111–120 of 241 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
NIMBYs, not NIMBAs?
I wish the article had addressed the other issue in the area: funding. The US stopped lavishly funding scientific research sometime in the 1970s. Private industry has taken up the difference, but private industry wants to focus on immediately usable research for profit, rather than fundamental stuff that’ll be useful for the next century for all of society. Is it that surprising that the most cited research papers co…
By a decade later, numerous factors had taken much of the steam out of the sails (to mix metaphors): the Vietnam war, foreign exchange and major changes in global currency, and the emergence of domestic peak oil in the US (lower 48 at least) with ceding of control over global petroleum production and prices to the Middle East, along with numerous consequences there. At the same time, Detante and the opening of China, and political scandals (most notably Watergate), and the civil rights and anti-war movements, changed attitudes toward government (amongst the Left) and toward academia (amongst the Right). The former is well documented through the general counterculture movement, the latter probably through the Lewis Powell Memorandum.
At the same time, there was what I'd see as a real decline in the pace of both scientific and technological progress in almost all areas, save information technology and some materials science.
TFA actually focuses fairly narrowly on one element, which is the explosion in publishing. I'll address that in a top-level comment, as I feel it's been overlooked by most other comments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bell Labs was only pseudo private. The government required they have that research lab in exchange for being allowed to have a monopoly. One should also consider that institutions like that were partly so productive for being at the right place and time in history, when we were developing the tools to exploit the low hanging fruit nature has to offer us. That whole era, we snatched it all up quick. Spaceflight and su…
Source?
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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.
Was 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.
Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are gone. OpenAI, Tesla and SpaceX are very different places, and Google has Alphabet that actually tries to be like those but fails. And I imagine that cutting funding from projects before they can mature is a large cause of that failure.
I wish the article had addressed the other issue in the area: funding. The US stopped lavishly funding scientific research sometime in the 1970s. Private industry has taken up the difference, but private industry wants to focus on immediately usable research for profit, rather than fundamental stuff that’ll be useful for the next century for all of society. Is it that surprising that the most cited research papers co…
That "lavish funding" era extended largely from WWII, with specific focus on technologies such as radar, fire-control (computers), and the Manhattan Project, was inspired strongly by Vannevar Bush's "Science: The Endless Fronteir" (itself something of an HN perennial), and kicked mightily in the keister by the Sputnik scare and nuclear / missile arms race of the 1960s. By a decade later, numerous factors had taken mu…
There are similar stories with chemical technology, manufacturing, even electricity generation. Fossil fuel depletion is one example of overtaxed sources. Strontium 90 in human teeth, acid rain, phosphate driven algal blooms, etc. are emblematic of overtaxed sinks. The US circa 1960 enjoyed a faster-than-sustainable pace of development (scientific and technological) by borrowing from the future on multiple axes.
The full title of the article is "Is scientific progress waning? Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations".
As submitted, the first, generic, clause was chosen. The second, more specific clause, might at least tip off readers that there's something more afoot.
The article narrowly addresses a specific premise: "There are so many papers coming out in the largest fields of science that new ideas can’t get a foothold". And indeed, that notion itself has failed to gain a foothold in the ensuing HN discussion. Instead, I see numerous threads in which some popular narrative, many with merits, but not specific to the contents of the article itself are being advanced and discussed. (There are a few notable exceptions, of course.)
As the article notes, even within single disciplines, there may be well over 100,000 articles published. No single researcher within a field can even keep up with the titles* published on a daily basis, along with their other research loads. As an empirical validation of this, I'll point to numerous instances of high-volume data assessment:
- The New York Times content-moderation desk manages a sustained rate of about 700--800 comments moderated per moderator per day.
- Facebook's content moderation data suggest similar rates.
- Data by Stephen Wolfram ("quantified life") and Walt Mossberg (general interivews) suggest that people can handle a peak of about 100--300 email messages of any significance and complexity, per day.
