Implication is irrelevant to Needlessly Pedantic Man.

elvismercury

I agree with your point. I just remember how shocking it was when someone pointed out that pretty much no scientific field has had a major breakthrough in the past 50 years, but many had their major breakthroughs in the 50 years before that. Progress in our understanding of the universe has largely stagnated.

Needlessly Pedantic Man: The "basically" that preceded "everyone" in my previous comment implied that the statement was an inexact summary.



Undisciplined

mostly_harmless

Incentives and coordination to solve hard problems

Excessively Pedantic Guy (was that his name?): not _everyone_ is just tweaking -- innovation still occurs, but it's not what's generally incentivized.  Even so, it eventually breaks through (see e.g., the rise of deep learning, from Hinton and others relentlessly pushing it forward, through decades of neural methods being in disfavor).

But yeah, the incentives are universally bad, as you say.  If innovation breaks out, it's in spite of them.