Just move to China. Dysfunction in the US has no fix in sight.
Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
11–20 of 241 posts
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#12I think this comes down to the growth of scientific management and technocracy in research and that bureaucracy's attempt to fight over dwindling public funding for the sciences coupled with lack of private non-commercial sources of funding. Universities are mostly made up of managers or researchers that end up acting like managers in order to justify their position. This leads to a set of bureaucratic rules for scie…
Would you mind sharing the author's name as well please? I'm interested in checking this book out.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#13Its almost like we dont invest in it anymore...
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#14[flagged]
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#15No, it isn't waning. There are struggles, but that doesn't mean its waning. We're having massive progress in medicine, space, cosmology, environment, biology, food, transportation. Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack.
I think it's obviously waning if you look at any field that deals with physical world: a car from 1940 looks totally different than one from 1980's, but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same.
Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear engines, fusion propultion, etc?
Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept computers.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7...
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#16First you shouldnt define scientific progress via academic progress.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#17Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken. Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted tenure and funding points.
Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation functioning like that.
Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies can reward innovators with more than just credentials.
Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ...
Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all economic drivers.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#18I think this comes down to the growth of scientific management and technocracy in research and that bureaucracy's attempt to fight over dwindling public funding for the sciences coupled with lack of private non-commercial sources of funding. Universities are mostly made up of managers or researchers that end up acting like managers in order to justify their position. This leads to a set of bureaucratic rules for scie…
> Disagreement, the possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the ability to take random choices based on intuition are eliminated when the majority of a field acts like scientific managers.
How do we democratize physical sciences in the same way as CS? My bet would be on the combination of the two (simulation) and providing the high-level tools to the masses.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#19[flagged]
That law is as unscientific as can be. In fact the very wiki article says that it has been empirically disproven.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#20This is not a question that would be answerable until at least 50 years from now. Discoveries that seem inconsequential are often profound, and vice versa.
Rise and decline of large scale human efforts and societies is generally only visible in retrospect. A good chunk of the people in any golden age think they are in a dark age or that doom is on the immediate horizon.