the Black Death killing between 30-60% of the population of Europe was a good thing.

1. The Black Death was not a Europe thing, it effected everywhere in much of Eurasia equally.

2. The Black Death and other mass disease outbreaks have surprisingly little effect on over-all population growth.


. You could make an argument that the Black Death was partially responsible for the abandonment of feudalism.

That argument has been made for at least the past 150 years and is basically utter lies (well, a dubious interpretation based on heavily curated facts which is basically the same thing if it gets presented as truth). The basic route of the theory is "I want to tell a inspiring story about European progress, let's make every event in history fit that story". Its 19th century garbage scholarship at its finest. Which incidentally is why we need specialised historians, because most scientists still believe this nonsense they've been being told for 200 years.

The nobility actually got more powerful after the Black Death and the groundwork for the later development of capitalism was several centuries earlier.

Feudalism in Russia didn't even start until centuries after the Black Death. This 'abandonment of feudalism' of which you speak is a made up nonsense phrase (what is feudalism anyway? the more certain you are of your definition the more wrong it is, that's how historical terms tend to work).


It's more that the ability to delay births increases the value contributed to society by those births.


On the other hand, the later you have children the less healthy they will be.

Which is why "everyone has kids at 18 and then the grandparents raise them" is not the stupidest idea. Every generation still gets to raise another one but nobody gets their risk of genetic diseases increased because nobody is educated enough to support a child until they're 30.

[wumpus]

D
Feudalism in Russia didn't even start until centuries after the Black Death. This 'abandonment of feudalism' of which you speak is a made up nonsense phrase (what is feudalism anyway? the more certain you are of your definition the more wrong it is, that's how historical terms tend to work).


Feudalism is basically multi-level government. Each level owes fealty to one level up, and is expected to follow the chain of command (this is important in fighting neighbors and your lord doublecrossing your lord's lord. While you may technically owe fealty to the lord's lord, in practice you follow the chain of command).

Feudalism typically forms during anarchy, and is fairly easy to build a large structure (similar to MLMs). Some examples:
Medieval European governments
The Mafia (fictional accounts likely tidy up the chain of command quite a bit, real life might not qualify so well).
Pretty sure pre-19th century Japan qualified. Less sure about the chain of command than above, but it seems to fit.

[I was guessing Iraq during its recent civil war (mostly due to reports from US Peacekeepers that watching the Sopranos was the best way to understand what is going on), but unless you consider the Scottish Highlands (of fairly late era, at least the 1700s) to be Feudal then they weren't either. Not that you couldn't build a Feudal system out of entire families as well as individual nobleman/knights (and presumably the families don't have that pesky dying/replaced by sons issue all at once), but it probably would take as long as more efficient governments.

[The Grue]

He has stated that no evidence will convince him that humans are the cause of climate change until someone explains to him why other planets are heating up too

So he's unwilling to be convinced unless someone can explain why something that isn't happening is happening? :smallannoyed:

Does he know that Mars used to have liquid oceans? That Jupiter used to radiate several times as much heat as it receives from the sun?

[nooblade]

I know a very educated molecular biology lady who became very sick of university stuff and decided to try some citizen science thing. Don't know how it's going to work out for her. Sounds to me like trying to be a climate change scientist would be more dependent on universities or charitable grant money or something like that. Maybe that's not bad for some people.

I'm a little curious about this if anyone looks into it further. What does a climate change scientist do all day? How many are there? Do college students in that field find jobs easily? There are some short articles from a google search, nothing very satisfying. I'm not arguing about the science or saying they're worthless, my question is more "what is daily work like for them?" There's some neat answers to basic questions on the internet like, "why would carbon dioxide trap heat but not reflect sunlight?" But that seems like common knowledge now--what kind of new things are researched?

[NichG]

Well, what are the related fields? What can happen is that a bunch of loosely related fields have to work together to address a specific kind of question or problem, that nucleates a large-scale collaboration or community, which becomes an organization or clusters around an organization, which then in turn defines a new field around itself as the various different areas of expertise are synthesized together by providing things like conferences, specialized journals, etc.

