To me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science going forward, you need enough people who understand the field to generate a sufficient probability of anyone putting together the pieces of the next major discovery. That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.
Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.
In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks.
Why do we keep making them? Because you need people who, on day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can't spend months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people making tanks for "no reason".
This is also why US shipbuilding is a dumpster fire: lack of a consistent order book for warships means they're more expensive to produce and the process is chaotic.
It's one of the great reasons to cultivate a collection of close allies who you support: it keeps your production lines warm and your workforce active and developing.
I hadn’t considered this - it must be a nightmare to try and find experienced aircraft carrier engineers. We have like 14 of em, right? Probably like 70% the same crew on each one, but I don’t remember the last time we built one. I wonder if the expertise is still there, and maybe I’m just missing these stories.
The last time we built aircraft carriers in the US? Has there ever been a one year period when we haven't been building aircraft carriers (or ships which other nations would consider carriers)?
Certainly there are many we're currently building and many we will build after that. Biggest in the world kind of stuff.
I wish it was that logical, but the tanks aren't going to make sense in future wars either. They're just too heavy. They previously had to re-enforce bridges in Europe so that the tanks could act as a defense if Russia invaded.
We sold some of them to Australia, and they struggled to get them off of the docks as the trains and bridges couldn't handle the weight.
Unsurprisingly, the military has asked for lighter tanks.
Eh, until we have drone-bots that can perform at nearly a human level, we'll still need to have a physical presence, and there's roughly nothing as dangerous or safe (for the users) as a brand-new tank. They're heavy because of the shielding - if it weren't necessary, they'd just be lighter.
As it is, we do also have lighter military vehicles - basically retrofitted F250/350s with a shitload of steel bolted on. They're great in many instances, but sometimes a tank is just what you want.
How will a tank that you can't get to the battlefield help? That truly is not a joke or exaggeration. They are above the weight limit of many bridges, without any other vehicles on the bridge. They are just that heavy.
C5s can also transport them easily. I... don't know if C17s can, but I assume not? Maybe though. If so, they're not a problem at all, if you really want 'em.
But also remember tanks are tanks - they're meant to drive over all kinds of nonsense. It might be something of a technical roadblock if there's an impassable ravine, but there are still many, many instances where they'll be useful.
IMO we'll see them fall out of favor heavily if we start doing more mountainous island warfare.
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, and there are a number of options:
1. Shore up/reinforce the bridge you want to cross with temporary structures
2. Just fill the damn terrain if it's a narrow ravine
3. Build a quick ferry
4. There are apparently literal armored vehicle-launched bridges (AVLBs)
During the cold war, American taxpayers ended up paying for bridges to be rebuilt in Europe so that theheavy tanks could defend against a Russian invasion. Now that the border is further East, they're busy rebuilding more bridges (not US paid this time): https://united24media.com/latest-news/maybe-this-europe-to-r...
They do not believe the tanks will be able to get there in time without doing that.
But that only gets you mobility in allied nations willing to spend billions on infrastructure.
You may have responded before seeing the rest of my comment edit - there are many methods for crossing some bridged area.
Either way, we can always just... scout a route ahead of time which doesn't take us straight to a dead-end. We probably already do this with satellites in a matter of minutes or hours nowadays.
It's... obviously better to just trust the roads are good to go, but you can never trust that in enemy territory. Even if the bridge is "sufficiently strong", you don't know if it was booby-trapped by the enemy.
Didn't you answer your question in the above sentence? They are used to protect US foreign interests by sending them to allies. It's not because people will somehow forget how to make them. It's based off of an assembly line and blueprints. I don't see how this would be forgotten, any more than it would be possible for society to forget how to build a CRT TV just because they are not used anymore.
I wonder how much we've learned from the Saturn V project where the majority of the crucial knowledge (including for the machines that build the parts for the machines that build the parts) was undocumented. Hopefully a lot but maybe we just forward evolve instead.
I'm always impressed that America's moribund manufacturing industry nonetheless makes prodigious amounts of expensive vehicles. It feels like one year I was hearing about the terrible failure that the F-35 was and the next year I looked up and we've got more than a thousand of them - enough to dwarf any other conventional air force.
