Comment by zkmon 7 hours ago
>> Scientists are driven by curiosity
Ok, then why do they get affected by funding? The truth is, today there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding. The era for curiosity-driven science is was over a long time ago.
The direction of research or science is all driven by funding.
Lets say the scientist takes $0 home (which is ridiculous btw). even then you would need the almighty "funding" to setup a lab, recruit participants, etc.
Anybody doing science at a University is definitely doing it at a significant discount to their salary (phds are paid ~$50K at the high end) at a private company.
I believe that most scientists start out being driven by curiosity. Just like most politicians start out being driven by ideology.
Unfortunately, we've created a system that wears them down to being driven largely by self-preservation.
Many people eager to better the world come of age every second. It's just that once they've amassed enough power to make a dent, most of them have been worn down.
Here we have someone who clearly practices little real science, as evident by the ease with which they speak absolute statements that apply extremely broadly.
I'm sure you are a Scientist. I worked as a Scientist (not a data scientist etc), worked on pure science projects that ran under grants from government, spoke at international conferences presenting the findings etc. Believe me. Every single move in this "science" work was guided by funding. Not just my projects, but all of them.
Yes, I agree there is a funding requirement for academic science. Hell, even attending a conference you've been accepted to is prohibitively expensive if out of your own pocket.
But your original statement was far too broad:
> there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding.
There are absolutely members from every one of those subsets driven by curiousity.
(In my own life, I have reached out to labs in completely different fields than my own to help publish out of nothing more than pure curiosity.)
So nobody in your department ever ran out of stipend or research funding?
Nope. The grants were always sort of 5-year projects. They just keep on going. We were employees, doing the work we were asked to do, not doing something we were curious about. For example, do this experiment, get field measurements, correlate them to some factors and publish a report. Ensure it takes 5 years and nothing less.
All I have to say is that it was not uncommon for people to run out of funding at my research university, nor others I was at.
Everything in the world is driven by money. There was never such a thing as curiosity driven science.
What pays for your leisure time so you can be alive and not starve? Money. Nobody on the face of the earth can just be curious and do science and not starve.
if scientists are so curious, why do they have to eat??? checkmate atheists
Less snarky: getting funding and making a living in academia, which is the most accessible way to be a scientist, has been cutthroat since long before this administration. If it were more accessible, or if staying alive weren't so damn expensive, I think we'd see more curiosity-driven science being performed.
Also, I don't believe one negates the other. As an engineer, my work satisfies my curiosity / desire to build, and I would do it for $50k, but I'm not gonna take a pay cut to prove how curious I am.