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

111–120 of 150 posts

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#111

Post by Fomite »

mike_hearn wrote: post #81
paulpauper wrote: post #36

This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like, what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge explosion of research into STEM subjects, from m…

Well. I wonder. You generalize a bit from maths and physics to all of STEM there, and throw computer science in there too saying there's not too much new ground to break. But that isn't what I see when I survey the CS literature. Instead it feels like important areas get neglected and ignored, whilst enormous herds thunder towards fashionable topics. My guess is this slowdown is happening for a few reasons: 1. Increa…

"2. State subsidies. We know these kill worker efficiency. If that weren't true the USSR would never have fallen behind the USA in terms of wealth. What the article refers to as science is really academia, and academia is dominated by ever increasing amounts of government money. Whilst the article phrases this as science getting "harder" it can also be seen as researchers simply becoming less efficient than they were in the past, which is exactly what we'd expect to happen given that academia is a parallel planned economy. Efficient here means in terms of discovery production not paper production, of course."

This isn't actually true.

"For the first time in the post–World War II era, the federal government no longer funds a majority of the basic research carried out in the United States. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. The federal share, which topped 70% throughout the 1960s and '70s, stood at 61% as recently as 2004 before falling below 50% in 2013."

https://www.science.org/content/article/data-check-us-govern...

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#112

Post by Fomite »

jltsiren wrote: post #102
hankman86 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applica…

I think it's the opposite. Science stagnates because the system focuses too much on justifications and practically useful results and too little on curiosity. For a few decades, the prevailing school of thought in public administration has focused on justifications. You must always justify how the public will benefit from the proposed use of money. Then you must report that you used the money for justified reasons. T…

I once had someone told me their organization "Didn't do curiosity driven research". I have never lost interest in a long-term position faster.

Having a position that doesn't require me to peg everything to a practical deliverable has done wonders for my ability to actually chase down ideas.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#113

Post by Fomite »

hankman86 wrote: post #76
kergonath wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because this is extremely hard to predict.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#114

Post by Fomite »

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…

I'm in a field that requires no more advanced equipment than a decent laptop, and there's not a vast array of private citizens "putting a fire" under anyone.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#115

Post by dragonwriter »

mike_hearn wrote: post #81
paulpauper wrote: post #36

This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like, what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge explosion of research into STEM subjects, from m…

Well. I wonder. You generalize a bit from maths and physics to all of STEM there, and throw computer science in there too saying there's not too much new ground to break. But that isn't what I see when I survey the CS literature. Instead it feels like important areas get neglected and ignored, whilst enormous herds thunder towards fashionable topics. My guess is this slowdown is happening for a few reasons: 1. Increa…

> State subsidies. We know these kill worker efficiency. If that weren't true the USSR would never have fallen behind the USA in terms of wealth.

The USSR never did fall behind the USA in terms of wealth; it started very far behind when it came into existence in the ashes of czarist Russia, and caught up quite a bit through one of the most rapid industrializations the world has seen. Even after the initial phase of industrialization, from the 1950s throughout early 1980s, the Soviet economy grew faster than the US economy.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#116

Post by whatever1 »

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…

But then Balaji also predicts that crypto is viable. So I would take his opinion with a pint of salt.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#117

Post by dhosek »

spinaltap wrote: post #42

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.

I think that's less a question of having ways to tell good stories and more one of a creative space being exhausted. There's a desire in a long-running series to keep raising the stakes as the series progresses, but doing so reaches a point where there's nowhere left to raise the stakes. I think that's been a bit of the problem with Doctor Who in the last few years. As they've kept raising the stakes (right up to the existence of the universe), there's nowhere left to go.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#118

Post by cycomanic »

aborsy wrote: post #78
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…

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,…

The argument does not hold any sort of deeper inspection. The greats of quantum mechanics, people like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger etc. we're all professors, which at the time put you up in the highest ranks of the middle class or the lower upper class + the status of the title it implied in Germany for example. They were amongst the highest paid salaried employees. In comparison now a typical professor salary is lower than what many junior software developers get straight out of undergrad. And that is after years of job uncertainty through PhD, postdocs and tenure track. Essentially the only ones left do out of idealism. (I also believe this long uncertainty is a big factor in the large gender imbalance, women are much less tolerant of this then men)

The other irony is that Teller himself was part (came out) of one of the biggest counter examples. The Los Alamos project pushed unprecedented funding into science, and it let to many discoveries that would have taken decades longer otherwise.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#119

Post by melony »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #106
XorNot wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I really don't understand what he's saying there - where does he think his salary comes from? Money buys those interested individuals time to pursue that interest, and the more of it we have the more people we can put in the right time and place to find the next big thing.

I think the key point is the "and worked in modest conditions", emphasis on modest. Injecting a ton of money creates perverse incentives and attracts people who are not interested pursuing something out of curiosity and interest, but for the money. I think it probably creates a hostile environment for people who are there out of pure interest, because if there is a way to earn more money/status/power/whatever by doin…

Academia is a career, not some sort of side project for bored scientists. We don't measure the competence of developers by the time they spend on side projects outside of work. You don't have to be full of visionary ideas to do research, and talent is everywhere. Teller would't be where he was had he been born in South America or Africa.

If you only give money and positions to people with "passion" when there is a clear demand for more, that's called exploitation. Maybe consider becoming an aerospace investor instead, that field is full of talent chasing after lost dreams for pennies. If you are a software engineer on this forum, you know damn well what your net worth is in the current North American market compared to the other legacy engineering fields. It is patronizing to expect the other scientific fields to be worth "less" than CS.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#120

Post by skellington »

kaashif wrote: post #105
laingc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP is conflating Maths with Pure Maths. While I’m sure there is new ground to break in Pure Maths, I would agree that it’s getting harder and harder. However, as you note, in Applied Maths there are more unsolved problems than you could address with a million researchers. A physicist or pure Mather social looks at Navier-Stokes and says, “Oh, we know how that works, nothing to do there I guess”, whereas the a…

> A physicist or pure Mather social looks at Navier-Stokes and says, “Oh, we know how that works, nothing to do there I guess” I don't know if that's the best example, it's one of the Millennium Prize problems to prove that smooth solutions always exist to the Navier-Stokes equations. Pure mathematicians do, by and large, still consider proving the existence of things to be "something". Maybe I'm misunderstanding wha…

He was simplifying for clarify, but what he said was just another form of what the person above him said which was:

>> no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. So, Millennium Prize is an unsolved and famous problem like Reimann Hypothesis, etc..

Post reply on HN