The whining wasn't completely nonsense: the JSF / F-35 program is a prime example of procurement malpractice where the government set flawed initial requirements which made the final product later, more expensive, and less capable than it should have been. Congress and the Department of Defense repeated the same errors from the debacle of the TFX / F-111 program and then compounded the problem with additional unforced errors like trying to do concurrent testing and production.
But in the end the F-35 really does work pretty well by all credible accounts. It could have been a lot worse.
You don't see how those skills would be forgotten because you're ignorant of the basics of manufacturing and have probably never worked in that industry. A working production line is kind of like a living organism: you can't just shut it down and then start it up again later expecting everything to still work. Much of the key information exists only as tacit knowledge that can't really be written down, and the actual product never exactly matches the blueprints.
There is also the supply chain to consider. Many of the parts coming from suppliers are custom or on a limited lifecycle so when orders stop the supply chain disintegrates and can't be quickly reconstituted regardless of how much money you spend.
> Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.
Especially if the work is classified.
The manufacture of FOGBANK, a key material for a thermonuclear weapon's interstage, was lost by 2000 because so few people were involved with its manufacture and the ones who knew retired or moved on. It's thought to be an aerogel-like substance.
5 years and millions in expensive reverse engineering was required to figure it out again.
My favorite part about the FOGBANK story is that once they figured out how to manufacture it again, the new version of the material was more chemically pure than the old version, but this actually made the material LESS effective, so they had to add spcific impruities back into it to make it work correctly.
Yep. Human civilization is fundamentally predicated on the transmission of ideas through time. Without old ideas to build upon (Newton's "shoulders of giants"), there's no long-term advancement. Transmitting established knowledge is just as important to civilization as generating new knowledge.
> That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.
Numbers game doesn't work in the idealized way you think it does. if you let too many mediocre or bad people become scientists, some of them engage in fraud or ill- considered modelmaking, which wastes the time of good scientists who are in the place of having to reproduce results that were never going to work.
Pretty impossible to compensate for or prevent. The day doctor or phd because a prestigious title; the first fraudsters were born. If the title becomes even more prestigious, the more damage can a bad actor be able to evoke with its influence.
I didn't say more people should become career scientists; the incentives of that are all messed up from trying to measure research output like it's a product. IMO the best way to prevent junk science is to teach more people to tell good science from bad. Better understanding is empowering regardless of career.
Would you have any reference of why it matters the number of people doing something for some to engage in something nefarious? I would expect to happen no matter the number of people.
I feel it is more connected to the culture (for example I would expect to happen more in a hierarchical culture than in an egalitarian culture, or more in a believing culture than in a critical culture).
it happens no matter the number of people. but if you create a directive to dump more people into science than the capacity of society to produce scientists, (and there isn't an aggressive system to cull fraudsters) you will wind up with a linear increase of fraud/bad science, and a superlinear negative effect.
Isn't the ratio that is important? You can have a linear increase in good science. And, intuitively, the bad science would be "fragmented" (many clusters of lunatics) so good science would "prevail" at some point. Most things that I follow seem to have progressed a lot in the last 30 years... (as well as the nutcases, but there were many before as well)
We worry about "bad science", but I read a physicist that claimed that the theory of relativity was really accepted and used only when the older generation (which were generally reasonable scientists) died and not before, because they just would not wrap their mind around "something that different". Which I don't think is the way "we" perceive scientific progress (a scientist looking at proofs/logic/building on others/impartial/rational/etc.)
let me give you ONE example. Homme Hellinga (tenured professor at Duke) claimed to have designed a triosephosphate isomerase. his grad student Mary Dwyer (science hero) recognized it was an artefact and called him out on it, got railroaded and i think even sued. after the dust settled, hellinga was merely forced to give up his named seat (he kept tenure and was still getting grants). meanwhile my grad student friend burned three years of his life doing a project based on a different hellinga result.
i have many, many more examples (this one is publically known, so its safe to talk about and i personally know someone who lost years to it), some worse, some not as bad.
here's two more publically known incidents just at duke:
Mediocre baseball players take their teams to the world series. Mediocre soldiers, not special forces commandos, win wars. Etc. The principle is pretty general.
Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.