[HN Gopher] Science Is Getting Harder
___________________________________________________________________
Science Is Getting Harder
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 94 points
Date : 2022-06-02 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattsclancy.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattsclancy.substack.com)
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that
| no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already
| been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an
| unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like,
| what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic
| integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge
| explosion of research into STEM subjects, from math, to physics,
| to biology, to computer science, etc.. Tens of billions of people
| people ever lived since the 1800s, and even just a tiny, tiny
| fraction of them are doing research, is still a huge amount of
| output. There just isn't much new ground to break, so this means
| discoveries will either be much more incremental or require
| considerably more mental horsepower.
|
| Psychology is sorta the opposite: there is no limit to the number
| of experiments you can run on people or possible associations
| between causes and effects. It's not like psychology ,
| literature, philosophy, or history has gotten harder over the
| past century, unlike math, physics, or economics. Sure, there are
| more advanced statistical methods, but running experiments hasn't
| gotten harder. This is also why the vast majority of physicists
| and mathematicians are teachers rather than researchers, and why
| econ papers have gotten much longer and are full of dense stats
| methods. There are always going to be new discoveries in biology
| and medicine, and same for applied math and applied physics, such
| as engineering or astronomy, but theoretical math and probably
| also theoretical physics are as saturated as can be.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well. I wonder. You generalize a bit from maths and physics to
| all of STEM there, and throw computer science in there too
| saying there's not too much new ground to break. But that isn't
| what I see when I survey the CS literature. Instead it feels
| like important areas get neglected and ignored, whilst enormous
| herds thunder towards fashionable topics.
|
| My guess is this slowdown is happening for a few reasons:
|
| 1. Increased number of researchers = increased team size = less
| innovation. The article shows increase in team size but doesn't
| ponder the implications. Teams shy away from bold ideas, in my
| experience. If you want innovation it has to come from
| individuals empowered to work alone and recruit slowly. The
| moment you're put in a team situation you are suddenly expected
| to pitch and convince others to take a risk on an idea that
| perhaps you aren't even sure about yourself yet, which is a
| high bar to meet. And the team won't want to try it because if
| it works the glory will associate with the individual who came
| up with the idea and drove it forwards, leaving the others in
| the shade. So teamwork puts pressure on people to propose
| 'safe' ideas that were found outside the group, which nobody
| will object to and which everyone can share equally.
|
| NB: non tech firms struggle to create new tech partly for this
| reason. They have a culture of creating so-called innovation
| teams. This practice is rampant in finance for example. I never
| saw an innovation team do anything truly surprising. You could
| always guess up front what topics they'd be "researching"
| before learning anything about them because the range of topics
| was so narrow.
|
| 2. State subsidies. We know these kill worker efficiency. If
| that weren't true the USSR would never have fallen behind the
| USA in terms of wealth. What the article refers to as science
| is really academia, and academia is dominated by ever
| increasing amounts of government money. Whilst the article
| phrases this as science getting "harder" it can also be seen as
| researchers simply becoming less efficient than they were in
| the past, which is exactly what we'd expect to happen given
| that academia is a parallel planned economy. Efficient here
| means in terms of discovery production not paper production, of
| course.
|
| 3. Falling paper quality. Another way to view (2). I feel like
| half my HN comments are about this problem these days but the
| quality of papers in some research fields is staggeringly low,
| sometimes junk quality. As in, you could throw out 90%+ of the
| papers and the field would get better not worse. In a few
| fields like "social bot" research or epidemiology I'd struggle
| to name _any_ recent papers that weren 't intellectually
| fraudulent in some way. If you join a field as a researcher
| because you feel like it's an important topic, and then
| discover that the papers published in the last 10-20 years are
| much more likely to be non-replicable or have nonsense
| methodologies than those published 50 years ago, then you'll
| probably end up reading older papers because you feel you get
| more out of them. Then you'll end up citing them more often as
| a result.
|
| I definitely feel I saw this when reading the epidemiology
| literature. Papers from the 1950-1990 period were quite
| different to modern papers. Way less fancy maths, much easier
| to read, more obvious and logical questions being asked and no
| WTF moments. You definitely got a feeling that the authors were
| intellectually curious and wanted to understand epidemics. From
| 2000 onwards the papers became nearly always useless.
