Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Science Is Getting Harder

mattsclancy.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 150 posts

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#41

Post by paulpauper »

growwrkr6 wrote: post #17

When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of effort to bubble up relativity and information theory. When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically easier and “better”? I see complaints about social media brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state populism? I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions o…

QM, SR, and GR literally didn't exist 120 years ago...think about that.

Also any physics paper you read today is about one of those major discoveries made over past 120 years, except maybe extromagantism or optics

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#42

Post by spinaltap »

Off topic but I think movies and TV shows are suffering the same problem. We have exhausted every way of telling good stories. Nowadays if you want to give the audience "something new" or "something they've never seen before", the only way is to increase craziness and intenseness, which is the opposite of good stories.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#43

Post by edmcnulty101 »

rscho wrote: post #30
edmcnulty101 wrote: post #7

I think we need to figure out how to extend human lifespan to allow for experts to continue to grow their knowledge/skills past the 40 year retirement mark to have a greater chance of making more advanced breakthroughs.

I see you've not met my advisors. Please no. Old scientists sometimes contribute to push the younger generation forward. In my experience though, most of the time they're a liability, due to their incredibly overdeveloped ego and their deep involvement into politics. I'm an academic MD, so this phenomenon might be more marked than in other fields. See the book "the structure of scientific revolutions".

There's no private industry competition in academia, which allows those old scientists to become old slow codgers.

Most scientific breakthroughs through out history were just private citizens outside of the conventional academic establishment.

We need to put an end to these government restrictions on buying supplies and equipment which keeps the research down to just a tiny fraction of the population.

Allowing private citizens to do research would put a fire under those old codgers asses.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#44

Post by kevinventullo »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #26
timkam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the (hopefully) more realistic action plan would be to change the academic system so that the average academic does not need to spend what amounts to the full official working hours on non-research tasks, latest after their first Post Doc, i.e., ~2 years after reaching academic maturity...

Yeah good point. Also, many major historical scientific breakthroughs have been just a smart (usually rich) dude/dudette with a lot of free time and not a member of the conventional 'academic' system. So somehow figure out a way for public to get in on the research instead of government restrictions on who can purchase supplies which limits research to the .0001% who have PhD's. This opens the door to a lot more mind…

At this point, I think “a lot of free time” is a more limited resource than supplies and lab equipment. Though I may be biased as I come from an extremely non-capital-intensive field (pure math).

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#45

Post by ren_engineer »

aborsy wrote: post #38

Having been long in academia, what has increased is commercialization of all kinds of science, number of science managers (like modern day billionaires, taking credit for the work actually done by the graduate students and postdocs, growing to be huge), number of politicians putting their names in various papers (I see managers co-authoring on average a paper per week), brutal competition for status and citations, ex…

I agree, modern academia seems to be more about meta-skills of gaming the system and playing politics rather than who is the best at actual research. Probably why so many potential academics just go into private industry

>I don’t think this system will last for too long. Balaji has a good prediction on that.

link?

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#46

Post by kergonath »

ajg4 wrote: post #16

So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven research is done in private companies rather than in public academia.

Private companies are often quite happy to fund an academic research group for a specific project. They also sometimes use this as a source of pre-vetted, competent future hires for R&D positions.

The focus is quite different in private companies and research institutions.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#47

Post by hamiltonians »

inglor_cz wrote: post #13
bjornsing wrote: post #9

Sorry if this sounds elitist to anyone but (I guess it is): When the R&D workforce expands at the rate it has over the last few decades you will invariably see less talented and less talented people entering the field. Also, various forms of overhead will grow with the size of the workforce. As an example about 20 people attended the 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics. How many attend a conference today? With the grow…

Weelll ... the world population in 1911 was approx. 1,8 billion people, growing fourfold since then. One would expect some extra talents to emerge from the extra population. Also, an average Earthling is now much richer than before. A random Korean or Turk of 1911 had much smaller chance to study physics, much less money to even buy a ticket to travel to the Solvay Conference. Both is now easier and cheaper. On the d…

which means more competition if the goal is to distinguish onself

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#48

Post by creato »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #43
rscho wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you've not met my advisors. Please no. Old scientists sometimes contribute to push the younger generation forward. In my experience though, most of the time they're a liability, due to their incredibly overdeveloped ego and their deep involvement into politics. I'm an academic MD, so this phenomenon might be more marked than in other fields. See the book "the structure of scientific revolutions".

There's no private industry competition in academia, which allows those old scientists to become old slow codgers. Most scientific breakthroughs through out history were just private citizens outside of the conventional academic establishment. We need to put an end to these government restrictions on buying supplies and equipment which keeps the research down to just a tiny fraction of the population. Allowing privat…

Money seems like a far more significant restriction than regulation, which will only affect a small subset of possible experiments one could do.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#49

Post by growwrkr6 »

concordDance wrote: post #23
growwrkr6 wrote: post #17

When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of effort to bubble up relativity and information theory. When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically easier and “better”? I see complaints about social media brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state populism? I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions o…

Life is getting harder in some fairly concrete and objective ways. Most noticably the number of hours the average person needs to work to be able to buy a house has gone up a lot.

That’s a political problem not a scientific problem.

No one wants to tax rich people who are of the age to have benefited from an era of high taxes. We let them pull the ladder up behind them.

There is no real reason to follow their orders or coddle their sensibilities. What are they going to do? Instigate a civil war from their Lay Z Boy? 60-70% of the population want to reverse their political policies across the spectrum of contexts. Just do it.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#50

Post by mhh__ »

ajg4 wrote: post #16

So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven research is done in private companies rather than in public academia.

By definition the new is not always obviously the next, so "not relevant" requires a crystal ball for anything other than basically already established industries.

Deep learning is beyond what VLSI was for the transistor, for example.

Post reply on HN