> I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
Honestly, I think more PhDs and "deep thinkers" does provide a net benefit to society. I actually wish we would scale it more. But I also think we often step on our own feet while doing this. In an effort to be "efficient" we create perverse incentives and it's clear that how we have things structured that people are more willing to pursue metric maximization than maximize a metric's intent[0].
If anything, I'm of the belief that you abandon the notion of efficiency as with governments, returns on investments can be long term (much longer than for a company). In general, people pursuing high levels of academia (or adjacent domains like research labs), are naturally interested in things that are pushing the bounds of our knowledge. We have a really bad track record at per-determining what is impactful and not. If anything, we're pretty good at rejecting things that have high impact (paradigm shifts). Frankly I'm aware of little to no fields that do not result in practical utility in the long run. There's plenty of math research that was long thought to be of no practical importance but did end up greatly influencing other domains
Research is expensive, but certainly we have the money for it. And frankly, a huge chunk in that cost is the administration. Which a large portion of that comes down to the measuring and determination. I wouldn't argue to distribute funds without question, but I'd wager that the amount we spend to ensure research funds are spent effectively is greater that the funds we would lost/spend ineffectively were we to perform significantly less administration.
If anything, I'm of the belief that you abandon the notion of efficiency as with governments, returns on investments can be long term (much longer than for a company). In general, people pursuing high levels of academia (or adjacent domains like research labs), are naturally interested in things that are pushing the bounds of our knowledge. We have a really bad track record at per-determining what is impactful and not. If anything, we're pretty good at rejecting things that have high impact (paradigm shifts). Frankly I'm aware of little to no fields that do not result in practical utility in the long run. There's plenty of math research that was long thought to be of no practical importance but did end up greatly influencing other domains
Research is expensive, but certainly we have the money for it. And frankly, a huge chunk in that cost is the administration. Which a large portion of that comes down to the measuring and determination. I wouldn't argue to distribute funds without question, but I'd wager that the amount we spend to ensure research funds are spent effectively is greater that the funds we would lost/spend ineffectively were we to perform significantly less administration.
[0] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...