So I couldn't tell you anything about careers or degrees in climate change science per se, but I'll bet that a lot of people who identify as members of that field got started in broader fields like geology, atmospheric science, etc, and then specialized as they pursued their career. Odds are they even still do a lot of that kind of stuff, but they frame the big picture of their research as asking questions about climate change in particular.

[Telok]

I'm a little curious about this if anyone looks into it further. What does a climate change scientist do all day?

My understanding of what they do is basically computational analysis. Since you can't do weather experiments you're stuck with collecting data, analysing data, writing up your analysis, and going to conferences to see if anyone else has a better idea of what's going on than you do.

That doesn't sound like much if you just spout it off casually, but scratch the surface and see what's in there. Start at the top with weather and other satellites that measure everything from moisture content and temperature to surface albedo and the local thickness of tee atmosphere. Move down to the land layer and we have everything from windspeed to particulate levels to the different levels of gas concentrations. Then go down to the oceans with the different temperature and salinity levels and the cycles of heat absorption and release. Gather and analyse all that data and more, on a world wide scale, every day for several decades. That's step one.

You can pretty much reduce anyone's job to a couple of simple sounding sentences if you leave out the annoying little details that make the difference between the good and useful work and the complete disasterous failures.

Do part time, amature, air traffic controllers sound good?

[Brother Oni]

Do part time, amature, air traffic controllers sound good?

There's a slight difference in that there's significant regulation regarding ATC fitness and competency, unlike with scientists. How about part time, amateur police officers in the US? At the moment, it's between 21 weeks to 6 months of general training as a police officer then you get to open carry a firearm and potentially get involved in high stress violent situations - imagine how it would be if that training requirement was reduced further?

[aspi]

I'm a little curious about this if anyone looks into it further. What does a climate change scientist do all day? How many are there? Do college students in that field find jobs easily?
Formally, I doubt that there even is such a thing as a "climate change scientist", simply because that topic of research lies at the intersection of a lot of different scientific fields. There are meteorologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and computer scientists working on this because there are so many layers to this problem. You need everything from basic observations to measurements to theoretical models to large scale simulations (some of the world's largest computers were built specifically for weather simulations). As a results, your job prospects depend on what area you're working on and you might move on to become a meteorologist for a local weather channel or a system administrator afterwards...

[Lorsa]

There's a slight difference in that there's significant regulation regarding ATC fitness and competency, unlike with scientists. How about part time, amateur police officers in the US? At the moment, it's between 21 weeks to 6 months of general training as a police officer then you get to open carry a firearm and potentially get involved in high stress violent situations - imagine how it would be if that training requirement was reduced further?

I'm quite certain most countries have quite srict regulations regarnding competency for aquiring a PhD. At least that is the case in Sweden.

[NichG]

I'm quite certain most countries have quite srict regulations regarnding competency for aquiring a PhD. At least that is the case in Sweden.

It's definitely not the case in the US. PhDs are granted within the university system, not by the government. So each university, each department, has its own particular standards and conditions, which can vary greatly.

[Brother Oni]

It's definitely not the case in the US. PhDs are granted within the university system, not by the government. So each university, each department, has its own particular standards and conditions, which can vary greatly.

It's not that way in the UK either. You also don't need a PhD to be scientist either, only if you want to call yourself 'Doctor'.

For example, my job title is 'scientist' and I don't have a PhD.

[Tyndmyr]

There's a slight difference in that there's significant regulation regarding ATC fitness and competency, unlike with scientists. How about part time, amateur police officers in the US? At the moment, it's between 21 weeks to 6 months of general training as a police officer then you get to open carry a firearm and potentially get involved in high stress violent situations - imagine how it would be if that training requirement was reduced further?

Not really a good example. Training can be MUCH shorter. Sometimes, the qualifications, such as for Sheriff are "get elected".

Doesn't make a good parallel for literally years of scientific training.

[gomipile]

I entered this thread going there would be more back-and forth with the subject of the thread, facilitated and mediated by MonkeySage. I'm rather disappointed that MonkeySage hasn't been around since page 1.

