I used to hold this opinion, but my experience with academic research changed my mind. Much of the scientific knowledge we have is passed from generation to generation by mentoring. The amount of knowledge is so vast, and our means of searching the written literature for relevant facts so poor, that when I want to learn something or solve a specific problem there is no substitute for a discussion with an expert in the field.
The core problem is that human communication is very difficult. It becomes even more difficult when we try to communicate ideas without interaction, as we do when writing a book and expect someone to read and understand it. If I read a paper and I can't understand a sentence, it might take me days to figure out what's going on by myself, whereas asking an expert might yield an answer in less than an hour (sometimes minutes). The difference is really orders of magnitude.
There are whole fields that have effectively died because no one works on them any more. That knowledge doesn't live in anyone's mind. All the literature is there, but actually acquiring that knowledge by reading the literature is incredibly challenging and time consuming.
I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations. Advancing research is of secondary importance. In fact I would say that most new research I see probably has no intrinsic value. I include my own research in this category. We have researchers solving esoteric problems of no value to anyone besides their own personal entertainment. Except, working on such research keeps our neurons firing and keeps knowledge alive. It is a well known phenomenon that taking a break from research very quickly leads to a sort of decay of memory. Our learned ideas and the connections between them wither away without constant reinforcement. In order to keep knowledge alive we have to engage in research, even if it seems pointless.
>I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations.
Then these scientists should be devoted to producing textbooks and courses which can then be taught to non-research students. Yes, all knowledge about the scale of what a single individual knows (and keeps on their shelves, hard drives, etc) is embodied as communities and traditions, but we still get far greater redundancy of that knowledge from teaching it as undergraduate or master's-level coursework than from passing it down only via research mentoring.
If 25% of the population gets an undergraduate degree, 11% or so gets a postgraduate degree, and only about 1.7% get a PhD, then we need to be embodying society's knowledge among the larger cohorts for that knowledge to survive. We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work.
> Then these scientists should be devoted to producing textbooks and courses ...
Textbooks and courses exist for everything but the most cutting edge stuff (which are still in flux anyway), but they are a very inefficient way of transferring knowledge. I would say they are practically useless without expert guidance. At the most basic level, there are so many of them that an expert has to tell you which ones are both good and relevant to what you want to learn. I've once seen a student waste months of his life studying a book he thought was relevant, only to discover that book wasn't building towards the sort of knowledge he needed in that subject. The book was about the correct subject, but was focused on somewhat different aspects than the ones he was interested in. There was no way for him to know this in advance without guidance.
So we don't know how to organize existing books. Also, even the books that exist are usually pretty bad at conveying knowledge. Or perhaps humans are just pretty bad at learning things from books. Either way, no one knows how to write textbooks and courses that are much better than what we have today. I really don't know of a better way to preserve knowledge than the current one. Perhaps technology can improve the situation by making access to knowledge more interactive. But I suspect this would require a real breakthrough.
> We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work.
The core problem is that human communication is very difficult. It becomes even more difficult when we try to communicate ideas without interaction, as we do when writing a book and expect someone to read and understand it. If I read a paper and I can't understand a sentence, it might take me days to figure out what's going on by myself, whereas asking an expert might yield an answer in less than an hour (sometimes minutes). The difference is really orders of magnitude.
There are whole fields that have effectively died because no one works on them any more. That knowledge doesn't live in anyone's mind. All the literature is there, but actually acquiring that knowledge by reading the literature is incredibly challenging and time consuming.
I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations. Advancing research is of secondary importance. In fact I would say that most new research I see probably has no intrinsic value. I include my own research in this category. We have researchers solving esoteric problems of no value to anyone besides their own personal entertainment. Except, working on such research keeps our neurons firing and keeps knowledge alive. It is a well known phenomenon that taking a break from research very quickly leads to a sort of decay of memory. Our learned ideas and the connections between them wither away without constant reinforcement. In order to keep knowledge alive we have to engage in research, even if it seems pointless.