David Graeber quoting Jonathan Katz’s “Don’t become a scientist” “You have to spend much of your time being someone’s flunky, but even once one isn’t, he says, you have to spend your time making proposals rather than doing research. ‘And because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity. You have to spend your time and talents anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than solving an important scientific problem. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal because they have not yet been proved to work.’ There you go. That’s why we don’t have flying cars.”