

You and Your Research - redshirtrob
http://blog.samaltman.com/you-and-your-research

======
fsk
The reason most scientists do routine safe work is that they need to publish a
certain number of papers per year to get or keep their job.

If you work on something important, spend a couple years on it, and go
nowhere, your career may be over.

It also was different 50 years ago, when almost any scientist with a PhD could
get a decent tenure-track job. Now, there's a severe oversupply of PhDs, which
means a lot of them need to scramble to survive instead of working on
important problems.