At 100,000 articles/day, a researcher would be faced with 235 titles per day, every day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.
This raises a few questions:
- Are all papers actually "paper-worthy"? (With apologies to Elaine of Seinfeld: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=gfDyOyrY-zM)
- What is driving publication of papers? Is it advancement of knowledge or gatekeeping functions within institutions and disciplines?
- What methods for capturing useful and valid information should be applied in cases of information overload? I've argued for years that in such cases, selection is less of a concern than rapid, low-cost, and unbiased elimination. That is, it's essential to discard information which cannot be usefully utilised and which will in fact impair the ability to process relevant available information.
- There's the meta-question (addressed by most comments so far on this thread) of what the limits and value, or even definition of science are. Whilst that's an interesting question of itself, and should probably have its own conversation, it's the least part of this specific article's merits.
Note that HN itself faces this issue, with numerous submissions daily, of which about 30 count as having made the front page. I'm increasingly going through the "Past" or "Front" links to find what's been curated on a given, or using Algolia to search for the top submissions for a given week, month, or year. That last is somewhat awkward where the immediate prior interval isn't selected, but illuminating. Rates of progress and/or stasis, as well as tropes and remarkable incidents, become much clearer when aggregated.
There are probably 100 times more scientists doing research than in the 1920's and the technological means for research are incomparably more advanced, so in that regard we're definitely moving at a much faster pace. Progress in fields like physics is definitely more incremental though as compared to e.g. the first half of the last century when the foundations of modern physics were laid (quantum mechanis, special an…
But what about the replication crisis? Was there such a crisis in the 1920's? Because the motivations for things like p-hacking all point at something broken in science.
As many other commentators have noted there are lots of problems in academia to do with funding and how ideas are spread, etc, however these problems seem to be fundamentally economic or political in nature, so just throwing more bodies/scientists at the problem will not resolve them, therefore there must be systematic change from the economic/political sides to improve the situation.
Another thing that pops into mind is in regards to low hanging fruit. An obvious solution to why progress may be waning in fields where computation is not important is that all the easy work has already been done (see Dirac's quote about 2nd rate physicists doing 1st rate work in the late 1920s with QM) and thus in order for there to be progress
1) students must have significantly more background knowledge as they need to know more about what does or doesn't work
2) creative ideas should not be shunned
1) imo is already a bit of a problem and I guess at one point in the future there may be issues once humans reach limits to how much their can learn in a certain time but for now this can be mitigated by being more efficient in how students are taught. For example in my own personal experience in math once you get to PhD/research level topics nobody reads textbooks to gain broad knowledge on a topic but rather reads them for reference. There's just too much to learn and know so instead if you're researching some topic you try learn whatever you need as you go rather than from a bottom up approach.
2) is linked to the problems in academia as I mentioned but I guess as more technologically advanced societies should have the advantage over less technologically advanced ones and science is of course basically a prerequisite for technology advances then this problem will solve itself natural selection style.
One other thing I would like to note about academia with regards to inefficiencies is how much is still locked away behind paywalls or other inefficiencies due to decentralization. For example lots of historical journals I've seen that only have the content in a certain language, etc things like that. For the scientist and for anyone in general interested in science it would be easier if there was just a central place to look for topics that would include all historical content in some common language so it would be easily accessible. An example again from math is me having information in a Hungarian journal that no longer exists. Not only is the information behind a paywall but also it was in Hungarian and only photo scans so I had to OCR it myself. This is an example of an inefficiency and I doubt most would go as far as I did to find that information, so potentially you have huge quantities of information that may be lost unless it is cited by modern literature on the topic, which is not always the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. The medical and biological sciences are where a lot of innovation has taken place, and the pace of technological advancement in things like DNA sequencing (as one example) is breathtaking.
> Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics > 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017 Is that the rate you expect?
If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial) vision to the blind. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in genomic medicine.