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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

#181

Post by ClumsyPilot »

supernovae wrote: post #159
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 Me…

Landing a winged aircraft is different than landing a rocket. Starship is designed for mars and its design changes pending mission realities. The fact they're progressing so quick is awesome. First engines to use Methane are great - and it shows a mission profile that is correct for a trip to mars - since they can use science to generate fuel while on mars. Uranium wouldn't be a revolution and there is no way it woul…

"Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going on, doesn't mean it isn't cool."

Dota is cool shit too, but I am not pretending it's an achievement that will be remembered in 3 generations, like the invention of an airplane.

I feel your categorisation is fed by being a fan of SpaceX and fails to put things into proper perspective.

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

#182

Post by bigbillheck »

f6v wrote: post #42
chrisamiller wrote: post #23

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?

By the miracle of compounding that's a 33% improvement in 16 years.

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

#183

Post by chinchilla2020 »

screye wrote: post #149

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 b…

The incentives in academia are to publish and receive citations. This is often very political and citations are made as a favor or trade, completely independent of the research.

Unfortunately this structure forces out productive scientists who want to do interesting research rather than churn papers.

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

#184

Post by chinchilla2020 »

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.

How much of that progress is coming from academia?

If the tech industry is an example, private companies and open source are doing 99% of the lift.

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

#185

Post by bigbillheck »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #15
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.

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…

> but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same.

Cars have a whole lot fewer right angles these days.

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

#186

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #71
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #15

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…

"We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner)." Sir Joseph Wilson Swan first created carbon fiber in 1860. Carbon nanotubes were discovered in 1950's. If Dreamliner was built out of carbon nanotube, then I would concede. Like this, meh.

"There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things."

to test this hypothesis, let's stop arguing about somewhat subjective things, like whether fuel injection is more significant than invention of a nuclear reactor, and think about things we can measure objectively.

Think about things we can measure, in the developed world, anything all, from wage growth to energy production to production of steel, by every metric that I have seen, their rate of increase was higher in year 1955 than in year 2015. Feel free to take your pick and show any statistics that disagrees with me.

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

#187

Post by chinchilla2020 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #15
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.

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 massively different. Anyone who works on cars in the garage will know that our modern vehicles are very different than the old carburetor and magneto machines.

Drivetrain, running gear, and fuel systems are completely different systems that would be unrecognizable to a 1985 mechanic.

This statement sounds like it came from a software engineer who has never washed grease off his hands.

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

#188

Post by caddemon »

photochemsyn wrote: post #99
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Every major pharmaceutical drug I know of (including mRNA vaccines see Pfizer) is based on publicly-financed (NIH) research done at public univesities and transferred to the private sector under Bayh-Dole exclusive licensing regimes. Now, would a university academic overseer be pleased to find their chemisty professors doing 'open-source drug discovery', or focusing on alternative uses of old drugs that cannot be pat…

This may be a problem, but it is not a problem at the level of the university IME. Universities are happy with any research that brings in a good amount of grant money. Sure it is gravy when they can make money on something like CRISPR, but the vast majority of labs will never make money on their results, and tenure track decisions don't appear to be made based on potential for those kind of pipe dreams, at least anywhere I've been. Universities want PIs that can regularly rake in money via grant proposals.

In the biological sciences the vast majority of grant money is coming from the government. The NIH could very easily push open source drug discovery by changing the way some grants are allocated, without any other change to existing policies.

I also think industry influence on research will always be a double edged sword. Yes there are important research topics that would be understudied in a purely profit-driven system. But there is also a big lack of accountability in a purely "academic" system. Industry forces replication in a way academia never can, for the topics it does tackle.

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

#189

Post by hardtke »

screye wrote: post #149

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 b…

You accidentally conflated "conference" and "paper" which is true in computer science and also relevant to other fields. The crux of the problem is that almost no one reads papers. People get exposed to ideas at conferences, and conference organizers invite the people that wrote the seminal papers many years ago to be the keynote speakers. Even if a paper is cited, it is usually because they saw the author speaking at a conference.
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