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Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

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Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#101

Post by mmmBacon »

The nature of scientific progress isn’t linear so it’s entirely possible that progress is slowing down. I’m not sure how you’d quantify scientific progress though.

If you’ve not read Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I highly recommend it because it lays out how science progresses. If you think about it, most of our current technology stems from late 19th Century and early/mid 20th Century science. There are exceptions and different disciplines experience revolutions perhaps at different rates. I don’t know much about biological science but CRISPR comes to mind in that regard.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#102

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Hey dang, can we change the title to the full article's title? It's:

> Is scientific progress waning? Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

The current title ("Is scientific progress waning?") is so clickbait that it's just getting people reacting to the question instead of the study.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#103

Post by lotsofpulp »

f6v wrote: post #36
walls wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has…

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.

Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#104

Post by ClumsyPilot »

supernovae wrote: post #54
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship." From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement? If we kept up the pace of progress, we would ha…

Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never seen before that uses technology specially designed because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane - something no other manufacturer was able to master because of specific issues with those styles of engines and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane on mars to be able to fly back. The methane…

"First flight computer that could tiake off and land"

Soviet Buran could do that in the 80's

"Starship is designed for mars"

Original starship design was 5x larger and could take meaningfull payload to Mars. It had to be scaled down so that it use the ancient Saturn 5 launchpad and other infrastructure and be more affordable. Current starship is in the same weightlifting category as saturn 5.

"First engines to use Methane"

So what? If it was first one to use Uranium, that would be a revolution. This is just burning a different propellant. Its an incremental step. It is not a 60 -year milestone. Its like saying 'i upgrading home boiler from coal to oil' - so what? You are still stuck will low energy fossil fuels

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#105

Post by lkbm »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #95
throwaway5752 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ignores an enormous about of vehicle safety improvements (roof crush resistance, various collision detection/drift detection, electronic stability control, crumple zones... ad nauseum). 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.

The fact that we are still discussing ICE cars proves my poity. The first electric care was built 120 years ago and London had an Electric Bus company (!) in year 1903.

Yeah, we still use ICE cars, which unfortunate, but outside of greenhouse gases they're immensely less polluting than they used to be[0]. 1968->2010 reduced NO 99%, CO 95%, and particulate matter 99.92%. (I'm guessing this is looking at engines for PM. Tires/brakes still produce a lot, as I understand it.)

The EPA says tailpipe emissions are 98%-99% cleaner, with a 71% overall drop across "six common pollutants" despite miles traveled climbing 114%[1] (They use a few different starting and end points throughout that article.)

It's easy to miss how much cleaner modern cars are.

[0] https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.h...

[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#106

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #25

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…

Looks like the scientist who discovered neutrino oscillations is Bruno Pontecorvo and his life story is quite interesting. Here's what he had to say about the Soviet Union in 1992:

Now, for the first time, he is prepared to talk about the choice he made. But, with most Communist countries having changed their colours, how does he feel about the dedication of his life to the Communist cause?

'The simple explanation is this: I was a cretin,' he said. 'The fact that I could be so stupid, and many people close to me should have been quite so stupid . . .' The sentence was left unfinished.

Communism, he went on, was 'like a religion, a revealed religion . . . with myths or rites to explain it. It was the absolute absence of logic.' He stuck by his faith, even after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. When Andrei Sakharov, a fellow physicist, turned against the system, it made no difference. 'I had always admired him as a great scientist and a man of integrity. However, my idea was that he was naive . . . it was I who was naive.'

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/confessions-of-an-a...

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#107

Post by AnimalMuppet »

goatlover wrote: post #83
h2odragon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s. That's what I think about with accelerating magnitude of advances. What we have now seems much more like the expected linear progress of 70 years, helped along by the computing revolution, where most of the actual magnitudes of progress has occurred.

They predicted flying nuclear cars, but not driving 100,000 miles before the first tune-up.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#108

Post by abrichr »

rcpt wrote: post #48

> When the rare paper does break through, it usually does so in less than 12 months, suggesting that popularity comes from social media, news coverage, or via existing networks of people who are already well-connected in the subject area—rather than from citations in other work I buy ads for one of my papers. Only a few dollars per month but I like to think it's worth it

Fascinating. If I understand correctly, you are saying that you buy paid advertising for academic papers that you have authored, is that right? Can you please elaborate? e.g. what platforms do you use, which keywords / audiences are you targeting?

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#109

Post by bakuninsbart »

crazy_horse wrote: post #55
ren_engineer wrote: post #40

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?

Shitting on academia is certainly one of them, but lets look at the merit of each comment for themselves.

As someone with a lot of friends in academia, but luckily not dependent on it myself, I was quite shocked by the amount of politics, polishing, neck rubbing etc. going on. Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting it published is usually super messy.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#110

Post by zardo »

goatlover wrote: post #83
h2odragon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s. That's what I think about with accelerating magnitude of advances. What we have now seems much more like the expected linear progress of 70 years, helped along by the computing revolution, where most of the actual magnitudes of progress has occurred.

> In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s

Who is the 'they' in this statement?

(I think this may say more about what sort of statements get hyped and remembered, than what reasonable people thought)

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