In October 1973, Israeli military intelligence operated under a framework it called the Konzeptziya: Egypt would not attack until it could neutralise the Israeli Air Force, therefore Egyptian troop movements were irrelevant. The assessment held until Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal. Fifty years later, a different generation of analysts applied an updated version of the same filter to Hamas in Gaza — contained, degraded, not the priority. The word had changed. The architecture had not. Both failures were catastrophic, and neither was unique to Israel.

Somewhere between the grant application and the trading screen, “relevance” became the word that ate the world. Universities now demand it of every research proposal. Fund managers invoke it to justify chasing whatever narrative is moving markets this quarter. Foreign policy analysts deploy it to triage which crises deserve column inches and which can be safely ignored. In each arena, the demand for relevance produces the same perverse result: it systematically filters out the things that matter most.

Start with the academy. The modern research funding apparatus operates like a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index in reverse: instead of measuring dangerous concentration, it enforces it. Panel after panel channels money toward whatever the policy establishment has already decided is important — artificial intelligence, net zero, pandemic preparedness — while defunding the basic science from which every one of those applied fields originally sprang. Quantum mechanics was gloriously irrelevant for decades before it underwrote the semiconductor industry. Ramanujan’s number theory gathered dust in Cambridge notebooks until it resurfaced in string theory and, later, in the elliptic curve cryptography that now secures global payments infrastructure. Relevance, as a filter, would have killed both at birth. The academy’s obsession with demonstrable impact is Le Chatelier’s principle made institutional: the harder the system pushes toward predetermined equilibrium, the more it forecloses the disruptive perturbations from which genuine breakthroughs emerge.

The same pathology infects financial markets, where it wears a slightly different mask. Here, relevance goes by the name of “narrative.” A stock is relevant if it fits this quarter’s story — generative........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)