Comment by Chance-Device

Haha. That’s almost verbatim what the guy said. Here, let me grab that for you:

> things that I do and that my colleagues do, this kind of like curiosity-driven, you know, applied math, computational physics type research has always been justified by, I would argue, intentionally blurring the line between what I would call, you know, science as product versus science as process

> science as product is very kind of clear-cut. It’s, you know, things like, you know, cure cancer, solve nuclear fusion, generate, you know, clean energy.

> And then there’s science as process, which is kind of the curiosity-driven stuff about, you know, like, “I want to understand protein folding,” or, “I want to understand, you know, turbulence,” or, “I want to understand quantum gravity,” or something. And broadly speaking, we have tended to justify the latter by kind of laundering it through the former

And the examples he gives are actually the more defensible ones, he talks about a friend of his working on some abstract algebra under the false guise of cryptography research later.

And it’s not just him saying it, this is simply true. He should be lauded for admitting it publicly, this is the only way any progress is made. At least, it used to be. Now it’ll be AI instead.