Help us MonkeySage, you're our only hope (for meaningfully continuing this thread within the spirit of your originating post.) :smallbiggrin:

[Brother Oni]

Not really a good example. Training can be MUCH shorter. Sometimes, the qualifications, such as for Sheriff are "get elected".

Doesn't make a good parallel for literally years of scientific training.

Isn't Sheriff more a political/elected appointment than a promotion from the ranks anyway? Reading up on Sheriffs in the US, we don't have an equivalent position in the UK, but the closest (Chief Constable I think) was a 'proper' police officer beforehand.

Firearms officers over here are also trained differently, with AFO candidates needing around 2 years of previous service (depending on the force) before they're eligible for the selection process.

[Telok]

Isn't Sheriff more a political/elected appointment than a promotion from the ranks anyway? Reading up on Sheriffs in the US, we don't have an equivalent position in the UK, but the closest (Chief Constable I think) was a 'proper' police officer beforehand.

Firearms officers over here are also trained differently, with AFO candidates needing around 2 years of previous service (depending on the force) before they're eligible for the selection process.

Yeah. The USA went a little overboard with the whlole election thing. Quite often the people at the top of local law enforcement or local education decisions are elected. Minimum compentency and qualifications are less important than having the money and free time to run a campaign. Luckily we stopped before applying the election principal to absolutely everything. It works all right in politics but I think it's inappropriate in positions where you want someone who's trained to do the job and can do it well.

[georgie_leech]

Yeah. The USA went a little overboard with the whlole election thing. Quite often the people at the top of local law enforcement or local education decisions are elected. Minimum compentency and qualifications are less important than having the money and free time to run a campaign. Luckily we stopped before applying the election principal to absolutely everything. It works all right in politics but I think it's inappropriate in positions where you want someone who's trained to do the job and can do it well.

Explains a lot :smallbiggrin:

[nooblade]

I entered this thread going there would be more back-and forth with the subject if the thread, facilitated and mediated by MonkeySage. I'm rather disappointed that MonkeySage hasn't been around since page 1.

Help us MonkeySage, you're our only hope (for meaningfully continuing this thread within the spirit of your originating post.) :smallbiggrin:

Well I still interested in keeping some discussion going.

Here's an interesting bunch-of-comments and one caller's experience and some nastiness. If anyone has a spare hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmvLdOkpg2M

[Sapreaver]

On one hand, there is a lot of waste in educating our scientists, at least in Canada (Seriously, a year and a half worth of Arts options that will not provide a scientist with any useful skills). And a lot of the full science courses are full of BS and useless information (like having me memorize the scientific name of a crow. I will never need to remember that, I can just look it up if necessary)

On the other hand, I've learned a lot in University, despite all of that. I've learned stuff that I couldn't have done in High School.

So basically, I'd say that our current method is wasteful and inefficient, but rather then just use High School education, I'd say the current method needs to be updated and upgraded to something more streamlined.

Regarding Climate Change, that's kinda irrelevant to the rest of it isn't it? IMO, I think the sheer amount of energy humanity is pumping into the climate is doing more then the CO2 we pump into the atmosphere.

xD are you at the UofM too? Take the writing courses for your arts they're helpful no matter the field and communication courses.

[veti]

There's a lot of assumptions going on in this thread, by everyone including the OP's friend. All questions of the form "are there too many/too much of something?" beg the more interesting question, "too many for what?"

What does it mean for "the world" to "need" scientists? Or anyone else, for that matter?

We could all agree to pack up tomorrow and go back to living in trees, and the world would keep on turning just the same. In that sense, "the world" doesn't need anyone.

So let's assume that by "the world", he means "human civilisation in something like its present form". (It can't mean "exactly its present form", because any systemic change rules that out.) So the question becomes, "by how much would our present civilisation have to change, in order to put all full-time scientists out of work?"

And I think the answer to that is "quite a lot". The history of civilisation is a pretty much one-directional story of increasing specialisation. Our whole economic system is based around getting as many people as possible to do what each of them, individually, does best - thus they earn money, which they use to trade with everyone else for all the things they personally don't do best. What sense would it make to exempt scientists (alone) from that general rule? And how, exactly, would we go about doing it?

