111–120 of 172 posts
May be relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-d...
Eugenics research is disruptive? Why not phrenology?
I assume only people like me and maybe a few like you will know what this means, but doesn't it upset you that I can freely say it?
From my training as a computer scientist, I am used to the idea that some problems are easy and some are plainly intractable. Perhaps that's also true in science and technology, and we are starting to exhaust all the easy directions. Still, many less techy problems remain, at least climate change and wealth inequality come to mind. Perhaps we'll see the biggest innovations in solving those in the future.
As a software developer, I’d want to see a rewrite to clean up the legacy bodges before we conclude we can’t add more. Also, wealth inequality isn’t a problem: how wealthy the people at the bottom are is. Wealth inequality is associated with fewer poor people and a higher standard of living because wealth inequality requires a wealthy society. What exactly are you “fixing”?
Wealth inequality implies that some people disproportionately control the life production of other people. If you're in favor of a "great man" idea of progress this is a benefit. If you're in favor of individual power to direct production and innovation (along the lines of de Tocqueville or it's left-wing equivalent) this is a detraction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not suggesting we can't add more, rather, that I find it conceivable that there is a barrier of technological progress that we can approach, but never reach. So the pace of progress will slow down. Concerning wealth inequality, I do think it is a fundamental problem of society if a fraction of a percentage controls majority of the available resources even if the lowest half has their immediate needs met, but we c…
The Pareto principle is incredibly harsh, but such hierarchies seem to form naturally. My concern with your view is that in trying to “squash the gap”, you end up doing so by making everyone poorer — and society worse overall. Happy to agree to disagree; hopefully we can consider each other’s perspectives in crafting policies.
You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.
And you can't get through peer review if you did. That process maintains consensus. Albert Einstein failed peer review the one time he was subjected to it. Newton was not subject to it at all.
His 1905 seminal papers were not peer reviewed per-se but the journal's editor who accepted the paper was Max Planck! So it was reviewed by another legendary physicist.
These days science has branched off into such specialized areas that another specialist in the field is needed for review. Whether that should be an anonymous referee, or someone else it is still valuable to catch errors and determine the soundness of the techniques. Also the selections of those peers is something for debate too.
[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.211782...
If you're really smart, enough to make disruptive scientific discoveries, why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more? If you stay in science, you'll earn peanuts and not even have any career stability since the academic track is so bad these days.
Because it's boring and depressing. And one thing money can't buy, unless you're solely interested in accumulating money, is satisfaction with your life.
Obviously not true for everyone, but we've got 8.8 million "scientists" (I'm not sure what they mean by the word). https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide...
Most scientists don't work in academia. Some of those who do have stable jobs as staff instead of faculty positions.
And this guy did it in his spare time while working at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889
Gone into universities as bright young people. They come out of them brain dead, not even knowing what science means. They think it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No, that's academia. And if a paper is peer-reviewed it means everybody thought the same therefore they approved it.
An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges, new scientific insights, they can never ever be peer-reviewed. So we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances. If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they don't come from the center of that profession, they come from the fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think of electric lights. They don't come from within they often come from outside the bricks. We're going to kill ourselves because of stupidity."
— Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist, research biologist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated the Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification.
A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.
Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the…
shrug
To understand the fundamental problem with this paper and the "CD" measure of "disruptiveness", one need only look at Figure 1a, where three Nobel Prize winning papers and three patents are ranked on the "CD5" scale. Apparently, there are more disruptive discoveries than Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-stranded structure of DNA (CD5 0.62 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0), and Baltimore's discovery of reverse tran…
That recognition immediately led to a flurry of follow-on work confirming the mechanism and birthing molecular biology as we know it, which opened up vast new areas of science.