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This perpetuates the fallacy that all "scientific effort" is in some way fungible, and if you took scientists off one project, you could just put them on anothe
by danaris 4y ago
This perpetuates the fallacy that all "scientific effort" is in some way fungible, and if you took scientists off one project, you could just put them on another one without any friction or loss of effectiveness.
That makes about as much sense as suggesting you could take me, a PHP developer, off the project I'm on now, throw me onto a team developing embedded OSes for medical devices, and have me just pick right up and be fully productive on day 1.
It also presupposes that as long as there is even one important hard problem out there, we should simply ignore all the less-important problems and throw all our resources at the most important one, which is also both unrealistic and fairly unhelpful.
- indymike 4y agoNah, it's just saying there might be more important fish to fry that fixing my broken mop.
- RobertWHurst 4y agoNah, you just don't get the point. There are trillions of people millions at least of which are solving civilizations problems right now. This idea that you can simply take a person with very specific knowledge off a problem set at resign them to another is ridiculous. There wouldn't even be a benefit given that most problems are solved by experts that have dedicated their life to a problem. Adding new people from other disciplines or projects - they would spend their time most likely covering already covered ground. There are enough people in the world to work on more than the dozen problems or so you can list of in your head.
- indymike 4y agoIf we had "trillions of people" living on earth we'd have a whole new set of problems, all of which would be much more urgent and important than solving the mystery of why my hair abandoned me at age 28.