81–90 of 241 posts
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Academia now selects for people who are good at navigating bureaucracy and getting research funding rather than people who are good at doing actual research
What kind of comments does HN select for?
No, 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/145134227466…
That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced pollution).
That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-driving car advances.
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I started driving in 1982... and I can say with 100% certainty that cars of 2020 may not look all that different from cars of 1980, but under that skin of glossy steel and glass, they are very different. The engines are different (electronic fuel injection, timing and compression ratio monitoring), the transmissions are different (dual clutch, torque vectoring differential), the electronics are massively different, s…
I started driving around that time, too... in a 1950 Studebaker. Not only do I agree with everything you say about the difference between cars of today and 30 years ago, the magnitude of advances has accelerated too.
No, 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/145134227466…
One thing obvious is the breakdown between theory and experiment in physics. Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics. Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to detect it on Earth. Einstein's prediction of how…
Yeah, then in 2004, 30 scientists signed open letter[0] to stop pushing of creationism into physics.
Moreover, it was predicted[1] that dispute between Ether and GR will be resolved in favor of Ether when Higgs boson will be discovered, because continuous Higgs «field» (a medium) must be presented everywhere for Higgs bosons to create mass. Higgs boson was discovered about 10 years ago.
[0]: http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/~dsoares/open-letter.htm
[1]: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.882562
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia now selects for people who are good at navigating bureaucracy and getting research funding rather than people who are good at doing actual research
What kind of comments does HN select for?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/145134227466…
Cars are vastly different than they were in 1980. Fuel injection, aerodynamics, airbags, driver assist, hybrid and electric drivetrains, etc… the difference between a 1980 Honda Civic and a 2020 civic is massive. In 1980 we weren’t landing self piloting rocket stages on drone ships and reusing them a month later. The engines powering our rockets were completely different chemistry and metallurgy. We weren’t building…
I still think somewhere between the late 19th century to the middle 20th century had the most impactful change in human history, and things have slowed somewhat in term of overall impact since then, with more gradual improvements. 1881-1951 saw more transformative changes than 1951-2021. As in the world changed more in the previous 70 years.
There's still a lot of change going on, and some of it is transformative. But not to the extent of the radical transformations from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, with revolutions in science, technology, economics, trade, transportation, communication and political structures.
This might be more true of the developed world than the developing, which probably has seen those transformative changes more in the last 70 years. But in terms of what came to exist, it's hard to beat that period of time.
Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the same thing. Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child. General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat. The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the people who are publishing the papers. For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're giving up a lot of understanding. If we give a mouse a maze…
I struggle with thwir math articles, but I know that if I find time on weekend, I'll get the theorem (may not be the proof). Knuth books feels the same. Hard reading but rewarding.
Biology is always pleasing to read. CS is my bread and butter so I usually bookmark them.
PS: Masters in electrical engineering and PhD in system biology.
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I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of which were really technology or innovation problems. Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs, Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths, expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack of care of passion from aviation for the past few generations. But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits,…
Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
This follows from individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions which alter its outcome.
Campbell's law (by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social scientist), is similar, but has a more concrete focus on the predictably negative unintended consequences of using such indicators for decision / policy making: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
For example, how schools evaluated by marks end up 'teaching to the test' or outright help children cheat.
A simple combination of the two (to misuse Donald trump style) basically would say that using metrics: sounds good, doesn't work; worse still, it backfires. Goodhart's law focuses on the fact that metrics don't work; Campbell's on the fact that they tend to backfire.
We have seen this time and time again in software engineering, when managers try to use crap like LOC metrics, or more recently "slack activity" to judge the quality of a software engineer.
Academia is now experiencing its own version of Goodhart/Campbell's law. Between impact factors, h-indices, and now REF exercises, scientific progress is but an afterthought, and the system self-selects either those with a high ability of navigating this monstrous maze of inane metrics created by bureaucrats, or those with the ability to successfully commit academic dishonesty (p-hacking, optimal division of publication units etc) without getting caught, or both. And only extremely occasionally, people with truly novel ideas and output, which happen to somehow still manage to obtain funding despite not fitting into any of the tight little checkboxes that need to be ticked to get a grant on the latest grant-bandwagon.