Taken to an extreme, this is UBI, and I think we would all benefit to some degree from a system like that if we could get from here to there. On the other hand, I imagine there's quite a bit of research that requires expensive tests and/or apparatus to get right, and I'm not sure how you feasibly come to a situation where you have a bunch of hobby physicists on staff and provide them with a particle accelerator, but just for funsies.
I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.
There are plenty of people passionate about perpetual motion and chemtrails. Until we get to a point where resources are effectively infinite, we still need some form of prioritizing research funding.
Even then, playing kerbal space program does not make you a rocket scientist. It requires a certain dedication to master various physics and mathematics disciplines to contribute to even a part of one, which is itself a significant investment that you won't find possible with UBI alone; there will still need to be some form of dedicated funding through either specific government programs or commercial enterprise.
Salary also has a bit of a sticky effect; people change fields less than jobs, and spend more time in jobs than in funsies hobbies. A rocket designed by a committee of hobbyists will likely perform much like any other design-by-committee process or product.
Well, taken to another extreme, it's Philip Glass working as a plumber and taxi driver (as he did) between compositions.
ROBERT Hughes, the Australian art critic, filmmaker and writer, wandered into the kitchen of his fashionable loft home in New York’s SoHo to see how the plumber was going, setting up his new dishwasher.
On his knees grappling with the machine, the plumber heard a noise and looked up.
Hughes gasped: “My god, you’re Philip Glass. I can’t believe it. What are you doing here?”
Glass, one of the world’s most famous composers, said afterwards: “It was obvious that I was installing his new dishwasher, and I told him I would soon be finished.”
“But you are an artist,” Hughes protested.
Glass said: “I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well, and that he should go away and let me finish.”
There have been suggestions that doing science funding via lottery (with some caveats) would be more effective and more efficient than our current grant proposal based system.
There should first be a good base of teaching assistant funding with enough free time to do research work. A lottery for extra PhD grants would indeed work well on top of this. Often the key is simply top-k grades now for those grants.
I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.