>>12084683>blame most of it on our over bloated academic system, and all the gatekeeping going onI'm in academia (grad student) and I agree with this. Its a lot of complicated bits that lead to the current state of science, but one that also stands out is "power creep"
Before, to do science it was the wild west. Do some experiments, get a few results, and publish. You could easily publish 3x a year, because to publish you just needed to find something interesting; "Look at these proteins and how they interact! We don't actually know how or what this means, but its neat".
You know how we got Drosophila? A lab was broke and said "you know what? Lets set up a bug trap in the corner of the lab and work on whatever we catch.". They caught flies, turned it into a model organism, and it became extremely useful.
Good luck trying to publish that these days.
Then you needed more to stand out. And it grew until now, when you need "we discovered a new protein, we discovered the entire mechanism behind it, we made a goddamn mouse model, AND we showed it reduces amyloid plaques!" and you still still might get rejected.
Oh, and NEVER say "we don't know what this result means yet". That's a death sentence.
Fuuuuuck what science has become. I want to be honest when I write papers with "This means X, I think it means Y-A-B, but I would love to figure out how Z fits in" but I was immediately told I CANNOT do that.
everything is also splitting hairs at this point. Low-hanging big fruit found. A HELL of a lot left to discover, but the reqs for becoming an academic suck balls.
Don't get me started on McMega labs and their big-dick influence they have and how they are awarded like 10x the grants of most PIs, and are less productive per dollar, but "ooo their 1971 paper was seminal in neuronal biology!" meanwhile they're still using fucking western blots to sequence genes
Fuck it all
