I’m quoting this from a recent ‘Stack-post by Adam Mastoianni that I really liked. It wasn’t intended to be this, but it’s a nice way to describe a sentiment that’s driving post-professionalism.
Professional science does a lot of good stuff. It gives people paychecks, health insurance, research funding, offices, and colleagues. It allows large groups to work together on big projects like launching telescopes into space. And it gives young, curious people a place to start: if you want to ask and answer questions about the universe, academia is an obvious career path.
But that good stuff comes at a price. Professions are bundles of weak-link interventions; they keep out quacks, but they also keep out revolutionaries. They enforce standards, which tends to make things…standard. They select for a pretty homogenous group of people—in this case, folks who got good grades in college, did research in the right institutions with the right people and published in the right journals. Then they make all those people even more similar to one another, steeping them in the same culture and putting them in competition for the same rewards, like grants, jobs, and citations.
Right now, professional science is like a world where every organism is trying to be a mammal. Mammals are great: milk-producing glands, body hair, ears that have three bones in them, what’s not to like? But if you’ve only got mammals, you’re in big trouble. Monocultures are fragile and prone to collapse because every single organism has identical weaknesses. What you need is an ecosystem—hawks, sea urchins, fungi, various types of fern, and so on.
Adam's comment on professional science seems too simplistic to me. He has a point but reducing all professional science down to 'bundles of weak-link interventions' seems so narrow and rather naïve. In the end he says we need variety. But in order to get a variety don't you need a wide variety of organisms that are homogenous in the first place?