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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

#141

Post by inglor_cz »

supernovae wrote: post #10

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.

Whatever politics touches, it taints. No surprise here.

But one of the items you mentioned is food. I sort-of doubt that we have a great progress in food. People seem to be much fatter than ever before. That would suggest a lot of cheap calories, but less quality of food overall. Unless we measure progress in food by raw caloric content, we might actually be regressing.

The burden of metabolic diseases is certainly at an all-time high and not a single country in the world managed to reduce it meaningfully again.

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

#142

Post by dTal »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #103
f6v wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.

I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves.

Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?

And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials?

This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.

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

#143

Post by sdenton4 »

moffkalast wrote: post #43
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…

And you could make the same case for other inventions. Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing. In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it, still a hammer. Some things are invented and then perfected to a point where you can't really improve them much in a cost effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.

But now we can buy plans to build our own hammer factory factory factories.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframe...

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

#144

Post by blt »

tpoacher wrote: post #90

My view is that, like many other fields (including notably software engineering) before it, Academia has fallen victim to Goodhart/Campbell's law. 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 (…

What is a REF exercise?

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

#145

Post by lotsofpulp »

dTal wrote: post #142
lotsofpulp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit indus…

Fair enough. A very large portion of catalogue-able knowledge? Or orders more than was available before within a few seconds in your hands.

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

#146

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #134
dredmorbius wrote: post #117

This article and the HN discussion (as I write this) themselves illustrate a major component of the problem, with rich irony. 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 arti…

Ok, we've changed from the title to the subtitle above. Thanks! More than 30 stories make the front page per day - how many depends on how you want to count them, but actually 30 would be the lower bound of all such numbers.

Right. The history pages typically list about 100, and I suspect even that is a subset of submissions.

But if you were simply to skip by period looking at front page, it's 30 items.

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

#148

Post by blt »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #70
photochemsyn wrote: post #56

It's worth noting that scientific progress in the Soviet Union seriously stagnated in the Lysenko era due to the prioritization of ideology and the destruction of independent science. I'd argue we are seeing the same thing in many western countries, especially the USA, under the ideology of corporate control of academic research. Much can be traced back to Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1980s, which allowed universitie…

Excellent observation apart from the profit-minded corporations bit. Corporate R&D spending has greatly increased, while USGOV spending has remained mostly flat. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...

How does this conflict with the original comment's point?

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

#149

Post by screye »

Imo, it has to do with incentives and rewards.(in CS at the very least)

The Hindex is a measure thats become the target. So 1 seminal paper is much much worse than 10 completely forgettable papers. It is also common to divide seminal work into smaller publishable morsels to rack up the hindex at the cost of novelty and clarity. The lack of incentive to pursue novel works, also means that most papers are incremental by design. Imo, this is the biggest waste of money at academic phd programs. However, the students need to take their career somewhere, so an uncomfortable compromise is met.

Another problem is how every conference is converging into the same impact maximizing mush without any meaningful differences between them. This has massively affected searchability, which as we know leads to even greater 'agglomeration at the top'. Having different standards for novelty, experimental rigor, math rigor, scale, technical fit and the like would allow for accepted papers to follow internally consistent searchable constraints, while the diversity of target audiences accross conferences would allow for different types of research to coexist. In my field, conferences are only differentiated by deadlines and status. Everything else is secondary.There arent too many papers. There just that the quality of curation has gone to shit.

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

#150

Post by kloch »

nitrogen wrote: post #132
kloch wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, how much of it there can be or where it comes from. Contrast with Neutrinos. But you are correct, I don't know what I am talking about which is why my comments were phrased in the form of a question or literally with the words "I don't understand"

how much of it there can be Something like this? https://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/dark_energy/chart.jpg

Is that a chart of how much we think there is (model fitting based on observations) or how much we think there should be based on how it is created?

With Neutrinos we know how they are created and have a very good upper limit on how much there should be and it's not nearly enough to explain the observed effects. Same for the CMBR.

I'm not saying there couldn't be much more Dark matter/energy than neutrinos or photons but it's a bit too convenient to introduce a variable that is allowed to take any value and match it to observations without an explanation of what it is (besides having mass) or how it is created.

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