The "why", in this case, will probably answer the "how", so let's look at that first. And we can start by dismissing out of hand the idea suggested in the OP, that science by full-time scientists is somehow "less efficient" than crowdsourcing it to high-school graduates. If anyone truly believed that, they wouldn't be arguing with us about it, they'd be making millions by dethroning Pfizer and all the other companies that are wasting their resources on these deadbeats. Nobody thinks that, it's the sort of silly idea you bring up as a debating point when you realise your position is weak and you want to divert attention from it.

So, what's the real reason? Given the proposer's hostility to climate science, it's possible he believes that the dedicated pursuit of science is morally harmful to the scientist, and so the rest of us end up taking manipulative advice from corrupt parasites. One problem with this is that it's not clear why science should be any more or less corrupting than any other vocation, and so we're back to "rewriting our entire economic system". But assuming he has an answer to that, then the problem of enforcement becomes severe. Because there are profits to be made from employing scientists, companies have an incentive to do it, and the moral hazard is just another externality whose cost they can push onto the rest of society while keeping the benefits to themselves. We'd need a whole new global regulatory agency with sweeping powers to audit companies' R&D efforts and make sure no-one was working more than, say, one day a week on them.

I can't be sure, of course, but my guess is that the original proposer of the idea - would not be OK with that.

So what's left of the proposition? "The world doesn't need scientists" becomes "I, personally, think we'd all be better off if we stopped relying on scientists, but unless I'm willing to countenance the huge changes that would be entailed by enforcing my preferences on the world, that's just a random thought with about as much meaning as a sixth-grade geometry problem, and if I'm being honest I haven't really thought through what I mean by 'better off' in this context anyway."

And I don't think that's really worth debating any further.

[Grinner]

*snip*

It's not how many hours scientists work that's been questioned, but how thoroughly they're trained.

You started out with a good, levelheaded approach to the question, but then you got all weird, overthought it, and missed what the OP was saying entirely. I think you were closest here:

The "why", in this case, will probably answer the "how", so let's look at that first. And we can start by dismissing out of hand the idea suggested in the OP, that science by full-time scientists is somehow "less efficient" than crowdsourcing it to high-school graduates. If anyone truly believed that, they wouldn't be arguing with us about it, they'd be making millions by dethroning Pfizer and all the other companies that are wasting their resources on these deadbeats. Nobody thinks that, it's the sort of silly idea you bring up as a debating point when you realise your position is weak and you want to divert attention from it.

Speaking for myself, I think there are arguments to be made for cutting down on the training of science professionals, but the reality of people and logistics is such that it's a largely nonviable.

That said, it may also be inevitable, in a sense. I once read a paper which argued that humanity's works can be divided into three resources: labor, knowledge, and intelligence. As time has gone on, we've steadily supplanted labor with machines, the product of knowledge and intelligence. Then with the dawn of the information age, we've been working towards supplanting knowledge with machines (i.e. Google). If we are indeed able to create artificial general intelligence, then we will in turn have mechanized all three forms of human usefulness. At that point, humans won't have a whole lot to do, and this could be disastrous.

Depending on how human economic systems are set up at the time, people may have to scrabble for work, creating a Malthusian catastrophe (if we're still using capitalism), they may do nothing, leading to complacency (if we've transitioned to a sort-of post-scarcity economy), or we could wind up somewhere in between. In the case of the first, we'd probably wind up transitioning to a post-scarcity economy anyway, but only after a lot of civil unrest.

Of the work that would be left, positions sitting between labor and knowledge (trade skills like plumbing or carpentry) would probably be pretty safe, since the human form has certain advantages over machines. With intelligence being fully mechanized however, the holders of post-graduate degrees may find their educations worthless, unless they develop the means to remain competitive with artificial intelligence. Unless they do so, the best they probably would be able to do would be assistant work.

[Jay R]

The world doesn't need full-time scientists. So what? The world has lots of things it doesn't need.

In fact, the world doesn't even need people. It got along without us for billions of years.

There are full-time scientists because the people running various entities - corporations, universities, research labs - are willing to pay for the full-time services of scientists.

