Confessions of a researchaholic

There were values and practices that people used to take for granted only turned out to be bad or evil later.
Examples in the specific realm of people include race (slavery, genocide), sex (women, and more recently LBGTQIA, rights), religion (more people have died in the name of God than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined), etc.

Which made me wonder: what are the values and practices that we take for granted (or consider to be normal) today will likely to become flipped in the future?

One immediate answer that came to my mind is the expansion of legal/ethical protection of people towards biological creatures and natural habitats, due to the increasing awareness of climate change and environment degradation.
For example, maybe one day we will have legislation that gives all (multi-cellular) animals and plants the same rights to live as humans so that killing them will be considered as murder, or dumping garbage into a river, ocean, or landfill is like littering your neighbor’s yard.
Would that make a better future world?

Saw this interesting quote today, which made me think that “engineering has to work, science does not” and “product has to work, research does not”.

https://twitter.com/liyiwei/status/1353058543746772998

https://twitter.com/liyiwei/status/1339636773421367301

Why the US is celebrating Easter, a Christian holiday, but not holidays of other regions or cultures, such as Holi, Ramadan, or Passover?

What does it mean for a non-Christian to put her hand on a holy Bible in a state ritual like court oath or citizenship ceremony?

National holidays should be centered on nations (e.g., Independence Day), not religions.

Recently I noticed a few interesting articles that I would like to read but are behind paywalls that asked me to subscribe to the encompassing publications.
Since not all articles of a given publication are of sufficient quality or interests to me, and different readers can have different preferences anyway, I wonder if it would make more sense to pay for individual articles instead of entire publications.
The publishers may be able to charge more per article and yet readers can choose to pay what they need.
The readers, writers and even advertisers can be better aligned, rewarding good individual writers and articles over bad ones.

Unbundling is already happening for music and academic papers, and could be more prevalent for news.