|
| A big part of this is the post-2000s era explosion in the use
| of advanced statistical methods and, especially, the acceptance
| of unvalidated models as "science". The creation of free tools
| like R and STAN made it much easier and so many papers now are
| just people playing around with R and random arbitrary
| datasets. They plot some regressions and publish a paper.
| Unvalidated modelling seems to have destroyed a lot of fields,
| because to people who are rewarded for publishing it's
| basically crack cocaine. If your papers have to describe
| factual things about reality then you're limited in how much
| you can write about by cost of experimentation, difficulty of
| discovering new things etc. If your papers can describe
| arbitrary scenarios invented in a computer with no care given
| to validity, then those caps are removed and you can publish an
| infinite number of papers. Yet the actual value of such papers
| can be zero or lower.
|
| So yeah. He shows graphs of discovery fall in exactly the same
| way across every single field he looks at, whilst output grows
| exponentially, and then concludes that "science" in general is
| getting harder. But then that's clearly not been true of some
| fields like AI lately. It seems more likely that such a
| strongly correlated trend is caused by structural issues in
| academia rather than a true general effect.
| btrettel wrote:
| > This is especially true in math and physics. You will find
| that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has
| already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or
| it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial.
|
| This hasn't been my experience in fluid dynamics. There are so
| many places where one could apply a standard approach that
| people haven't. It takes some effort and experience to
| recognize that, but it's still true in my experience.
|
| I think what you described is probably true for sexier areas
| like high-energy physics, but not true for more "boring" areas
| like turbulent flows. Yes, turbulence is "unsolved", but that
| doesn't mean that useful information couldn't come from
| applying standard approaches to particular turbulent flows. The
| variety of industrially-relevant flows is quite large.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I agree with you there are so many areas still vastly
| unexplored, fluid dynamics or the whole area of complex
| systems is definitely a prime example. Stephen Hawkins called
| his inaugural lecture "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical
| Physics?" suggesting that we are very close to the end of
| theoretical discoveries.
|
| Although less famous I would argue that prediction was just
| as wrong as "640kB should be enough for everyone", lots of
| extremely fundamental discoveries had been made since then,
| and we don't seem to significantly closer to a theory of
| everything.
| Beldin wrote:
| He discusses in (if memory serves) "A Brief History of
| Time" whether we will keep on discovering ever-more
| accurate physical theories, or if there's a theoretical
| limit. The Planck scale offers a theoretical limit, so
| there's hope.
|
| At any rate, that is how I understood him. Not that we're
| nearly there, but that our current path of discovery seems
| finite.
| cycomanic wrote:
| To be honest I have not read his books, but I always had
| the impression from his talks that he was quite narrow
| minded in that he largely only meant astro/particle
| physics when talking about theoretical physics, ignoring
| many areas in the process. Also worth noting that the
| book came out 10 years after his lecture, so he probably
| revised his views during that time.
| laingc wrote:
| I think GP is conflating Maths with Pure Maths. While I'm
| sure there is new ground to break in Pure Maths, I would
| agree that it's getting harder and harder.
|
| However, as you note, in Applied Maths there are more
| unsolved problems than you could address with a million
| researchers.
|
| A physicist or pure Mather social looks at Navier-Stokes and
| says, "Oh, we know how that works, nothing to do there I
| guess", whereas the applied mathematician looks at it and
| goes, "holy cow, this could keep my entire department busy
| for the rest of our natural lives".
| hankman86 wrote:
| This should worry everyone. Economic progress is intimately tied
| to scientific discoveries. And if that's slowing down, we may
| still see some business model innovation (think: Uber), but less
| progress that increases humanity's collective wealth.
|
| Making matters worse, population count in highly educated
| countries is shrinking, inevitably leading up to fewer brains
| trying to solve hard problems than before. For now, I don't see
| the remaining countries with a growing population making up for
| this loss in collective cognitive capacity devoted to science.
|
| Perhaps we shouldn't fear universal AI as much as we should cheer
| it on as the future saviour of science.
| paul_deerrack wrote:
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I think we need to figure out how to extend human lifespan to
| allow for experts to continue to grow their knowledge/skills past
| the 40 year retirement mark to have a greater chance of making
| more advanced breakthroughs.
| timkam wrote:
| I think the (hopefully) more realistic action plan would be to
| change the academic system so that the average academic does
| not need to spend what amounts to the full official working
| hours on non-research tasks, latest after their first Post Doc,
| i.e., ~2 years after reaching academic maturity...
