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

> the newbies compete so intensely amongst themselves that they can’t compete with the established dominant choice — in the case of research, that often means [mostly only old papers get cited].

The article does not mention tenure and the publish or perish incentive (which forces academia to work like the auto industry, just-in-time manufacturing of incrementally better output).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gMszBSAX23uqYhytR/technologi...

( https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6xm5DFX4AEjP3_.jpg )

Scientific progress is still way ahead engineering readiness in terms of results… and engineering readiness, while catching up, validates and enables further scientific progress.

Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken. Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted tenure and funding points.

I think this comes down to the growth of scientific management and technocracy in research and that bureaucracy's attempt to fight over dwindling public funding for the sciences coupled with lack of private non-commercial sources of funding. Universities are mostly made up of managers or researchers that end up acting like managers in order to justify their position. This leads to a set of bureaucratic rules for scientific success and a range of conferences that prop that system up. Disagreement, the possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the ability to take random choices based on intuition are eliminated when the majority of a field acts like scientific managers.

I highly recommend reading "The Body Electric" which details an excellent example, in both technical and social terms, of how structural effects like the above impede highly "random" or creative ideas in science.