Comment by kcexn

This is such a nuanced problem. Like any creative endeavour, the most powerful and significant research is driven by an innate joy of learning, creating, and sharing ideas with others. How far the research can be taken is then shaped by resource constraints. The more money you throw at the researchers, the more results they can get. But there seems to be a diminishing returns kind of effect as individual contributors become less able to produce results independently. The research narrative also gets distorted by who has the most money and influence, and not always for the better (as recent events in Alzheimer's research has shown).

The problem is once people's livelihoods depend on their research output rather than the research process, the whole research process becomes steadily distorted to optimise for being able to reliably produce outputs.

Anyone who has invested a great deal of time and effort into solving a hard problem knows that the 'eureka' moment is not really something that you can force. So people end up spending less time working on problems that would contribute to 'breakthroughs' and more time working on problems that will publish.