Wow…I’ve avoided most of her non-physics videos for a couple of years because they put off a “I’m a physicist so I’m an expert in everything else” vibe, and while I’ve been somewhat on board with some elements of her rants against searching for mathematical ‘beauty’ over evidence (and against building a next generation hadron collider without having some more firm theory than just straining for dark matter gnats), she’s really gone off the rails and that video is the absolute nadir. The idea that academic research is somehow “centrally planned” is so obviously wrong I’m not sure where to even begin with that. Except for applied research into weapon systems, I can’t think of any research—certainly not in basic scientific research—that is in anyway planned and organized in any central fashion (sometimes to the detriment of researchers doing completely redundant work).
Academic has a lot of problems but it is not in how basic research is conducted. Applying a thesis of absolute efficiency to research is completely antithetical to the openness and creative experimentation required for real innovations. Her list of “people who think about the long term progress of human civilization” are a litany of billionaire exploiters who view actual humans as “work units” or at best consumers to be milked. And her assertion that if “we hadn’t left nuclear fusion research to academic in the 1960s the world would be a completely different place today’, as if the problems of achieving controlled nuclear fusion are just motivational.
I quit the video after her third point, which was some confused claim that people would pay for abstract research in physics because ‘people’ are curious. I guess we should just be Kickstarting research projects, I guess? I couldn’t make heads or tails of how she thinks this should work, but her assertion that private investors are much more scrupulous about investing in worthwhile research is pretty risible given examples like Theranos (and there is plenty more where that came from). She seemed to have totally bought into the SiVal, corpro-libertarian mindset that money fosters innovation rather than the other way around. It would be great if big tech companies were actually sponsoring applied research like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but even when they are the tendency now is to retain all knowledge as proprietary and publish only superficial pr obvious details, and nobody is going to spend the billions of dollars into astronomy, cosmology, deep core geophysics, et cetera with no expectation of a return on investment regardless how much it enriches the corpus of human knowledge.
Stranger