The first objection is particularly interesting, and I’ve been mulling another post on it. As a general question: if you want to have high impact on something, how much decision-making weight should you put on leveraging your existing skill set, versus targeting whatever the main bottleneck is regardless of your current skills? I would guess that very-near-zero weight on current skillset is optimal, because people generally aren’t very strategic about which skills they acquire. So e.g. people in semiconductor physics etc probably didn’t do much research in clean energy bottlenecks before choosing that field—their skillset is mostly just a sunk cost, and trying to stick to it is mostly sunk cost fallacy (to the extent that they’re actually interested in reducing carbon emissions). Anyway, still mulling this.
Totally agree with the second objection. That said, there are technologies which have been around as long as PV which look at-least-as-promising-and-probably-more-so but receive far less research attention—solar thermal and thorium were the two which sprang to mind, but I’m sure there’s more. From an outside view, we should expect this to be the case, because academics usually don’t choose their research to maximize impact—they choose it based on what they know how to study. Which brings us back to the first point.
The first objection is particularly interesting, and I’ve been mulling another post on it. As a general question: if you want to have high impact on something, how much decision-making weight should you put on leveraging your existing skill set, versus targeting whatever the main bottleneck is regardless of your current skills? I would guess that very-near-zero weight on current skillset is optimal, because people generally aren’t very strategic about which skills they acquire. So e.g. people in semiconductor physics etc probably didn’t do much research in clean energy bottlenecks before choosing that field—their skillset is mostly just a sunk cost, and trying to stick to it is mostly sunk cost fallacy (to the extent that they’re actually interested in reducing carbon emissions). Anyway, still mulling this.
Totally agree with the second objection. That said, there are technologies which have been around as long as PV which look at-least-as-promising-and-probably-more-so but receive far less research attention—solar thermal and thorium were the two which sprang to mind, but I’m sure there’s more. From an outside view, we should expect this to be the case, because academics usually don’t choose their research to maximize impact—they choose it based on what they know how to study. Which brings us back to the first point.