When your future began to depend on what you were published in, and those publishers had to compete with corporate interests. Capitalism poisons nearly everything it touches, but especially academia.
Isn’t that the same thing? Why work as a scientist when you don’t have interesting research to do? And if you do, then getting funding should be possible. I know that it can get quite tricky and exhausting but what exactly do those people expect? The whole job of scientists is to come up with worthwhile questions and to find answers.
The problem the tweet is pointing out is that research scientists are mostly concerned about getting and keeping funding since their jobs and the jobs of those working for them depend on it. Thus they'll target research questions that are deemed sexy by those in control of the funds. This can lead to a few areas being over-researched and other worthy areas of inquiry being underfunded. Plus that over-researched work can be of questionable quality and importance since a lot of less-good scientists get funded due to the overabundance of funds.
No, the number of grants you get determines whether you get tenure / raises. So the government tells everyone what research ideas they will fund and everyone has to do as many of those as possible.
"When did authors lose sight of the fact that books should be written about story ideas they already have, instead of trying to think up stories to write about."
Why would we want people to stop coming up with ideas that would be beneficial enough to be funded?
Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants. If this was even a problem, which it isn't, the root cause is capitalism.
People will always optimize their methods to maximize resource gain. It's a fact of life since the dawn of life. Even animals do this.
I've seen cancer researchers lie to people with dead loved ones to get funding. I've seen physicists do bogus experiments that yield nothing with a nice dark matter story just to get funding... it's become marketing at this stage.
This is my problem with climate change research. Those who attempt to oppose the "narrative" never get funding. How are we supposed to claim science is unbiased when bias is what's making the results come out?
I'm gonna go with "immediately after the fall of the soviet union" when the feds pulled the plug on all funding for higher education in lieu of doing donuts in the parking lot and invading Iraq over and over again