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Science Is Getting Harder

mattsclancy.substack.com

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Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#71

Post by semi-extrinsic »

derbOac wrote: post #61
cycomanic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we underestimate the amount of politics that was going on in science previously. Really compared to the shenanigans with Newton, Leibnitz or Hooke and Newton, much of what we see today is quite harmless. Or take for a more recent example Teller and Oppenheimer. I think in science (but not only in science) we tend to idealise the old days and scientists, because we remember the discoveries not the politics and…

I often wonder about this, and have talked about this all with older colleagues. My sense is some things were the same, but others were really different. Even looking at the peer review process: it was much more informal in the distant past, and maybe more akin to what happens today with invited papers in my experience, or with small open source software projects. There were certaintly very petty but intense personal…

Peer review really was different in the past. Hell, Nature even used to occasionally accept papers without any review at all until the mid-1970s, if the editor thought they would provoke good discussions.

Watson and Crick's famous 1953 paper where they presented the double helix of DNA is one such example.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#72

Post by bee_rider »

the_af wrote: post #24
concordDance wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the word "politics" has many different meanings you need to state your definition here if you want people to understand your post

I think the context is pretty clear in both comments. "Politics" in this context means a form of communication, consensus and decision making in a group.

The first comment was clearly talking about the internal, institutional politics of things like professional societies, academic fields, etc, while if we look at the other branch of this particular subthread we have a pretty long post about things like the media and international politics.

Perhaps it is impossible to nip talk of the latter type of politics in the bud, though.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#73

Post by cycomanic »

derbOac wrote: post #61
cycomanic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we underestimate the amount of politics that was going on in science previously. Really compared to the shenanigans with Newton, Leibnitz or Hooke and Newton, much of what we see today is quite harmless. Or take for a more recent example Teller and Oppenheimer. I think in science (but not only in science) we tend to idealise the old days and scientists, because we remember the discoveries not the politics and…

I often wonder about this, and have talked about this all with older colleagues. My sense is some things were the same, but others were really different. Even looking at the peer review process: it was much more informal in the distant past, and maybe more akin to what happens today with invited papers in my experience, or with small open source software projects. There were certaintly very petty but intense personal…

Yes I didn't mean to say that there are no issues in science. I disagree that politics and personalities are a big part though. I think we have huge structural issues, requirements and pressures are increasing constantly, the way into science takes much longer and much talent is burnt out in the process, current funding favors short term "low risk" research and disincentives trying out new things or changing direction/field...

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#74

Post by cycomanic »

Beldin wrote: post #63
cycomanic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you there are so many areas still vastly unexplored, fluid dynamics or the whole area of complex systems is definitely a prime example. Stephen Hawkins called his inaugural lecture "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?" suggesting that we are very close to the end of theoretical discoveries. Although less famous I would argue that prediction was just as wrong as "640kB should be enough for everyo…

He discusses in (if memory serves) "A Brief History of Time" whether we will keep on discovering ever-more accurate physical theories, or if there's a theoretical limit. The Planck scale offers a theoretical limit, so there's hope. At any rate, that is how I understood him. Not that we're nearly there, but that our current path of discovery seems finite.

To be honest I have not read his books, but I always had the impression from his talks that he was quite narrow minded in that he largely only meant astro/particle physics when talking about theoretical physics, ignoring many areas in the process. Also worth noting that the book came out 10 years after his lecture, so he probably revised his views during that time.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#75

Post by hankman86 »

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.

Not as much as it used to it would seem. And that has got to do with some major misalignment in academic institutions. I don’t even want to sound off on all the BS “research” that’s going on in humanities (and which worryingly spills into STEM at an alarming rate).

But even STEM research itself wastes too much time with costly self-serving objectives, rather than shooting for breakthroughs that lead to actual applications. Take CERNs large hadron collider, which has produced preciously few new insights, despite costing a fortune in taxpayer money. The Higgs boson is all well and good, but it’s hardly a new finding.

Or take mathematics’ famous millennium problems, where only a subset (eg. P vs NP) would lead to practically useful new insights. By contrast, solving some obscure numbers theory problem would benefit humanity how exactly?

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#76

Post by hankman86 »

kergonath wrote: post #46
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.

Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#77

Post by derbOac »

cycomanic wrote: post #73
derbOac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder about this, and have talked about this all with older colleagues. My sense is some things were the same, but others were really different. Even looking at the peer review process: it was much more informal in the distant past, and maybe more akin to what happens today with invited papers in my experience, or with small open source software projects. There were certaintly very petty but intense personal…

Yes I didn't mean to say that there are no issues in science. I disagree that politics and personalities are a big part though. I think we have huge structural issues, requirements and pressures are increasing constantly, the way into science takes much longer and much talent is burnt out in the process, current funding favors short term "low risk" research and disincentives trying out new things or changing directio…

My sense is the structural issues amplify the political and personality issues, in the sense that when those things arise they can maybe have bigger effects than in the past. But that's just speculation.

I wish things like the research in this blog post got more attention, because it's important in understanding how things have and have not changed.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#78

Post by aborsy »

cycomanic wrote: post #57
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 think we underestimate the amount of politics that was going on in science previously. Really compared to the shenanigans with Newton, Leibnitz or Hooke and Newton, much of what we see today is quite harmless. Or take for a more recent example Teller and Oppenheimer. I think in science (but not only in science) we tend to idealise the old days and scientists, because we remember the discoveries not the politics and…

Teller touches upon this subject. In an interview published on YouTube, he says, increasing scholarships and science funding further doesn’t help; because money doesn’t buy science, money buys technology; we actually don’t have enough scientists on whom to spend the money. And that, most of the advances in quantum mechanics and atomic physics were made by individuals genuinely interested in problems in these domains, and worked in modest conditions. Quantum mechanics theory took practically nothing to develop.

Politics, of course, is part of the humanity, but it manifests differently in different environments (academia vs industry, or then vs now). There is undoubtedly politics in industry, however, there are also products and reality checks. The companies won’t survive if they operate entirely based on politics. In academia, on the other hand, the environmental feedback can be weaker depending on the subject; there, politics could come to the fore. Amusingly, Kissinger said, politics in academia is specially vicious precisely because the stakes are so low.

As for then versus now, there used to be a lot of low-hanging fruit that could be taken until 1980s, and there weren’t many researchers. But now there are fewer accessible opportunities, with far more researchers. If you consider that the size of the cake has not increased proportionally (due to factors mentioned in the article), while the number of players has increased substantially, you may conclude that the environment has become much more competitive. Increased competition indicates increased politics, emphasis on selling, networking, and other non-scientific factors relevant to industry, except there you actually get paid. The conditions are nowadays totally different. There all sorts of performance metrics (H-index, citations, number of papers etc), that have become target, in place of good science, which are gamed.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#80

Post by ackbar03 »

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.

I would say for cs this is largely true now? At least for deep learning stuff my impression is pretty much the most impactful stuff are coming from the big tech companies. Academics sort of pick the scraps around them. I mean Google (deep mind) were the ones who figured out protein folding and for a while quite a lot of academics were jittery that they'd keep that knowledge to themselves.
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