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Yeah good point.
|
| Also, many major historical scientific breakthroughs have
| been just a smart (usually rich) dude/dudette with a lot of
| free time and not a member of the conventional 'academic'
| system.
|
| So somehow figure out a way for public to get in on the
| research instead of government restrictions on who can
| purchase supplies which limits research to the .0001% who
| have PhD's.
|
| This opens the door to a lot more mind power going into
| research.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| At this point, I think "a lot of free time" is a more
| limited resource than supplies and lab equipment. Though I
| may be biased as I come from an extremely non-capital-
| intensive field (pure math).
| rscho wrote:
| I see you've not met my advisors. Please no. Old scientists
| sometimes contribute to push the younger generation forward. In
| my experience though, most of the time they're a liability, due
| to their incredibly overdeveloped ego and their deep
| involvement into politics. I'm an academic MD, so this
| phenomenon might be more marked than in other fields.
|
| See the book "the structure of scientific revolutions".
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| There's no private industry competition in academia, which
| allows those old scientists to become old slow codgers.
|
| Most scientific breakthroughs through out history were just
| private citizens outside of the conventional academic
| establishment.
|
| We need to put an end to these government restrictions on
| buying supplies and equipment which keeps the research down
| to just a tiny fraction of the population.
|
| Allowing private citizens to do research would put a fire
| under those old codgers asses.
| honkler wrote:
| it's not the government restriction, but wage slaving that
| keeps private individuals from making scientific
| breakthroughs. Perhaps UBI could be the answer.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> Allowing private citizens to do research would put a
| fire under those old codgers asses.
|
| I have a few published papers in peer-reviewed journals
| with 30+ citations and I'm a college dropout, but I run a
| company that can fund/produce this kind of research as part
| of our mission statement. It's not really restrictions, but
| rather money/funding, and willingness of private companies
| to publish publicly (which is a big blocker for most).
| creato wrote:
| Money seems like a far more significant restriction than
| regulation, which will only affect a small subset of
| possible experiments one could do.
| aborsy wrote:
| Having been long in academia, what has increased is
| commercialization of all kinds of science, number of science
| managers (like modern day billionaires, taking credit for the
| work actually done by the graduate students and postdocs, growing
| to be huge), number of politicians putting their names in various
| papers (I see managers co-authoring on average a paper per week),
| brutal competition for status and citations, excellent writing
| and formalism with little or no substance, rise of administrators
| with large incomes, gangs and tribes accepting each other grants
| and papers, intensified politics on awards/recognitions/invited
| talks and control of main publications, people constantly chasing
| the same topical subjects for grants and industry relevance, and
| similar activities. The science component has actually decreased
| in my view. The system and practices sometimes remind me of the
| Wall Street, with the currency being fame.
|
| I don't think this system will last for too long. The environment
| is increasingly filled with status hungry people. Balaji has a
| good prediction on that.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think we underestimate the amount of politics that was going
| on in science previously.
|
| Really compared to the shenanigans with Newton, Leibnitz or
| Hooke and Newton, much of what we see today is quite harmless.
| Or take for a more recent example Teller and Oppenheimer. I
| think in science (but not only in science) we tend to idealise
| the old days and scientists, because we remember the
| discoveries not the politics and their personal flaws. I would
| even argue that this greatly demonstrates the success of the
| scientific process. In the end the best science won, despite
| all the political infighting.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Yup, the point of the "scientific method" is that it works
| regardless of petty personal politics, so long as empirical
| evidence remains the standard.
|
| To some extent it depends on the weakness of humans for
| status and competition, because they are powerful motivators
| to drive advances.
