I was under the impression that you still need a heirarchy insofar that a more educated person can make more sound hypothesis. In medicine, for example, there are machines that analyze 1000s of chemicals to see if they have any therapeutic merit in cell cultures. You can use AI to check a million molecular interactions. In this sense, there's no reason to let thousands of researchers who have a vague idea of what might work try to come up with the base of a therapy when we have technology to do it better. You might also put a lot of hours into a project that has already been done or a hypothesis that is incongruent with all the relevant data.
I think the biggest difference (besides a better workplace which I am underqualified to discuss) is that you would receive more funding for grants that would have been ignored if all your funding goes to insurance companies and imperial war. There was no interest in a coronavirus vaccine after SARS-COV 1. I have a textbook that makes specific mention that the outbreak could be much worse if it were to ever be discovered that the virus was more infectious (R >= 2). Low and behold, this shit happened. How would you get funding to figure out the vaccine? It's difficult to manipulate a +-strand RNA virus genome. It's expensive to push it through clinical trials. Who gives a fuck? Maybe with more funding, it would have been easier to propose a vaccine for coronaviruses. I remember wanting to find a way to break open the knot on flavivirus RNA and really advance how we deal with disease like west Nile. My teacher, who was a veteran of the industry, lamented about how hard it would be to get funding for research into unsexy, non-widespread viruses.
I was under the impression that you still need a heirarchy insofar that a more educated person can make more sound hypothesis. In medicine, for example, there are machines that analyze 1000s of chemicals to see if they have any therapeutic merit in cell cultures. You can use AI to check a million molecular interactions. In this sense, there's no reason to let thousands of researchers who have a vague idea of what might work try to come up with the base of a therapy when we have technology to do it better. You might also put a lot of hours into a project that has already been done or a hypothesis that is incongruent with all the relevant data.
I think the biggest difference (besides a better workplace which I am underqualified to discuss) is that you would receive more funding for grants that would have been ignored if all your funding goes to insurance companies and imperial war. There was no interest in a coronavirus vaccine after SARS-COV 1. I have a textbook that makes specific mention that the outbreak could be much worse if it were to ever be discovered that the virus was more infectious (R >= 2). Low and behold, this shit happened. How would you get funding to figure out the vaccine? It's difficult to manipulate a +-strand RNA virus genome. It's expensive to push it through clinical trials. Who gives a fuck? Maybe with more funding, it would have been easier to propose a vaccine for coronaviruses. I remember wanting to find a way to break open the knot on flavivirus RNA and really advance how we deal with disease like west Nile. My teacher, who was a veteran of the industry, lamented about how hard it would be to get funding for research into unsexy, non-widespread viruses.