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Andrew Perfors (andyperfors@aus.social)'s status on Saturday, 07-Jan-2023 17:03:31 JST Andrew Perfors

How to slow down scientific progress
"Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—also wrote fiction. His book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, contains a story “The Mark Gable Foundation,” dated 1948."
You can see the full thing at this link, but I've also taken a screenshot of an excerpt. ? ? ?
https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science
In conversation Saturday, 07-Jan-2023 17:03:31 JST from aus.social permalink
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1. “It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”
  https://mediacdn.aus.social/media_attachments/files/109/645/353/481/969/295/original/72df34479c100ce6.png
2. Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: live.staticflickr.com
  
  How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard
  
  from @jasoncrawford
  
  “Science would become something like a parlor game. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants”

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