| timr wrote:
| Science continues to work, but the work of being a
| "scientist" really sucks because of this stuff.
|
| I personally left science because I could see it had 98%
| overlap with what I'd do as an engineer (or entrepreneur,
| in the case of a PI), with a tiny fraction of the monetary
| benefit. Being a winner in that system is a great life, but
| it rests upon a huge pyramid of people who are working
| their butts off at low pay and lower prestige, for a brass
| ring that few will ever grasp.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I agree with you. Being a scientist has become worse
| (although I would argue that is true for many other jobs
| as well). A PI nowadays really works like the leader of a
| small startup constantly looking for money to keep the
| ship afloat without the prospect of a big payout at the
| end.
| aborsy wrote:
| Teller touches upon this subject. In an interview published
| on YouTube, he says, increasing scholarships and science
| funding further doesn't help; because money doesn't buy
| science, money buys technology; we actually don't have enough
| scientists on whom to spend the money. And that, most of the
| advances in quantum mechanics and atomic physics were made by
| individuals genuinely interested in problems in these
| domains, and worked in modest conditions. Quantum mechanics
| theory took practically nothing to develop.
|
| Politics, of course, is part of the humanity, but it
| manifests differently in different environments (academia vs
| industry, or then vs now). There is undoubtedly politics in
| industry, however, there are also products and reality
| checks. The companies won't survive if they operate entirely
| based on politics. In academia, on the other hand, the
| environmental feedback can be weaker depending on the
| subject; there, politics could come to the fore. Amusingly,
| Kissinger said, politics in academia is specially vicious
| precisely because the stakes are so low.
|
| As for then versus now, there used to be a lot of low-hanging
| fruit that could be taken until 1980s, and there weren't many
| researchers. But now there are fewer accessible
| opportunities, with far more researchers. If you consider
| that the size of the cake has not increased proportionally
| (due to factors mentioned in the article), while the number
| of players has increased substantially, you may conclude that
| the environment has become much more competitive. Increased
| competition indicates increased politics, emphasis on
| selling, networking, and other non-scientific factors
| relevant to industry, except there you actually get paid. The
| conditions are nowadays totally different. There all sorts of
| performance metrics (H-index, citations, number of papers
| etc), that have become target, in place of good science,
| which are gamed.
| derbOac wrote:
| I often wonder about this, and have talked about this all
| with older colleagues. My sense is some things were the same,
| but others were really different.
|
| Even looking at the peer review process: it was much more
| informal in the distant past, and maybe more akin to what
| happens today with invited papers in my experience, or with
| small open source software projects.
|
| There were certaintly very petty but intense personal
| squabbles in the past but that's a bit different from the
| pervasive structural issues in science today.
|
| At some level too, I don't care what it was like 100 years
| ago. I can still see the problems today.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Peer review really was different in the past. Hell, Nature
| even used to occasionally _accept papers without any review
| at all_ until the mid-1970s, if the editor thought they
| would provoke good discussions.
|
| Watson and Crick's famous 1953 paper where they presented
| the double helix of DNA is one such example.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes I didn't mean to say that there are no issues in
| science. I disagree that politics and personalities are a
| big part though. I think we have huge structural issues,
| requirements and pressures are increasing constantly, the
| way into science takes much longer and much talent is burnt
| out in the process, current funding favors short term "low
| risk" research and disincentives trying out new things or
| changing direction/field...
| derbOac wrote:
| My sense is the structural issues amplify the political
| and personality issues, in the sense that when those
| things arise they can maybe have bigger effects than in
| the past. But that's just speculation.
|
| I wish things like the research in this blog post got
| more attention, because it's important in understanding
| how things have and have not changed.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Weren't scientists of old after endowments from kings and
| royalty, too? Further, I seem to recall a Vertiasium about
| the guy who solved the cubic, fighting for a position at a
| college by dethroning another professor through an academic
| duel.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I'm a scientist at heart, and my PhD is science, but this is a
| very good description of why I decided to work as an engineer
| instead.
