Yeah, I agree that the EMH holds true more for incremental research than for truly groundbreaking ideas. I'm not too familiar with MCMC or Bayesian inference so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing these advancements required combining of ideas that nobody expected would work? The deep learning revolution could probably have happened sooner (in the sense that all the prerequisite tools existed), but few people before 2010 expected neural networks to work so consequently the inefficiencies there remained undiscovered.
At the same time, I wouldn't denigr...
True, I guess a more precise statement is "most problems that are important and solvable are already solved". There are lots of small gaps in my research as well, like "what if we make a minor adjustment to method X" -- whatever the outcome, it's below the bar for a publication so they're generally left untouched.
To be fair, almost nobody considered a pandemic to be a serious possibility prior to 2020, so it is understandable that pandemic preparedness research was a low-priority area. There may be lots of open and answerable questions in unpopular topics, but if the topic is obscure, the payoff for making a discovery is small (in terms of reputation and recognition).
Of course, COVID-19 has proven to us that pandemic research is important, and immediately researchers poured in from everywhere to work on various facets of the problem (e.g., I even joined in an effor... (read more)