why do we hold people back

IF we grant the perception that researchers are being held back from doing some of the "really interesting research", then why do we do it, especially if people are aware of it as an issue?

Well, it is a problem that has many levels.

First of all, the committments I allude to are real: a lot of grants are contractual, and must the work as described must be carried out, or a good faith effort made to do so (or the recipient is unlikely to get any more grants). Some grants have flexibility, and a lot of grants officers are approachable for variances, but to invoke such things is both an effort and a risk.

Grant funding bodies are risk averse and conservative. Not always, and not on the whole, but in general, and as such they reflect us - scientists are generally relatively risk adverse and conservative.
I mean, we love hot new and unexpected results, really love them. But most of the time good solid incremental stuff (that validates MY theories) is really very nice...

Did I mention scientists are really quite conservative. For a reason, it works.

There is also a lot of regular work to be done; it would not actually be a good idea for every trained PhD physicist to stop whatever they are doing and go classify the string landscape, or knit quantum loops, or even try to find planets - there is a community need to spread the effort around what needs to be done, and there are internal market mechanisms for adjusting this - some fields become oversupplied and people get squeezed out, sometimes painfully and inefficiently, other fields are gold mines of undiscovered treasure that no one is mining, and finding those can be very rewarding - and risky, some fields are abandoned because they are mined dry, at least with the current level of technology (one of the interesting things about getting older is seeing fields re-open as technical ability to make new progress comes along, sometimes right on schedule as predicted decades ago when people walked away).

Resources are finite, some stuff is not done because there is no one to do it, rightly or erroneously.
Because there is scarcity, people are risk averse in allocating the resources, which tends to discourage innovation.

There is also a local/global problem - I simultaneously would like the freedom to pursue new stuff that I might find interesting, AND have the resources to sustain or complete ongoing projects, while given scarcity, I would like others to get just what they need for ongoing committments so that I get free reins to explore fun stuff.
And so would they.
So an impasse is reached where we sorta share stuff around to mostly get stuff done and occasionally someone squirts out with something new and fun, either serendipitously or because they really are very clever, and then half the pack breaks off and chases the new thing.

I don't know the solution. More resources would help. So would more people doing stuff.
As long as they leave the really fun stuff to me, eh?

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From your previous post, there is no "right time" in one's career to step out of the mainstream. Whether a researcher is 16 or 60, the time is now.

This week I have been under attack from someone I've never met at Cornell. What should I do?