There is def an element of this. Replicability, perverse incentives, bad scientific cultures in specific fields, and all sorts of problems mean a lot of bad or

There is def an element of this. Replicability, perverse incentives, bad scientific cultures in specific fields, and all sorts of problems mean a lot of bad or pointless research is done. It is very hard to say with basic research, what is pointless. For instance, there is little application for bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So hard to value. But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only becomes valuable once we can do that.