With the exception of performances (sports, acting, music) you can make a decent living despite not being at the next level. It is generally not so with academia.
And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic positions and honing their craft in community theater or open mic nights or whatever while making ends meet some other way. With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables.
> With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables.
Depends on your level of engagement. Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not.
Can you engage in citizen science projects like BOINC or Zooniverse (essentially performing drudge work that would otherwise be thrown at some hapless research assistant at the bottom of the totem pole)? Of course!
My argument for why you couldn't is more one of pragmatism than anything else. After 8 hours slogging away in a cubicle, you're unlikely to have the energy to work with the laser-like precision necessary to tackle a scientific problem. Perhaps it is possible in some exceptional cases, but for the vast majority of people I don't see it happening.
Plus, science is as much about your interactions with your peers as it is your work. Individuals that aren't highly embedded in a scientific clique are liable to miss important information that would have an impact on your research. You can't develop the same level of social capital as you'd need doing science part-time as a hobby.
For those who are potentially offended, I wasn't insulting citizen science projects (I, in fact, participate in some of them)- having actually worked as a hapless research assistant at the bottom of the totem pole, I was actually just making the blunt observation that qualitatively a lot of the work one would perform in citizen science project is indistinguishable from necessary, but particularly dull, work that higher level investigators don't feel like doing.
And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic positions and honing their craft in community theater or open mic nights or whatever while making ends meet some other way. With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables.
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