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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

To gain a deep understanding of a mature science you have to invest thousands of hours in diligent study. At the end of it all you have a corpus of knowledge that's utterly useless to outsiders, a group which includes nearly every single person in the world. Unless you translated your erudition into lots and lots of money/prestige, or lots and lots of experiences that are story-friendly, most people will think, rightly or wrongly, that you made a stupid investment.

Dilettantes are not jealous of specialists. That's wishful thinking.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Specialization is a necessity. If you are to make any significant improvement, you have to spend at least a few years studing in a particular subfield, therefore repeatedly changing subfields and fields is not an efficient use of your time.

While it is true that some projects may be trivial or faddish, or even some research fields may be pathological (e.g. cold fusion, maybe string theory or even hot fusion), academia overall (or at least science and technology departments) do generate significant innovation that would not happen otherwise.

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