Bitcoin, on the other hand, is some electricity, and arguably a waste of it.

The majority of teachers make a median US wage fairly early into their career and plenty make a multiple of it later on, on top of great benefits. Their job is no more challenging than nearly all other professions. “But they have to”… yes, everyone else has shit they have to deal with. The fact that the Waltons, crypto lottery winners, etc. exist is a separate problem that doesn’t mean teachers are underpaid.

Education majors are easier.The sky is blue. If we even remotely believe in a meritocracy (liberals often really don’t when you dig into their beliefs, granted) starting teachers should not make as much as a starting EE major. Nobody in their right mind would or should pursue an engineering career if teaching paid equivalently.

As for the other point, it is indeed standing, on air.

They also did not say there are major advances but they are “really hard” (your words), they said there are no major advances left (by comparing them to continents, which we’ve already all discovered). There is no other way to interpret their words, unless you believe there are additional continents on earth to discover. Maybe atlantis?

The OP is not commenting on individual contributors vs large groups but I will comment on that as I disagree. You are describing the current state of physics (and many other stem fields) and the popular consensus about future advancements. While certainly having hundreds of researchers is necessary on many projects, you have no basis to claim an individual will not make a major breakthrough in the distant future. And frankly, as much as they are necessary, giant labs are strongly encouraged by our current culture. Large profits from monetizing research into products, corporate involvement and funding, staggering bloat in universities, fame-chasing, printing off papers like buzzfeed articles, unprecedented levels of organized fraud in academia… very little of the current culture is conducive to modest, brilliant individual contributors in many fields.

You have no idea how the culture will change in science, how much more intelligent and capable people will be than we are in the distant future with natural selection and gene modification, and whether there will be any more breakthroughs by individuals or small groups that will seem “obvious” in hundreds of years. To say otherwise is frankly dogmatic caveman thinking.

Frankly, unlike the author, I think there’s too many people in the field. They produce a handful of papers worth reading every year along with thousands upon thousands of models that may or may not slightly improve performance on a specific task and then have no general value beyond that. And I don’t believe this will change much- ml is likely the most monetizable PhD path by a safe margin, so there is too much profit incentive to churn out crap at any cost.