I think I agree with a large chunk of this: there are inevitably triage/discovery problems as the number of things/options go up. The cost of evaluating each r

I think I agree with a large chunk of this: there are inevitably triage/discovery problems as the number of things/options go up. The cost of evaluating each remains fairly constant, and at some point production outstrips the ability of even extremely-interested/dedicated individuals to have a good handle on it all. Beyond this point, you either need organized collective effort (and trust) to efficiently distribute the work of keeping up (and synthesize the results) or the larger community will be wasting ever-increasing slices of potential energy to extract increasingly less knowledge of the scope of activity. But there's a difference between simple volume growth for good reasons (i.e., people chasing incentives that are aligned at multiple levels of society), and volume growth caused by people chasing incentives that are misaligned at one or more points up the stack. If the researchers are spending their time on things even they find boring because Goodhart's law, I think it is important to recognize it and try to undo the misaligned incentives. They're not only externalizing a cost on their entire field of knowledge--but we're also collectively suffering some ill-defined opportunity cost of whatever it was they would've spent their time on if they were following curiosity.