This is a marketing piece masquerading as advocacy. What's the difference? An advocate won't personally profit from the course of action they are recommending. A marketer will. I say this because this man's conclusion is, basically, "The coral reefs are disappearing. Fund my research more."
This does, of course, put research scientists into a bit of a bind. Presumably, since they are the ones looking at these systems in detail, they are the "early warning system" for any catastrophic change. When they see catastrophe, what should a research scientist do? Write an op-ed piece in the Times asking for more research funding? I don't think so.
I think the correct move is to complete the fucking research. "Completion" means to come up with some really solid conclusions, and if the system is on course to do something nasty, to have a list of actionable steps to change it. Then, you advocate that list of actionable steps, citing your research as the basis for it. Presumably, you will NOT personally profit from those steps (except, perhaps, as a consultant).
Now, I can hear the objectivist/egoist hacker contingent's hackles raise - why shouldn't a research scientist profit from their research? Was not that their blood and tears and insight? Actually, I think that should be open for them - but they should call it marketing, not advocacy, and it should be clearly a matter of personal enrichment. The thing that an objectivist should focus on is the hypocrisy of a "call to action" masquerading as altruistic concern over the environment, when it is really a quite selfish concern for securing one's own funding source. It's not that I'm against securing one's own funding source, but to do it under the guise of advocacy is flat out wrong.
So people should never be allowed to advocate societal changes in which they have a personal interest?
I think this is unnecessarily rigid. All we really need is full disclosure of the nature of the personal interest, which appears in this case to have been provided.
I don't know how the author is supposed to complete this research, or even continue it, without funding. To bar him from advocating for such funding risks the loss of important advocacy from those who are in the best position to know what is going on.
I guess you have half a point in that there is some risk of research scientists just collecting a salary and never producing much of value, even though they claim loudly that their research is important; such things have happened. But I think it's a chance we have to take. Anyway, the best protection against it is not to tell people like the OP to shut up, but to look closely at their work and decide on our own how valuable we think it is.
I feel you're a bit off base, and are just being negative. Roger Bradbury may be trying to get his research funded but he's also trying to make a difference. You're just trying to out him as some kind of greedy scientist. He's right, we're loosing our reefs. He's also trying to research possible ways to keep a resemblance of what they once were around for future enjoyment. There is nothing wrong with that, and quite frankly it reads at worst like a kickstarter page for science.
Fine, then make a difference. "Fund research more to study the problem more" is NOT a solution. Give me solutions. Don't say "Big hairy problem, no solutions, but fund me to keep looking at it."
If more people had my attitude then maybe we'd not only get to see the pile of shit (the disappearing reef problem) but also some shovels (real ways we can help fix the problem). I'm not interested in getting all into the details of the pile of shit, I just want a shovel, so give me one.
Edit: actually a kickstarter page for science is a great idea. Even better would be a kickstarter page for making chemicals that can be dropped into the ocean to safeguard reefs. Or a kickstarter page for lobbying government to tighten regulations on run-off or global warming. Or a kickstarter page for stimulating reef growth with low-level electric impulses (which is a real thing). What about a solar powered bouy that stimulates reef growth?
There's a ton of stuff to do other than "study it more".
Solutions will be hard - stop emitting CO2 and take better care of the oceans, apparently we get a big do not want on this, or additional measures such as climate engineering which will lead to somewhat unpredictable results because the system is not fully understood and may have unequal results on different regions of the world, creating people who profit and people who get disadvantages.
Both ways are not something scientists can just decree, because it affects everyone, and you run into international relations and cultural differences very soon.
If you want, have a look at some ideas for solutions that actually were published in scientific literature (slides from a lecture):
http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/lehr...
And before you say it doesn't talk about the ocean - CO2 levels and ocean acidicity are linked very directly.
edit: Page 26 in the first file is a long set of reasons why climate engineering might be a bad idea.
How do you propose we know what actions to take without first studying the problem? If your car breaks down, you don't immediately start disassembling the car, you troubleshoot (study the problem, if you will), then apply a reasonable solution.
How do you propose to solve it then? The point of the further study is to work out what solutions are going to be the most effective. Saying "give me solutions" will likely result in a second rate solution that is optimal for neither humans nor the reef.
I propose to solve the problem by putting pressure on researchers. Researchers are all about looking at things, and they get all excited about something, but their only response is to look more at those things. It's time to motivate researchers to encourage behavior other than looking more at stuff when you see a problem.
If you can't even begin to identify possible corrective actions, then you have no basis in which to claim there is a possible problem in the first place. Whatever the problem is, poverty, health, environmental destruction - if the problem cannot be addressed than why even bring it up?
Cancer is a good example. It's a problem, it doesn't have a good solution, but we talk about it anyway. Does this explode my theory? No. Because there is no cancer research that is trying to prove that cancer is a problem. We already know that. The only cancer research that goes on is the kind designed to stop cancer. Needless to say, I would not support any research into how cancer is bad, but would support research into how to stop cancer.
In the same way, I would not support research into looking further into how coral reef destruction is real and it's bad, but I would support research into how to slow, stop, and reverse coral reef destruction (without causing lots of other problems, of course).
>>if the problem cannot be addressed than why even bring it up?
Because an engineer (not a research scientist) somewhere, given the right model, and access to the right information, has a basis on which to start working on a solution.
>>Downvote me, I don't care.
You have a very serious misunderstanding about the scientific process and its interaction with other disciplines it seems.
Or to put it more bluntly.
Cancer is a punishment from God, not a "problem", no investigation warranted, case closed. So let's all get back to devising scientific methods for determining who's a witch, a real problem that can at least be addressed directly and is beneficial to society.