| spicymaki wrote:
| I worked for a midsize company that required the CEO be named
| on all patent applications. I am not sure engineering is
| exempt.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I agree, modern academia seems to be more about meta-skills of
| gaming the system and playing politics rather than who is the
| best at actual research. Probably why so many potential
| academics just go into private industry
|
| >I don't think this system will last for too long. Balaji has a
| good prediction on that.
|
| link?
| ralphmelish wrote:
| I believe he is talking about this thread: https://twitter.co
| m/balajis/status/1450324226129338369?lang=...
| aborsy wrote:
| He addressed this topic in a podcast around two years ago (he
| has too many podcasts to find it).
|
| He was asked about his views on academia vs industry, having
| been in both himself. He said capable people in academia will
| gradually realize that it's better to start companies or do
| the same work in industry, rather than writing these grants.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I feel like life in general is getting harder.
|
| There is less chance of escaping past mistakes, or more chance
| that a mistake will ruin you. There are more things you have to
| stay on top of benefits and finance wise. There are more options
| for many things, which leads to more analysis of what's best. The
| systems we use every day, from cars to computers, are more
| complex.
| ajg4 wrote:
| So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies
| anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven
| research is done in private companies rather than in public
| academia.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I would say for cs this is largely true now? At least for deep
| learning stuff my impression is pretty much the most impactful
| stuff are coming from the big tech companies. Academics sort of
| pick the scraps around them. I mean Google (deep mind) were the
| ones who figured out protein folding and for a while quite a
| lot of academics were jittery that they'd keep that knowledge
| to themselves.
| hankman86 wrote:
| Not as much as it used to it would seem. And that has got to do
| with some major misalignment in academic institutions. I don't
| even want to sound off on all the BS "research" that's going on
| in humanities (and which worryingly spills into STEM at an
| alarming rate).
|
| But even STEM research itself wastes too much time with costly
| self-serving objectives, rather than shooting for breakthroughs
| that lead to actual applications. Take CERNs large hadron
| collider, which has produced preciously few new insights,
| despite costing a fortune in taxpayer money. The Higgs boson is
| all well and good, but it's hardly a new finding.
|
| Or take mathematics' famous millennium problems, where only a
| subset (eg. P vs NP) would lead to practically useful new
| insights. By contrast, solving some obscure numbers theory
| problem would benefit humanity how exactly?
| rscho wrote:
| And one might be completely wrong about that. Academia and
| industry research are different in scale, goals and methods.
| Both have their uses.
| kergonath wrote:
| Private companies are often quite happy to fund an academic
| research group for a specific project. They also sometimes use
| this as a source of pre-vetted, competent future hires for R&D
| positions.
|
| The focus is quite different in private companies and research
| institutions.
| hankman86 wrote:
| Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions
| morally justify doing research that doesn't increase our
| collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application
| in the short term?
| mhh__ wrote:
| By definition the new is not always obviously the next, so "not
| relevant" requires a crystal ball for anything other than
| basically already established industries.
|
| Deep learning is beyond what VLSI was for the transistor, for
| example.
| girishso wrote:
| I have always thought if I was born some 200-300 years back, I
| would have made many scientific discoveries by myself. Science
| has indeed got harder.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What is "you?"
|
| If I, with my current education, was sent back 200 years... I
| could probably do OK with inventing stuff (engineering
| education, so I have some good answers backed by a nice model,
| much of which I'd have to work backwards to derive because who
| remembers 200 level engineering classes?). It took Marconi a
| while to realize that he had to ground the antennas, so there's
| a pretty good discovery for free.
|
| On the other hand, if I was actually born then... I think I'm a
| pretty clever guy, but not a genius. Someone like me 200 years
| ago would probably... I dunno, be trusted to fix mill
| equipment. Or maybe work on watches, depending on where I was
| born. Maybe I'd be a town pharmacist or something.
| nradov wrote:
| Up until about 300 years ago it was possible for a wealthy
| person with plenty of free time to learn literally _all_ of the
| scientific knowledge in western civilization.
| pixl97 wrote:
| One common thing seen when looking back on discoveries is many
| times the 'same' discovery was made independently by many
| people. The bottleneck was more in 'publishing', that is
| getting other people to know about what you figured out.
