I've certainly wondered why scientific breakthroughs seem to have basically dried up.

It would be interesting to somehow link the decline in major breakthroughs to these kinds of research incentives.

Undisciplined

earmarked for research that has provable improvement metrics....that sounds reasonable (and it is), but it winds up producing counter-intuitive industry wide effects when done at scale.

:  "When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric."

science

Politics_And_Law

The Bureaucratization of Science Is a Feature, Not a Bug

> earmarked for research that has provable improvement metrics....that sounds reasonable (and it is), but it winds up producing counter-intuitive industry wide effects when done at scale.

Ah yes, this is an example of `Goodhart's Law`:  "When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric."