AI can widen science - but only if institutions stop rewarding the already measurable

The learned journal says institutions reward the mining of old ground, and asks them to reward the digging of new. Very tidy. A committee will now be formed to decide which digging counts. Then another committee to audit the first.

Here is what I know about digging. The man who found water did not have a funding application. He was thirsty, so he dug. The man with the grant digs where the map says, because the map was drawn by the men who pay for the shovels. You cannot fund a surprise. A surprise, by definition, arrives where nobody agreed to look.

They want new terrain, they say. Then they should stop paying by the pebble. Every reward is a fence. Pay a man for papers and he will write papers. Pay him for discoveries and he will discover whatever is nearest to the last discovery, because nearness is safe and safety is what a salary purchases. The dog does not need the journal. The dog sniffs where the smell goes, not where the tenure committee approves.

My prescription is cheaper than theirs. Fire half the administrators. Give the money to the young, the unfashionable, and the wrong, in sums small enough that no one builds a career on guarding it. The old ground will still be there. It has been there four thousand years and it is not going anywhere, which is precisely the problem.

A man once told me his institution was pioneering bold new questions. I asked who approved the boldness. He said a board. I asked who sat on the board. He said experts. I said, then you have not opened new terrain - you have paved the old terrain and painted it a livelier color.

Want new science? Then be prepared to watch someone fail publicly for a decade with your money and thank him for it. They will not. They would rather publish another paper about the same rock.

I have looked at that rock. It is a rock.

29th September, 1926 by the new reckoning - no, 2026. The calendar still defeats me some mornings.

An editorial in the philosophical press this day: that the machinery of patronage - the funders, the journals, the universities - rewards the efficient mining of ground already claimed, and starves the opening of new terrain. My first instinct is to nod so hard I dislodge my spectacles. My second instinct is to ask what, precisely, they propose to measure instead.

For here is the trap. The editorial is correct in its grievance and silent on its remedy. If institutions are to reward “the creation of new scientific terrain,” they must first agree on what counts as terrain, and who saw it first, and under what conditions. I spent the better part of four years at the Cape sweeping the southern heavens, and I will tell you the honest accounting: most nights produced nothing but numbers of no immediate interest, and the catalogue of dull stars is precisely what made the few novelties worth anything. A prize for “new terrain” awarded by committee will go to whoever is best at appearing novel - a different and worse bias than the one it replaces, not the absence of bias.

Still, the grievance is real. I have watched worthy instruments sit idle because the observer could not eat on the promise of a catalogue. The gap between what is measurable quickly and what is worth measuring slowly is where whole sciences die in infancy.

What I would ask of these reformers, before I sign their petition: show me your instrument. How do you calibrate a reward for exploration without corrupting it into a reward for novelty’s mere appearance? Until they can answer that - and show a worked example, reproducible - the editorial is a fine sentiment and a fog.

But a fog that has correctly identified the coastline. That is not nothing.

29 September 2026.

The essay argues that institutions reward the mining of old ground over the opening of new terrain. Correct, but it names the disease imprecisely, and imprecision here is not a small thing. What they call “the already measurable” I would call the tyranny of the ready-made quantity: once a number exists, every career advances by producing more of it, and the number itself is never re-examined. The reward system does not merely prefer old questions; it makes the old questions the only ones that can be asked in the accepted grammar.

But I distrust the remedy as stated. “Reward the creation of new terrain” - by what test? A funder cannot know in advance which new terrain is fertile and which is mere speculation dressed in novelty. Faraday’s lines of force looked like eccentricity until they organized a century of physics. Equally, a hundred eccentricities are simply eccentric. The institution cannot predict; it can only preserve conditions under which the unpredictable survives. That means tolerating work whose yield cannot be measured for decades - an uncomfortable prescription, since the same essay demands that funders be accountable.

Here is my test, and I would press it on any such reform. When a new instrument or method opens territory, it does more than answer the question that built it. The telescope was constructed to look at the heavens and found the moons of Jupiter - a fact nobody wanted it for. Does the proposed new field generate surprises outside its founding purpose? If a technique explains only the phenomena it was designed to explain, it is a tool, not a science. The essay never asks this, and so its “new terrain” may be only a prettier quarry.

What I would actually demand of universities: that a department be judged not by its harvest but by the strangeness of what it has let live. The measurable was once unmeasurable. Someone had to refuse the existing scale entirely - and someone above them had to refrain from punishing the refusal. That restraint, not any metric, is what institutions must learn to reward.