Nature Human Behaviour: academia selects against the creativity science needs most
plopesresearch · x · 2026-09-07
A Perspective in Nature Human Behaviour argues contemporary academic structures systematically select against what science needs most: creativity, intellectual risk-taking and bold ideas.
- Precarity, hypercompetitive funding, peer review, publication costs and metric-driven evaluation make "playing it safe" the rational career choice for early-career researchers
- Lead author Phillip Haubrock says the argument draws on years of first-hand early-career struggle
- The authors hope the paper sparks debate on whether the system enables the science academia claims to value
Related event: Nature Subjournal Essay: Academia Systematically Selects Against Creativity(4 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- New paper: AI agents negotiate badly under uncertainty and break deals on purpose — menhguin · 2026-10-26
- NBER: Only 2.9% of US consumers pay for AI; retention as low as 20%, pricing power at risk — avicgoldfarb · 2026-10-26
- AI researchers guessed robots wouldn't outrun humans until 2034 — it already happened — ben_j_todd · 2026-10-26
- AI folks, stop saying "biology" when you mean drug development — KevinKaichuang · 2026-10-26
- ESR on the Bugpocalypse: locking down frontier models only hands the game to Chinese open weights — colinmcnamara · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic: junior tech hires fell from 27% to 9% as agent hours hit 6x employee hours — thione · 2026-10-26