alt Hacker Newsthere is blog post somewhere i read, i cannot find it at the moment, that discusses the idea of "doctor problems" vs "musician problems". Doctor problems are problems where low quality solutions are deeply bad, so you should avoid them even if it involves producing fewer high quality solutions, while musician problems are ones where high quality solutions are very very worth it, so you should encourgage as many tries as possible so you get the super high quality wins. This seems a useful frame of reference, but not really the Ortega Hypothesis
it seems clear to me that the downside of society having a bad scientist is relatively low, so long as theres a gap between low quality science and politics [0], while the upside is huge.