| growwrkr6 wrote:
| When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or
| replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of
| effort to bubble up relativity and information theory.
|
| When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically
| easier and "better"? I see complaints about social media
| brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state
| populism?
|
| I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions on "life is
| getting harder" seriously or sincerely. It's just another
| clickbait trope.
| [deleted]
| concordDance wrote:
| Life is getting harder in some fairly concrete and objective
| ways. Most noticably the number of hours the average person
| needs to work to be able to buy a house has gone up a lot.
| growwrkr6 wrote:
| That's a political problem not a scientific problem.
|
| No one wants to tax rich people who are of the age to have
| benefited from an era of high taxes. We let them pull the
| ladder up behind them.
|
| There is no real reason to follow their orders or coddle
| their sensibilities. What are they going to do? Instigate a
| civil war from their Lay Z Boy? 60-70% of the population want
| to reverse their political policies across the spectrum of
| contexts. Just do it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| QM, SR, and GR literally didn't exist 120 years ago...think
| about that.
|
| Also any physics paper you read today is about one of those
| major discoveries made over past 120 years, except maybe
| extromagantism or optics
| xwdv wrote:
| It was definitely easier in the past. I look at a lot of past
| scientific discoveries and I think I could have easily come up
| with them if I was in the time period and was educated. Could
| have made light bulbs, automobiles, telephones, computing
| machines, etc.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I do think it is getting harder, but that is not necessarily
| bad at all. One big bottleneck in science is the technology to
| do experiments. A lot of the discoveries that required lower
| tech are for the most part over, now we need some serious
| technology to make discoveries. Hubble has its limits, so we
| need the James Webb Telescope. Einstein predicted gravitational
| waves, but it took almost 100 years to develop the technology
| of LIGO and get it up and running to run the experiments. Also,
| the technology needed is also insanely more expensive. Newton
| needed time, pen, paper to writes hit laws of motion. Now we
| need satellites out at the L2 point that can be put in place
| remotely since it may be awhile before people can swing by and
| make repairs or troubleshoot physically.
|
| Maybe just spit balling. Maybe it isn't that science has gotten
| harder, but science needs more engineering support than what it
| currently has to develop the technologies to allow more a more
| rapid discovery.
| chestertn wrote:
| I tend to use and cite older works because they tend to be better
| written and reproducible.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Could this just be selection bias? Clearly the older works that
| people are still talking about are pretty special. This is sort
| of addressed in the "top cited papers" section. But I think a
| better metric would be something like "are papers that we'll
| still be discussing in 20 years still being published." Hard to
| say until 20 years goes by.
| chestertn wrote:
| I am talking about old papers that might not be widely known
| (i.e., have few citations) but present some useful results
| that I can use in my research.
|
| In my field, the latest papers are a bit "click-baity". They
| have interesting titles with many trending words but when you
| read them it is hard to find either a coherent vision or a
| single result that one can build on top of.
|
| Of course, I am generalizing. There is great research being
| done today and low-quality papers in the past. But it is
| completely true that the need to publish has distorted the
| goal of research communication.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Sorry if this sounds elitist to anyone but (I guess it is):
|
| When the R&D workforce expands at the rate it has over the last
| few decades you will invariably see less talented and less
| talented people entering the field. Also, various forms of
| overhead will grow with the size of the workforce.
|
| As an example about 20 people attended the 1911 Solvay Conference
| on Physics. How many attend a conference today?
|
| With the growing size of the R&D workforce also comes the most
| destructive force in any human endeavor: politics.
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Weelll ... the world population in 1911 was approx. 1,8 billion
| people, growing fourfold since then. One would expect some
| extra talents to emerge from the extra population.
|
| Also, an average Earthling is now much richer than before. A
| random Korean or Turk of 1911 had much smaller chance to study
| physics, much less money to even buy a ticket to travel to the
| Solvay Conference. Both is now easier and cheaper.
|
| On the downside, there is a lot more prestigious and well
| paying jobs today. Instead of tackling physics, best minds of
| today may be sitting in Facebook, trying to discover yet more
| ingenious ways to push ads on the rest of us.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| which means more competition if the goal is to distinguish
| onself
| groffee wrote:
| > 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics
|
| The Solvay conference was invite only, but I think your point
| still stands.