And if they want those services, and are willing to pay for them, nobody else - not your friend, and not "the world" - have any say in the matter.

[georgie_leech]

The world doesn't need full-time scientists. So what? The world has lots of things it doesn't need.

In fact, the world doesn't even need people. It got along without us for billions of years.

There are full-time scientists because the people running various entities - corporations, universities, research labs - are willing to pay for the full-time services of scientists.

And if they want those services, and are willing to pay for them, nobody else - not your friend, and not "the world" - have any say in the matter.

I dunno, I think people would be willing to pay for FTL spaceships too but so far at least the world/universe has something to say about that. :smallbiggrin:

[Jay R]

I dunno, I think people would be willing to pay for FTL spaceships too but so far at least the world/universe has something to say about that. :smallbiggrin:

In an economic sense, being willing to pay for something means being willing to pay the actual cost. I'm willing to pay $100 for a Mercedes, but nobody considers that "being willing to pay for a Mercedes".

Nobody on earth is willing to pay the research cost for an FTL spaceship, which is either infinite (if it's impossible) or far more than anybody has (if some as yet unknown physical principle makes it possible, but we don't know how).

[Sith_Happens]

or far more than anybody has (if some as yet unknown physical principle makes it possible, but we don't know how).

If that were how research costs worked it would be impossible to discover anything.

[Lethologica]

In an economic sense, being willing to pay for something means being willing to pay the actual cost. I'm willing to pay $100 for a Mercedes, but nobody considers that "being willing to pay for a Mercedes".

Nobody on earth is willing to pay the research cost for an FTL spaceship, which is either infinite (if it's impossible) or far more than anybody has (if some as yet unknown physical principle makes it possible, but we don't know how).
Nitpick: You argue against "the world" having any say in the matter, but it feels like you can only do this by incorporating "the world" into your economic model to the extent that there's no actual difference between the model you're building and a model where "the world" has a say in the matter.

[halfeye]

I dunno, I think people would be willing to pay for FTL spaceships too but so far at least the world/universe has something to say about that. :smallbiggrin:
World? Universe! :smallbiggrin:

Mind you, a flying (ground effect, so low) bicycle is fully possible, and people would probably pay, but there are rules and regulations that say no.

[Jay R]

or far more than anybody has (if some as yet unknown physical principle makes it possible, but we don't know how).If that were how research costs worked it would be impossible to discover anything.

I think you misunderstood me. By our current knowledge of physics, it is impossible for something to go from moving slower than light to moving faster than light. Yes, it's theoretically possible that there is some finite cost to discover some principle (as yet unknown) to do so, and then to create a new understanding of physics based on that principle, and then to create new engineering tools that can do this (since no machine or method current known can do so). But even if that happens, there is now way to pick any price within anybody's price range today and say, "OK, if I spend this much money, then in five years I will have an FTL spaceship." There is no finite price today for an FTL spaceship.


Nitpick: You argue against "the world" having any say in the matter, but it feels like you can only do this by incorporating "the world" into your economic model to the extent that there's no actual difference between the model you're building and a model where "the world" has a say in the matter.

There's no contradiction.

I said that if people want to hire full-time scientists, nobody - not the friend, and not "the world" - have any say in it.

That is not inconsistent with saying that there is not enough money in the world to build an FTL spaceship.

[NichG]

On the other hand, there can be a finite price associated with 'trying to come up with an FTL spaceship', so long as you don't make the assumption of guaranteed successful delivery of a product. There probably are a handful of scientists in the world who are in fact making a full time salary working on that particular endeavor.

Which, really, is a pretty common case - you don't pay a surgeon for a guarantee of saving your life, you pay them for a chance at it. There are lots of things in the world that we can't obtain 100% guarantees on, or even good probability estimates on, but which people are still willing to pay for.

Which is part of where scientific training comes in. In science, you never really have a guarantee that you know what the work will produce before its done, because it's all about finding new things. However, if you're an experienced, you can make better guesses as to what will be productive and what won't be productive than someone without training. So if you pay more to hire an experienced scientist, you're hoping in part that their experience will direct you towards the things with a 10% chance of being useful rather than a 0.1% chance of being useful.

