But the stupid people asking stupid questions are also the poor dudes with barely a future for their children giving a bit of what they earn so you can focus.
I mean, people hate rich banking elites so far removed from society providing obscure services to each others. What do you think they think of intellectual elites complaining of stupid questions by the people who paid them ?
You want funding you explain why. You don't want to explain why, accept nobody cares. It's because there's no absolute good in nature, nothing an expert can do to increase global knowledge is as necessary as the same guy growing lemons if society desires lemons more than knowledge. Make them desire knowledge more than lemon, THAT is part of the job.
I'm not sure that comparing the derivative products of very rich people to a fundemantal understanding of the Earth we live on is a fair comparison.
Suggesting we must sell everything feels short-sighted. Knowledge of the Earth benefits everyone in the long run. We should collectively have the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this.
For example [0] there are cases where a semingly-obscure wasp, describe by a seemingly obscure person, for an audience of seemingly a handful of people, turns out to be critical to the lives and livelihoods of many, many people. The knowledge that lead to this discovery came from the passion of the taxonomists who dedicate their lives to this gathering of foundational knowledge, not from those who best knew how to sell themselves as useful.
This is one of the reasons I support basic income. It will be an unshackling for the intellectually curious. They may be small in numbers but they’re the ones who move everyone forward.
You just sold it to me, though. Before, I thought only lemons mattered.
See my point ? You have to tell your taxpayers why you spend their taxes, they can't guess it. And if they know nothing abt what you do with it, they'll just vote for the next magical unicorn telling them they're actually stolen by a conspiracy of elitist universities.
Expecting people to be clever just because they exist is optimistic at best :)
I don't expect the average person to be fully appreciative of every Science! thing that I find interesting. But I do think that an important goal of education and of a polity is to communicate and inculcate the value of intellectual inquiry for the common good.
That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.
We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.
We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.
Maybe we should have people collectively decide on who they want to represent them and then those representatives could allocate funding depending on what societies broader strategic goals are.
The reason for the mocking tone of the above is that we have always solved this problem centuries ago yet somehow now everyone has decided they want to live in a crypto-neo-feudalist society that cares only for profit and stock price and screw everything else. Government will never work if we do everything we can to sabotage it at every corner. Enough is enough. We either fix this now or we resign ourselves to a dark future.
I mean, people hate rich banking elites so far removed from society providing obscure services to each others. What do you think they think of intellectual elites complaining of stupid questions by the people who paid them ?
You want funding you explain why. You don't want to explain why, accept nobody cares. It's because there's no absolute good in nature, nothing an expert can do to increase global knowledge is as necessary as the same guy growing lemons if society desires lemons more than knowledge. Make them desire knowledge more than lemon, THAT is part of the job.