| interroboink wrote:
| > ... the most destructive force in any human endeavor:
| politics.
|
| I imagine you were being tongue-in-cheek, but just to
| unreasonably latch onto that statement a bit: politics is
| certainly infuriating, and it's easy to treat it as some
| unalloyed Bad Thing that we wish would just go away, but
| politics is essentially communication, and so it can be a good
| thing, too. The bigger the group, the more communication you
| need to keep everything (somewhat) together.
|
| For instance, on a larger "human endeavor" scale, I am grateful
| that WW3 has not happened yet -- thank you politics (:
|
| As with many things, it's a tool that can be used poorly or
| used well. But the tool itself is not inherently bad or
| destructive, I don't think. Or maybe it is both inherently good
| *and* bad, and you can't entirely separate the two.
| _jal wrote:
| Politics _happens_ via communication, but what differentiates
| politics is that it is mostly about resource allocation.
|
| People don't (usually) get pissed off about idle chitchat.
| They do when their project is spiked.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OK, but it's a particular _kind_ of resource allocation.
|
| Economics is about resource allocation using money and
| markets. Politics is about resource allocation using...
| influence? Connections? Coercion?
|
| If we had an open, transparent market where sponsors could
| bid on research, it might work better. (Hey, HN: Anybody
| want to set up such a market, funding it by taking a small
| cut of the bid?)
| honkler wrote:
| economics is the justification/rationalism that politics
| puts forth for resource allocation.
| concordDance wrote:
| Given the word "politics" has many different meanings you
| need to state your definition here if you want people to
| understand your post
| the_af wrote:
| I think the context is pretty clear in both comments.
|
| "Politics" in this context means a form of communication,
| consensus and decision making in a group.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The first comment was clearly talking about the internal,
| institutional politics of things like professional
| societies, academic fields, etc, while if we look at the
| other branch of this particular subthread we have a
| pretty long post about things like the media and
| international politics.
|
| Perhaps it is impossible to nip talk of the latter type
| of politics in the bud, though.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Imagine we somehow were able to purge all political and media
| influence, past and present, from the minds of each person
| today. And then had them rank the issues they find most
| relevant in the world. Where do you think the things people
| today spend all their time politicking on would rank?
| Similarly imagine they wrote out their 'oughts' of what the
| world ought look like in their eyes. How much overlap do you
| think there would be with the political platforms of today?
|
| Of course we can only speculate, but to me it seems self
| evident that there would be effectively 0 overlap. The issue
| is that politics invariably turns into a viral team sport
| where people pick some side, adopt that side's views
| wholesale, convince themselves they're the most important
| thing ever, and then set out to convert everybody else to
| their team, beat the other teams in any way possible, and of
| course always fanatically cheer on their own team regardless
| of whether or not its deserved.
|
| And then when things get hot enough, you get violence.
| Politics is precisely what started WW1. An otherwise
| irrelevant Archduke was assassinated and then that
| politically snowballed into everybody killing everybody
| everywhere, because politics. Then we chose to engage in
| extreme political myopia imposing absolutely harsh
| punishments on the losers of the war which, shockingly
| enough, didn't really lead to them rejoining the "world
| order" but instead declaring war on it again, and nearly
| winning.
|
| And the only reason we haven't yet had WW3 is nuclear
| weapons. War doesn't really work when you can guarantee that
| your country (and you, for that matter) will most likely not
| exist at the end, "win" or lose. But now political frenzies
| are overriding even that most basic aspect of self
| preservation and inching us closer to WW3 than we've ever
| been. So no, I do not think he was being tongue in cheek.
