Science Is Getting Harder

For a few decades, the prevailing school of thought in public administration has focused on justifications. You must always justify how the public will benefit from the proposed use of money. Then you must report that you used the money for justified reasons. The administrators will also audit you to ensure that you didn't use the money for frivolous purposes.

As a consequence, you can't get funding for studying something you find interesting. Instead, you must always justify how your research will benefit the public. If you manage to get funding, you must spend a lot of time reporting how you used that money and what it did enable you to do. Those reporting requirements are also one of the major reasons for the administrative bloat in the academia.

The general public does not want to fund BS research, and science stagnates largely as an unintended consequence of that.

1) On number of papers published, citation value, etc. There may be an inflation in the numbers of PhD's granted for little more than serving as a PI's lab tech for a few years. That requires a few publications. Often the publication count is inflated by splitting a paper that would be more coherent as a single publication into several publications to fluff a CV. Such papers may not get many citations. This is about politics and careers, not about the quality of science being done.

2) Universities are in the market trying to patent discoveries and license them to big corporations. This is very bad for basic scientific discovery in many fields, as funding is directed away from those fields. Basic science underlies later applied science applications. Shutting off basic research is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, but the administrators want those sweet patent license payments more than anything else.

3) People with the potential to do difficult science and math, but who happen to come from a background where they can't afford college without large loans, are much less likely to go into academic research than in prior eras in the USA when college was less expensive. Many would like to do research but the economics of current education systems are incompatible with that goal.

4) Some areas of research are simply not being funded anymore due to pressure from entrenched interests in areas like energy, pharmaceuticals, etc. Renewable energy research is a threat to fossil fuel interests. One-shot cures for diseases like HIV/AIDS are a threat to the profits of pharmaceutical companies selling lifetime maintenance programs. Research into environmental pollution is a threat to a wide variety of interests, as is research into declining biodiversity.

The corporatization and financialization of literally everything is really out of control, and these are the side effects.

Injecting a ton of money creates perverse incentives and attracts people who are not interested pursuing something out of curiosity and interest, but for the money.

I think it probably creates a hostile environment for people who are there out of pure interest, because if there is a way to earn more money/status/power/whatever by doing something other than good work people will do it. So you effectively get punished for doing what you're supposed to instead of playing the game.

I think the "professional money extractor" explanation here is an apt description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253.

I am a PI.

What I spent my day doing was dealing with managerial tasks, fiddly stuff for funding applications, etc.

I got to actually code for a whole day last week, and it was marvelous. It was also only possible because it was an all-hands-on-deck, everything else can wait situation.

If it works well, you get to push clinical science forward.

Then about half the time, "This seems like a boring classification problem" turns out to be way harder than expected.