Slowing Scientific Progress

You're ignoring that science improves and leads to further discovery.It's perfectly fine if 0.00000001% of the population spends their lives on something that achieves nothing if a few of these lead to further developments.

The philosophies are very different. You have:1. Low hanging fruit (business) vs. high hanging fruit (science). Businesses can not pursue leads which may only have long time payoffs.2. Only leads with visible benefit are pursued by business. Whereas science believes that discoveries may have benefits far beyond any visible benefit.Thus if a society ditches research without any immediate benefits academics believe society would advance much slower.

I think the problem is that science today, in many fields, is slower and requires more work than it used to.With physics in particular there’s a perception that science should progress fast in spectacular breakthroughs. But the 1900s was a very unique time. It’s not like that anymore. We’ve figured out the “easy” things (relatively speaking), most things left to discover are probably far harder.So we need to get used to paying scientists and researchers to just play around with whatever th

You need top scientists to get publications in Nature, Science etc. These scientists (and the equipment they need) cost a lot, and it's unclear whether it's actually a reasonable investment for a country where so many basic needs (ex. reliable electricity) are still unmet.

People don't understand that in the worst case scenario, an avenue of potential innovation is eliminated and makes future work easier. Too many people identify as scientists, especially online, for the sake of their ego rather than intellectual development. Anyone exploring possibilities has contributed.

Looks like the observations is that "science is less disruptive than ever", and the proposed solution is to fund more random/weird research projects. But the former happens because all the low-hanging high-impact/low-cost research has been done already. You can't make a major discovery anymore using just your pulse and a couple of balls. So the historical analogies do not apply. The proposals to "ignore the worst", "don't gatekeep" will not work

In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right. You can see that it takes multi disciplinary teams nowadays to discover the connections between these large systems and how they (how all in the universe) connect. People are curious which is our most precious gift

"I don't see why" has never been the bar for scientific advancement, fortunately. "Someone is curious" is sufficient, and "Someone involved sees potential" provides funding.Seriously, how much else of the world's technology would you summarily do away with, because you simply don't see the point?

1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it to me with a YouTube video3. Because I don’t understand it and I can

Scientific progress isn't in a 1:1 ratio with funding.