Comment by random3

> so this seems like missing the forest for the tree imo.

But is it? Again, regardless of the amount, what is the utility?

What's the end goal of academia (assuming broadly as research with humans) when the answers to the deepest questions become commodities at orders of magnitude higher speed and lower cost?

How are federal grants justified and, forgetting the current hierarchy, how is differentiation made? It's currently based on research output, once that becomes irrelevant what is it? We already have IMO, IOI as competitions and I assume just like Olympics this can be a thing, but it's very remote from research.

Take for example Rene Thom after Alexander Grothendieck overshadowed an entire field

> His technical superiority was crushing. His seminar attracted the whole of Parisian mathematics, whereas I had nothing new to offer. That made me leave the strictly mathematical world and tackle more general notions, like the theory of morphogenesis, a subject which interested me more and led me towards a very general form of 'philosophical' biology.

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Thom/

Now amplify this a few orders of magnitude.