<story><title>We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/we-havent-seen-quarter-of-known-bee-species-since-1990s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parsimo2010</author><text>Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be asking for.  If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.&lt;p&gt;We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else.  Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis.  As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine.  Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money.  Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).</text></item><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without disputing your claim, why is this &lt;i&gt;taxonomists&amp;#x27;&lt;/i&gt; job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in &amp;#x27;who cares about this boring stuff&amp;#x27; as opposed to &amp;#x27;what is the airspeed of a pigeon&amp;#x27;).&lt;p&gt;If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics&amp;#x27; goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.</text></item><item><author>xipho</author><text>As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined.  In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts &lt;i&gt;worldwide&lt;/i&gt; who can take specimens to a species-level identification.&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research.&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as &amp;quot;alpha-taxonomists&amp;quot;, in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue &amp;quot;immense&amp;quot;) short-sightedness of institutions. &amp;quot;We want answers to complex questions!  We&amp;#x27;ve neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions.  Oh, we see.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target.&lt;p&gt;It seems like we&amp;#x27;re already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn&amp;#x27;t take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (&lt;i&gt;knowing&lt;/i&gt; the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.</text></comment>
<story><title>We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/we-havent-seen-quarter-of-known-bee-species-since-1990s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parsimo2010</author><text>Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be asking for.  If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.&lt;p&gt;We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else.  Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis.  As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine.  Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money.  Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).</text></item><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Without disputing your claim, why is this &lt;i&gt;taxonomists&amp;#x27;&lt;/i&gt; job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in &amp;#x27;who cares about this boring stuff&amp;#x27; as opposed to &amp;#x27;what is the airspeed of a pigeon&amp;#x27;).&lt;p&gt;If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics&amp;#x27; goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.</text></item><item><author>xipho</author><text>As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined.  In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts &lt;i&gt;worldwide&lt;/i&gt; who can take specimens to a species-level identification.&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research.&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as &amp;quot;alpha-taxonomists&amp;quot;, in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue &amp;quot;immense&amp;quot;) short-sightedness of institutions. &amp;quot;We want answers to complex questions!  We&amp;#x27;ve neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions.  Oh, we see.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hertzrat</author><text>This is an argument against specialization. You can’t do extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a week on business management, public outreach, and fundraising. Since that’s the world were living in, might it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive in the last 2 decades?</text></comment>