We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is failure, when some achievement comes despite its ham-fisted efforts. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab. Should it be noticed at all, more billions will be spent appropriating the credit, or more likely, suppressing it for giving “false hope.” The regulators will be called in, as the police are to a crime scene.
For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.
David Warren, “That’s funny”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-08.
June 23, 2020
QotD: Scientific discoveries despite “research” and “planning”
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