I’d argue that the burst of activity triggered by Covid was at least partly due to a “paradigm effect” rather than importance/social good. Many recognized that a huge natural experiment was underway and would paradigmatically reframe everything we thought we knew in many fields.
Conversation
I’m not actually a big fan of Kuhnian paradigm shift model, but I think it applies here to first order (I’m more in the Feyerabend methodological anarchy camp).
Basically good researchers don’t work on what’s “important” but on what they have a promising attack for.
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Unless you define “important” the way Hamming did. The problem with all programmatic top-down efforts to “start a new field” is that they tend to go after important in the wrong outsider sense flagged by Hamming here. cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAnd
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It’s not actually possible to drive planned roadmaps at any useful level of detail below say “go to the moon” and allocating Apollo level budgets. Below that, you gotta pour fuel on emerging paradigm sparks, not force “research time travel” down people’s throats with money/funds.
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This is one reason I’m a skeptic of Progress Studies type thinking. Appeals to economists and billionaires but rests on an illusion of methodological legibility and governability that the history of science casts serious doubt on.
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surely a serious inquiry into "what drives progress in science/technology" can discover that the answer is "stuff you can't replicate on purpose"? I think at least some of the people working on Progress Studies are honest enough to report "null" results like that.
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It’s a bit besides the point whether they do. Like reporting failure looking for ghosts. They’re free to study whatever but I personally invest attention (since I can’t invest money) on things with a “have an attack” premise.
Eg. SpaceX $10/kg to LEO is a paradigm bet.
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ah. without reason to believe you have a lead on something good, doing a broad search is kinda depressing and unmotivating.
I do share that attitude...but it's a wonder anyone else who feels that way can stomach social science!!
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They tend to be sufficiently strongly motivated by values
Also reward curve is less fat tailed. They are what’s called “low paradigm” fields.

