4 ms·

Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for.

by parsimo2010 6y ago

Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs. We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded. Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).

hertzrat 6y ago
This is an argument against specialization. You can’t do extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a week on business management, public outreach, and fundraising. Since that’s the world were living in, might it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive in the last 2 decades?
- pishpash 6y ago
  So it is somebody's job to sell to the public, but it may not be the researchers'.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  So they should band together and hire a PR firm, it's possible for something to be your responsibility without having to do the work yourself.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    So now you propose that scientific researchers fight each other using advertisement and PR campaigns, and spend more of their already small grants, just to do what they were trained to do? Who would benefit from this other than PR companies?
    - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
      In this case a PR firm would be mostly about getting articles like this written, so maybe they already started. It's either that or they naturally grow their own Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye to popularize their cause. The bottom line is they're essentially living off the government, so they need to compete with everyone else looking for tax money.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    > they should band together and hire a PR firm Maybe they should do it, yes, and I'm being 100% serious. That would solve a lot of newspapers abuse, always delighted to sell a history about crazy eccentric being chased by bees in some jungle, fourty years after falling in a pond at 8Yo. Journals seen politics or sports(wo)man as clients (they pay), but scientists... are products. They don't pay. Is a never-ending caricature.
3131s 6y ago
> * Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.* No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only people that have actually worked toward solutions to the current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields have already done their part. Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone not care about plants and animals. This along with similar corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made everyone go crazy.
yw3410 6y ago
Isn't your hypothesis dependent on the fact that there is a way to convince the public at all? The alternative tends to be more enticing. Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they would need to fork out more money for taxes? How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on their pension funds? And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?
anigbrowl 6y ago
The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target. It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.
- 7800 6y ago
  That’s not the point of higher education. Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected. However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail. Should we guard against this? Probably, yes. Could it be crowdsourced? Probably, yes.
  - marmaduke 6y ago
    Academy is not the same as higher education. The other part is people doing research and no teaching. These are people who then publishes their findings in journals for others to see. And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.
    - 7800 6y ago
      In the US there is no academy, to my knowledge. It’s another word for school.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Words cannot describe how much I disagree with this point of view. If we’ve let capitalism devalue non-profitable knowledge and rot society to the point that what you say is the general consensus we have truly started our decline as a civilisation and the only way from here is down.
- Dudeman112 6y ago
  I agree with you. Science making is bound to go wrong if it needs regular people's approval to be done. Electricity would never have been a thing if we adopted that behavior from the get go
eecc 6y ago
Even of they figured it out, if the admins decide to axe your department to sell the building and make a rich profit out of it you’re toast. That’s how the Universiteit van Amsterdam decided they had to close a whole Linguistics department: it wasn’t hip and they needed the money to pay for the new posh Economics development, for which they had plunged the institution in a debt spiral. So the socialistish - thorn in the side - folks wasting their time in endless mental masturbations about Hungarian literature lost their offices. Didn’t matter the whole faculty revolted and occupied the administration’s office, eventually the time was ripe for the police to break the protest and everything moved on as planned. In 30 years this country won’t have a clue about Eastern Europe and will have to comfort itself with its heritage of prejudice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hertzrat 6y ago

This is an argument against specialization. You can’t do extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a week on business management, public outreach, and fundraising. Since that’s the world were living in, might it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive in the last 2 decades?

pishpash 6y ago
So it is somebody's job to sell to the public, but it may not be the researchers'.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
So they should band together and hire a PR firm, it's possible for something to be your responsibility without having to do the work yourself.
- coliveira 6y ago
  So now you propose that scientific researchers fight each other using advertisement and PR campaigns, and spend more of their already small grants, just to do what they were trained to do? Who would benefit from this other than PR companies?
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    In this case a PR firm would be mostly about getting articles like this written, so maybe they already started. It's either that or they naturally grow their own Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Bill Nye to popularize their cause. The bottom line is they're essentially living off the government, so they need to compete with everyone else looking for tax money.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > they should band together and hire a PR firm Maybe they should do it, yes, and I'm being 100% serious. That would solve a lot of newspapers abuse, always delighted to sell a history about crazy eccentric being chased by bees in some jungle, fourty years after falling in a pond at 8Yo. Journals seen politics or sports(wo)man as clients (they pay), but scientists... are products. They don't pay. Is a never-ending caricature.

3131s 6y ago

> * Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.* No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only people that have actually worked toward solutions to the current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields have already done their part. Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone not care about plants and animals. This along with similar corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made everyone go crazy.

yw3410 6y ago

Isn't your hypothesis dependent on the fact that there is a way to convince the public at all? The alternative tends to be more enticing. Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they would need to fork out more money for taxes? How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on their pension funds? And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?

anigbrowl 6y ago

The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target. It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.

7800 6y ago
That’s not the point of higher education. Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected. However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail. Should we guard against this? Probably, yes. Could it be crowdsourced? Probably, yes.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  Academy is not the same as higher education. The other part is people doing research and no teaching. These are people who then publishes their findings in journals for others to see. And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.
  - 7800 6y ago
    In the US there is no academy, to my knowledge. It’s another word for school.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Words cannot describe how much I disagree with this point of view. If we’ve let capitalism devalue non-profitable knowledge and rot society to the point that what you say is the general consensus we have truly started our decline as a civilisation and the only way from here is down.

Dudeman112 6y ago
I agree with you. Science making is bound to go wrong if it needs regular people's approval to be done. Electricity would never have been a thing if we adopted that behavior from the get go

eecc 6y ago

Even of they figured it out, if the admins decide to axe your department to sell the building and make a rich profit out of it you’re toast. That’s how the Universiteit van Amsterdam decided they had to close a whole Linguistics department: it wasn’t hip and they needed the money to pay for the new posh Economics development, for which they had plunged the institution in a debt spiral. So the socialistish - thorn in the side - folks wasting their time in endless mental masturbations about Hungarian literature lost their offices. Didn’t matter the whole faculty revolted and occupied the administration’s office, eventually the time was ripe for the police to break the protest and everything moved on as planned. In 30 years this country won’t have a clue about Eastern Europe and will have to comfort itself with its heritage of prejudice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