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| But it seems like if you're making the argument that science is
| getting harder, then raw numbers should matter more than
| percentages. From the article:
|
| "I'm claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that
| it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have
| comparable impact to the ones in the past".
|
| So, unless you're arguing that there aren't an equivalent 20
| people alive today as prestigious as the 20 people that went to
| the 1911 Solvay conference. Then the fact that there are
| greater percentage of less talented people now, shouldn't make
| it harder for the greater number of talented people to make
| "discoveries <of> comparable impact". (With some caveats of
| course.)
| bjornsing wrote:
| I think discoveries of equivalent impact are being made, but
| not in physics laboratories. Looking back at the current
| century I think it will be clear that the most impactful
| discoveries / inventions were related to information
| processing and that they were made in the private sector.
| kkfx wrote:
| IMVHO less talents are there because less public research where
| researchers manage themselves is there. R&D on-purpose for
| making money, product, in a publish-or-perish aka short-time-
| to-market move simply do not work.
|
| Volumes goes up, quality goes down.
| aaron695 wrote:
| enviclash wrote:
| The 20 years threshold in the analysis might be just related to
| the preferences of the Nobel committee.
| 0des wrote:
| > A basket of indicators all seem to document a trend similar to
| what we see with technology. Even as the number of scientists and
| publications rises substantially, we do not appear to be seeing a
| concomitant rise in new discoveries that supplant older ones.
| Science is getting harder.
|
| Nothing worth doing is easy. We have cleared the low hanging
| fruit and can now do the actual work. This is so exciting :)
|
| (also I wonder sometimes if as a society we are teaching people
| less to be critical thinkers, who are not afraid to disagree with
| the mainstream)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Nothing worth doing is easy.
|
| Breathing is pretty easy.
|
| But more seriously, I think what you said only applies in
| iterations of revolutions. A new breakthrough (e.g. new
| physics, new invention) could create a lot more low hanging
| fruit.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > I think what you said only applies in iterations of
| revolutions
|
| I think a major problem is ever since general relativity, all
| of our (existing and potential) new revolutions are _very_
| abstract and hard to relate back to human perception.
|
| Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better
| model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think
| about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact
| on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Hmm, I don't think that's something we can predict. Someone
| could have said the same thing before general relativity...
| in fact, most people did because they thought we were
| almost done.
| hinkley wrote:
| The Scientific Method, as classically defined, is a process of
| reducing a potential problem space to a single variable and
| testing it six ways to Sunday to prove to yourself and others
| that you aren't just imagining things. I don't think it's an
| accident that physics and chemistry are far ahead of psychology
| and biology. Both are emergent behaviors and emergent behaviors
| are notoriously difficult to lock down to a single variable. I've
| been wondering for a while now if we are just running out of
| 'simple' problems to test and running out of techniques for
| simplifying problems. That at some point there is only hard stuff
| left, even by a contemporary definition of "hard".
|
| I just want to state this as context, not as an invitation to
| tangent into an argument: I think general purpose AI is going to
| fade from consumer software again, as it has so many times
| before. But I suspect that some of the tools may find a home in
| areas where all of the problems are multivariate, and things like
| advanced techniques in linear algebra can help find signals in
| the noise when you can't control an environment.
|
| I recall years ago someone discovering that chemo works better on
| an empty stomach, and not just for the obvious reason of not
| having anything to throw up. Normal cells in "starvation mode"
| absorb toxins slower, while many tumors ignore this signal. If we
| can nail down things like "If you have these genes and your serum
| vitamin D is > 120 and you fast for >8 hours and ingest 20-40 mg
| of caffeine an hour before infusion, tumor shrinking is increased
| by 40%" by mining through mountains of telemetry and then working
| backward from there to find the causal link.
| spinaltap wrote:
| Off topic but I think movies and TV shows are suffering the same
| problem. We have exhausted every way of telling good stories.
| Nowadays if you want to give the audience "something new" or
| "something they've never seen before", the only way is to
| increase craziness and intenseness, which is the opposite of good
| stories.
| yk wrote:
| Some of these measures are not really convincing, most obvious
| Nobel prices/paper, the rate of Nobel prices/year is fixed so
| when the number of papers goes up, the rate of publications that
| get a Nobel goes down.
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, some of the measures were curious, such as unique
| keywords per 10,000 papers. It isn't clear to me what we should
| expect if science was doing fine -- more unique keywords total,
| yes, but per 10,000 papers? Why?
|
| In general, I think the paper needs a stronger argument about
| what a null hypothesis should be and why that is violated.
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