‘Pointless’ university studies to be weeded out by new government panel
—Changes to government funding may force academics to prove that their inquiry has real-world relevance—
So say the headlines on a September 23, 2009 report in The Guardian.
The poor souls who become official judges of these matters might have a miserable time of it.
It’s simple to decide what’s important and what’s not.
It’s simple to decide what’s valuable and what’s not.
But it’s not always simple to decide those things correctly.
Sometimes it’s not even possible to decide those things correctly.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a minor example of this. Look at the list of all the past winners. We have seen near-violent arguments break out as to which of the winning achievements are (1) important or (2) trivial or (3) valuable or (4) worthless or (5) all of the above or (6) may seem, after a few decades, rather different than they now do. You may have seen similar arguments about the winners of any group of prizes — or, more important, about any group of projects of any kind.