[veti]

On the other hand, there can be a finite price associated with 'trying to come up with an FTL spaceship', so long as you don't make the assumption of guaranteed successful delivery of a product. There probably are a handful of scientists in the world who are in fact making a full time salary working on that particular endeavor.

I doubt it. There are certainly scientists (as well as engineers) who are working on making spaceships lighter, stronger, more efficient, devising new ways to propel them. Then - separately - there are scientists working on control technologies that could, ultimately, be used to fly such a ship, and biomedical technologies to keep the crew alive and functioning, power generation and storage technologies, ways that could protect it against micro-meteoroids, radiation, the stresses of extreme cold, extreme acceleration, the rigours of takeoff and re-entry...

All of which technologies would have dozens of applications here on earth, which is what pays the bills for that work.

Then there are physicists who make their study of relativistic effects, wormholes, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves, and dozens of other things I can't even begin to name that might, or might not, turn out to be key to travelling faster than light. And physicists study these things - basically, because they have to study something, and these things are interesting precisely because they're unknown. This is where the "too many scientists" argument looks superficially persuasive, because nine-tenths of this work will probably never have any payoff. The hope, as always with blue-sky research, is that the other one-tenth will pay off enough to make the whole body more than worthwhile. But there's no way of knowing in advance which one-tenth that'll be.

So is 90% of the work "unnecessary"? Well - as I said before, "necessary" is what you make of it. It depends on what your objectives and constraints are. Is owning a car "necessary"? Well yes - if you want to live in one place and work in another and public transport between the two requires sacrifices that you're unprepared or unable to make, and you're not willing to move either house or job, and... "Necessity" is all about value judgments. Always. If you disagree with someone else's values, then you will inevitably disagree with what they consider "necessary".

But when it comes to "policy" decisions - it's not your values that matter. It's the values of the people who - collectively - control the resources, i.e. the money. What they're prepared to pay for, they can and will have - unless you're willing to assert your values over theirs by force.

[NichG]

I doubt it. There are certainly scientists (as well as engineers) who are working on making spaceships lighter, stronger, more efficient, devising new ways to propel them. Then - separately - there are scientists working on control technologies that could, ultimately, be used to fly such a ship, and biomedical technologies to keep the crew alive and functioning, power generation and storage technologies, ways that could protect it against micro-meteoroids, radiation, the stresses of extreme cold, extreme acceleration, the rigours of takeoff and re-entry...

All of which technologies would have dozens of applications here on earth, which is what pays the bills for that work.

Then there are physicists who make their study of relativistic effects, wormholes, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves, and dozens of other things I can't even begin to name that might, or might not, turn out to be key to travelling faster than light. And physicists study these things - basically, because they have to study something, and these things are interesting precisely because they're unknown. This is where the "too many scientists" argument looks superficially persuasive, because nine-tenths of this work will probably never have any payoff. The hope, as always with blue-sky research, is that the other one-tenth will pay off enough to make the whole body more than worthwhile. But there's no way of knowing in advance which one-tenth that'll be.

The world is a pretty big economy and there's a lot of give. In the corners of that, paying for a few people to do crazy pie in the sky stuff doesn't amount to a blip in the budget. There's enough that that people can make their careers working on things like the Alcubierre metric and even talking about building prototypes, mucking around with things like the EM Drive which shouldn't actually work, etc. So you can say all you want about necessity, but there's enough interest in even the fringe stuff that probably has no chance of working that it can pay the bills for a couple of people.

I wouldn't give people the career advice to get a bunch of student loans so they can become an enterprising FTL researcher. There's not enough give to pay for more than a handful of such people, so trying to become the N+1 when N is 2 or 3 is a bad strategy. But for those few people who are already paying their bills with that, it's a functional way for them to make a living so it doesn't really matter if someone thinks the world doesn't need them.

[Brother Oni]

Guys can we please bury this thread?

I don't mean to be an a-hole... actually my request is for just the opposite reason. I was not in my right head when I posted this thread. You guys want to continue the discussion, it's cool, but I was hoping perhaps in a different thread.

You could try requesting a mod to lock the thread.