This quote from Bruce Charlton reminds me how many of my scientific colleagues have problems they'd really like to address, but instead spend their careers working on what they believe is fundable:pic.twitter.com/Nqqds4sTeP
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If there are such people, I must automatically avoid them like poop on the sidewalk.
I've noticed it's relatively uncommon in mathematics. I attribute this to the fact people feel less pressure to get grants. I know physicists who've spent their entire career wanting to work on quantum foundations, for instance, but who do it rarely, since it's "not fundable".
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Mathematicians feel less pressure to get grants because there are so few grants to be gotten that it's not a mark of shame not to get many! We earn our living by humbly teaching teenagers calculus; then we think about what we want. A case in point: me.
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Unfortunately it is not necessarily the same case in every institution. In some institutions, math is expected to be as productive as other lab sciences in bringing grants and when it doesn't happen (and it doesn't as John explained), we are shamed for not doing so. More than ...
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