There’s a world of difference between “let’s just continue doing this research project on something obscure with no theory of impact because penicillin” and “this is more likely than not to become irrelevant in 18 months time, but if it works, it will be a game-changer”.
Robustness and generalizability are subcomponents of the expected value of your work/research. If you think that these are neglected, and that your field is too focused on the “impact” components of EV, i.e. there are too many moon shots, please clarify that, but your analogy fails to make this argument.
As it is, I suspect that optimizing for robust generalizability is a sure-fire way of ensuring that most people become “very general helpers”, which seems like a very harmful thing to promote.
There’s a world of difference between “let’s just continue doing this research project on something obscure with no theory of impact because penicillin” and “this is more likely than not to become irrelevant in 18 months time, but if it works, it will be a game-changer”.
Robustness and generalizability are subcomponents of the expected value of your work/research. If you think that these are neglected, and that your field is too focused on the “impact” components of EV, i.e. there are too many moon shots, please clarify that, but your analogy fails to make this argument.
As it is, I suspect that optimizing for robust generalizability is a sure-fire way of ensuring that most people become “very general helpers”, which seems like a very harmful thing to promote.