You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

bokov comments on Is it immoral to have children? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: jkaufman 22 October 2013 12:13PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (317)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: bokov 23 October 2013 10:42:04PM 2 points [-]

The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It's a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses.

Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.