Readit NewsLike what's even the alternative? We want a Steve Jobs of science? That's really what we are going for?
Scientific progress is largely driven by the “Steve Jobs” of sciences.
Only a tiny fraction of papers remain relevant. So that means the quality of the average paper doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the best paper.
The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.
There is a lot of work in research that fits the permanent worker better than the fresh 22 year old. But having that fresh talent is really beneficial to science.
This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.
But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things.
I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this. Pål Jonson is an important guy, who has a job to do. That job is to keep Sweden safe, and, as Sweden is now part of NATO, by extension to keep NATO safe as well. If he does his job well, then Sweden and NATO together might be able to deter aggression by Russia. If taking time to read books means he has less time to do his job well, then he should not read books.
But if you replace Pål Jonson with somebody else, who are we to say that their job is less important? And if we take a kid, the way the kid understands their jobs is that they need to get ready for life,for their actual, paid, job when the time will come. And if in doing that, they are more efficient by using ChatGPT, then why should they read entire books?
[1] https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/getting-faster-stronger-re...
I bet important people don’t even have time to sit and watch a full movie.
On a separate note, I always saw Chet baker and Gerry mulligan as "real" musicians but was taught early on that Brubeck was "staid" and boring. After judging it myself I guess you could say his soloing was a little underwhelming but he was incredibly creative in a way that a lot of the "serious" musicians weren't. Jazz people can be such losers sometimes
So the world of mathematics is really the only world model we need. If we can build a self-supervised entity for that world, we can also deal with the real world.
Now, you may have an argument by saying that the "real" world is simpler and more constrained than the mathematical world, and therefore if we focus on what we can do in the real world, we might make progress quicker. That argument I might buy.
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
Large pharma makes strategic bets on several drugs, some initiated in house, others acquired, but they all just go through further optimization and testing before it is approved.
Huge RnD is required even if drug is “simply acquired”