I think there is another aspect that makes determining scientific value difficult.
In the hard sciences there are a lot of esoteric sub-disciplines that do rigorous work that seems to be of little consequence. I would suggest that one of the costs of maintaining a technological society is maintaining practitioners in many of these sub-disciplines just to keep the thread of knowledge alive.
If it was all left to the private sector, such researchers would be out of a job as soon as they were not longer necessary to the tasks at hand.
So many times in my own research have I needed a particular bit of information, and I search the literature and I find that someone did collect the data 30 years ago, presented in a paper with 5 citations. It would not be tractable for me to collect that data myself.
The problems with current management of scientific productivity is that the management ideas employed are good for running a production line cranking out a B-24 Liberator per hour, which is not really the same thing.
> In the hard sciences there are a lot of esoteric sub-disciplines that do rigorous work that seems to be of little consequence.
I think people systematically under-estimate the value of all those small seemingly-inconsequential tweaks, variations, and improvements. We all prefer simpler narratives that "person X invented Y for the very first time in year Z and that was good."
Many times when you break down a world-changing invention or innovation, it's actually an older idea that is finally possible due to thousands of incremental improvements being turned to the combined use.
Even that understates the importance of "trivial" research. Sometimes research projects don't work out - if you have a success rate of 100%, you're not doing research. Moreover, the minor research projects are your way of practicing, getting to know the literature, and getting to know what not to do (the Edison quote applies here) when you're doing research. If all of your research is of the trivial variety, you will not be doing research for long, because you won't be getting grants and you won't have a tenure track position at a school that gives you time for research.
In the hard sciences there are a lot of esoteric sub-disciplines that do rigorous work that seems to be of little consequence. I would suggest that one of the costs of maintaining a technological society is maintaining practitioners in many of these sub-disciplines just to keep the thread of knowledge alive.
If it was all left to the private sector, such researchers would be out of a job as soon as they were not longer necessary to the tasks at hand.
So many times in my own research have I needed a particular bit of information, and I search the literature and I find that someone did collect the data 30 years ago, presented in a paper with 5 citations. It would not be tractable for me to collect that data myself.
The problems with current management of scientific productivity is that the management ideas employed are good for running a production line cranking out a B-24 Liberator per hour, which is not really the same thing.