[HN Gopher] Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collec...
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Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation
Author : geox
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-01-09 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| mmmh.. Paving the way for ML-generated/immitated stuff.. IMO same
| thing in music, recent years. It's easier and easier to produce
| yet-another-immmitation.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| This pattern can be seen in golden age vs current CS papers: the
| former[0] contain multiple ideas per paper, derived from a
| short[1] list of references; the latter often spend pages upon a
| single idea, derived from a huge list of references.
|
| [0] at least: the classics which still have attention drawn to
| them today
|
| [1] to be fair, they didn't have much literature from which to
| draw -- maybe a fairer comparison would be "references as
| percentage of literature extant"?
| delusional wrote:
| [0] is extremely important here, maybe too important to be left
| in a footnote. When you look back at history it's all too easy
| to only recall a select few gems and discard the rest. It's
| possible that the vast majority of research published today
| will go by the wayside as dead ends or insignificant, while the
| stuff that ends up having world changing impact will also
| contain "multiple ideas" and a "short list of references".
|
| I don't have any proof to disagree with you, not even an
| anecdote, but be cautious of making claims such as these
| without data. Now will almost always seem uninteresting and
| pedestrian while the past will seem mysterious and interesting.
| zdw wrote:
| I tend to agree with this - one time I tried reading through
| all the Internet RFCs starting at the first one and I would
| say that probably 80% of the ideas in first 1000 were
| abandoned quickly, and after that that the % of abandoned
| went up to 90-95 percent, with a high quantity of vendors
| trying to push their own solution a standard.
|
| Very pareto principle/sturgeons law there.
| maicro wrote:
| With respect, in case you or anyone else wasn't aware - this
| is an example of "survivorship bias":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias .
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Isn't what you describe simply the consequence of picking low
| hanging fruits?
|
| it's only seminal papers that involve multiple ideas together,
| and even those have a lot of mathematics involved to make them
| stand up to scrutiny tests.
|
| I'd even go as far as to argue that if you took any of the
| highly cited papers of the last 5 years in ML, 20 years or so
| back, they'd be even more groundbreaking than that time's
| seminal work.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I think you see the same in physics. The extreme example is
| probably Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"
| [1], where he laid out the special theory of relativity. It has
| some incredibly original ideas, and not a single reference. :)
|
| 1. https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
| pnathan wrote:
| I noticed the same thing when doing my Master's (graduated
| 2012, work in embedded debuggers), for which I read a heck of a
| lot of early papers, both the better and the worse (Sturgeon's
| Law is very real). My SWAG is that a lot of early CS papers
| were being written by people doing very serious programming;
| they often did a few years in industry (or they were doing very
| focused Physics coding) before coming back for the PhD. Too,
| they were not worried about working within the dominant
| operating system framework - such things didn't quite exist. So
| they could give things a fresh go by the simple virtue of
| starting out on a new computer.
|
| I think the straight BS->PhD pipeline has introduced an
| "academic" bias, in the bad sense of the word. I also think
| that the dominance of Linux, Windows, etc have put blinkers on
| our research.
|
| In any case, you can trace the evolution I describe in the
| journal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1097024x which
| has been around for decades.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > work in embedded debuggers
|
| That is extremely interesting. I always thought that the
| debugging tools we have are cool... but we could do _so much
| more_ to observe the systems we develop. And the scripting
| languages in most of the embedded debuggers I had worked with
| sucked.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It reminds me of a chapter in Alex Pentland's book _Social
| Physics_ where he looked at the performance of IIRC eToro traders
| and the degree to which ideas spread among traders and the
| collective returns on investment.
|
| When there was extreme levels of connectivity and copying between
| traders collective returns went down because diversity of trading
| strategies went down, when there was too little connectivity the
| same thing happened as optimal strategies could not spread
| effectively.
|
| The maximum returns were achieved somewhere in the middle when
| there was both room for individual new strategies to emerge but
| enough connectivity for good strategies to spread avoiding both a
| sort of herd dynamic and isolation.
| pvaldes wrote:
| big words, obscure results
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Honestly, I think this is just an academic phrasing of the
| Eternal September concept. Which... is observed all over. The
| paper is a bit more general than that though and applies the
| concept to other social domains.
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