In 9th grade biology our teacher asked the class for their solutions to the problem of global hunger. My hand reflexively shot up.
Teacher: Yes?
Me: Kill a quarter of the planet and feed it to the remaining three quarters.
Teacher: Um...well...who decides who has to die?
Me: There are four people in my family and I volunteer to go for them. The rest is up to you.
Class: You're weird
Me: If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question.
I set the curve on the final just to f**k with those visionless morons.
The point is, there are three doors: status quo, radical change, or complete annihilation. I am lazy, apathetic and feel like I have no skin in the game, so I choose door number 1 with the caveat that I have reframed the problem as a feature.
Until we start force-feeding large doses of psilocybin to everyone in authority, the best alternative is... https://www.youtube.com/watch
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.
*whistles nonchalantly and walks away*
I don't know about all that. I just meant that science, being more experimental in nature, has a greater tendency to entrench the ego. Maths, being more postulative, require less heavy lifting, and as such are proven and disproven with a blackboard and a few grams of calcified diatoms. Ego is invested in theorems but mathematicians are a supremely logical lot, and are more apt to humbly defer to subsequent supersession. Science not so much. The frontier of many branches of the sciences are a veritable battle royale of ardent disagreement and recrimination. One might even say the emphasis gets placed on discrediting the opposition more than underscoring ones own position. But when you already have a conclusion that satisfies you, there's no need to keep proving it. You always find things in the last place you look because once you find them, you stop looking.
Who said there were no conflicts of interest in math studies? Any human pursuit will be tainted by human ego, which is chiefly concerned with its own exaltation. Math perhaps less so than science. In either case the collective focus is on the cutting edge, because that's the most current chapter of the story. This wouldn't be so if people were as content to solve problems that already had a solution as they are problems that have yet to be solved, but not even an automoton would waste its time on that. Besides, the previous chapters have already been signed, and the ego loves putting its name on stuff.