> The only cancer research that goes on is the kind designed > to stop cancer.
That's ludicrous. If solutions were obvious then we would only need engineering. The problem is most of the time "you can't get there from here" - there are still huge swaths of poorly understood territory in fundamental cancer biology. For example how are the natural cell death mechanisms circumvented; how do some cancers hijack the transcription mechanism to promote certain cell growth; how do cancers promote growth of new blood vessels to support their expansion. Of course the goal of the research is to stop cancer, and some of these paths will help, but only some research is directly drug- or treatment-related because there are still too many things we don't know to be able to design effective, targeted treatment
Without exploring/understanding a problem space, how would you propose the formation of solutions occur?
Moreover, you're ignoring that to get corrective action against entrenched financial/economic incentives requires overwhelming proof of a problem and public sympathy.
> If you can't even begin to identify possible corrective actions, then you have no basis in which to claim there is a possible problem in the first place.
Hey guys the house is on fire! Oh wait! I don't see any water around here .. or any other fire retardant materials .. I guess the house isn't on fire after all.
> Downvote me, I don't care.
Well, you should. You're being downvoted for very good reasons. Learn from it, or continue being an ineffective advocate of a flawed theory, the choice is yours.
OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend more money to model the collision! Will insects survive or just single-celled life? Let's spend millions on computer simulations of the collision itself, answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
vs
OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend some money developing a plan to mitigate the risk - move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive, or at least launch some of our most precious info into space (or on the moon) so that a future alien civilization will at least know we existed.
And once again, by your proposed model to fund science. How are we even going to know there's a comet hurling towards earth ?
Gazing out there for neat stuff in the cosmos isn't even a problem in the first place, so it's completely useless by your metric.
>>move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive"
Those are screenwriting scenarios
>>answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.
The answers to those questions have allowed governments to, in as far as is realistically possible, have scenarios and structures in place, for actual world-wide calamity events.
>>Try reading.
You make some highly unorthodox points. There's nothing wrong with that in itself; in fact, it's welcomed.
But when people respond to those points and indicate they have no merit (like how research scientists are in it for their own enrichment), being rude and dismissive is not going to convince anyone you're right; quite the contrary.
Actually we can change orbit of comets/asteroids if we know few years ahead of time that they will impact with Earth - by bombarding object with few hundreds kilograms of "metal spheres" we cause small change in energy of object, causing it to deviate from its orbit quite a bit in the long run.
OMG there's comet hurtling toward Earth. We didn't study the problem enough so now the debris from our nukes is going to take out ten land-locked cities, instead of just coastal cities from the tsunami.
The frustration you're feeling is a side-effect of reality. Complex problems are complex.
They don't. Salaries are typically dictated by the funding agency or the university. Research funding often goes toward purchasing equipment and materials, but the bulk of it goes toward paying graduate student stipends and postdoc and technician salaries.
Typically, the only way a researcher can get "rich" off of their research is if they write a book or go on a speaking tour.
Last I checked (about 3 years ago), the median salary for a full professor in the US was $70k/yr. Obviously, there are regional and institutional differences, but I highly doubt that any professor at Harvard is making in excess of $300k.
Mind you, also, that the average age that one reaches "full professor" is something like 45 or 50. If you want to go down that track, you're looking at a salary in the range of $23k until your mid-to-late 20s as a grad student, followed by a salary of no more than $45k as a post-doc until sometime in your mid 30s. If you are lucky enough to snag a tenure track position by your mid 30s, then you'll probably make around $50k for the next 7 years, at which point you might get a tenured position (which can eventually, through promotions, lead to "full professor"), or you might be sent packing at age 45 with essentially no future on your chosen career path. This is not a hypothetical. I watched this very thing happen to two Ph.D. advisors.
So, no...despite what you might have been told, no one chooses a research career to get rich. (Consequently, I left academia to pursue software engineering and easily increased my expected lifetime earnings by at least 4x.)
These numbers are too conservative. The median salary numbers are biased downward by professors in nontechnical fields. Many professors at Harvard, especially in medicine and law, make more than $300K, but most are probably $100-200K. You can get salary numbers for the UC system here.[1]
On the other hand, you are right that the chances of getting through are very slim, maybe 1 in 20 of those dedicated to try. Professional athletics is a safer career move. :)
That's actually a very cool, very useful tool. Thanks!
And yes...for the top-level number I was guestimating. Still, if the top paid professors are in Law and Medicine, consider that these areas are the top paying non-academic professions. In other words, those professors are still taking a major hit.
This does, of course, put research scientists into a bit of a bind. Presumably, since they are the ones looking at these systems in detail, they are the "early warning system" for any catastrophic change. When they see catastrophe, what should a research scientist do? Write an op-ed piece in the Times asking for more research funding? I don't think so.
I think the correct move is to complete the fucking research. "Completion" means to come up with some really solid conclusions, and if the system is on course to do something nasty, to have a list of actionable steps to change it. Then, you advocate that list of actionable steps, citing your research as the basis for it. Presumably, you will NOT personally profit from those steps (except, perhaps, as a consultant).
Now, I can hear the objectivist/egoist hacker contingent's hackles raise - why shouldn't a research scientist profit from their research? Was not that their blood and tears and insight? Actually, I think that should be open for them - but they should call it marketing, not advocacy, and it should be clearly a matter of personal enrichment. The thing that an objectivist should focus on is the hypocrisy of a "call to action" masquerading as altruistic concern over the environment, when it is really a quite selfish concern for securing one's own funding source. It's not that I'm against securing one's own funding source, but to do it under the guise of advocacy is flat out wrong.