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Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

nature.com

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Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#121

Post by kickout »

scifibestfi wrote: post #116

"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of sci…

Yea, sadly I can relate to this quote. Modern science has lost it voice and purpose it seems and it nothing more than a glorified printing press of poor research and glad-handing consortiums.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#122

Post by dekhn »

scifibestfi wrote: post #116

"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of sci…

While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory.

"Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#123

Post by perardi »

So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of “disruptive”. (Also, can we just stop using that word? Such a though-terminating cliche at this point.)

But let’s accept that we are seeing less fundamental breakthroughs in science. Is that a failure of the system…or, depressingly, what if we really are hitting the limits of what we can model and describe?

In a roughly 200 year timespan, we figured out the at least the rough outlines of…wow, where even to start…electromagnetism, general and special relativity, quantum mechanics as it relates to field theories and chemistry, genetics, and computability. We really picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and what if there just isn’t any fruit left to easily get at? There’s certainly things like dark energy that we don’t have particularly satisfying theories for at all, but, the basics? We seem to have good models.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#124

Post by anonymouskimmer »

feraloink wrote: post #18
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #14

- Grant funding - Tenure requirements - Job duties (both requirements and limitations) - Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC - Credentialism - A "Pain point" focus would tend to be more incremental than truly disruptive On the good side there may be some decrease of disruptive inventions and discoveries because we are also focusing on eliminating the externalities of current and previous inventions and dis…

>Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC This is a big problem. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Research are the first that come to mind. Same is true for mostly government-funded initiatives like the one where Marc Andreessen invented Mosaic browser, that eventually became Netscape Navigator. I don't recall the project name. Do we even do that anymore?

We still have DARPA. We also have ARPA-E, ARPA-H, and HSARPA.

A variety of DOE national labs and core facilities (including NCSA where Mosaic was developed) still exist and are funded.

We may need more to take up the slack of the corporate research facilities.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#125

Post by [deleted] »

dekhn wrote: post #122
scifibestfi wrote: post #116

"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of sci…

While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory. "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or…

[deleted]

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#126

Post by dekhn »

jjk166 wrote: post #101
shae wrote: post #85

You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.

Well you get the funding before you do the experiment and thus before you know whether it's going to disagree with existing research. If you have the results before you do the experiment, you're not doing science.

No, grant proposals normally expect you to provide preliminary results. The more controversial your proposal, the better your preliminaries have to be. Especially you have to convince the funding deciders that you did the appropriate positive and negative controls.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#127

Post by scifibestfi »

dekhn wrote: post #122
scifibestfi wrote: post #116

"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of sci…

While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory. "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or…

Most scientific breakthroughs in history did not go through peer review. That's a new consensus mechanism that was introduced not that long ago.

Einstein was only subject to it once and didn't pass. Newton, Galileo and the rest were not subject to it at all.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#128

Post by klabb3 »

klyrs wrote: post #77
bilsbie wrote: post #44

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.

Alternative theory: we've pretty much nailed the basics and it takes a PhD before people can even understand the frontier of most scientific fields. These frontiers are manifold, highly technical, and extremely boring to the layperson. Number theory is a very clear example of this: go read the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Come back in a decade after you understand the Tate–Shafarevich group. (hahahaha just k…

I’ve heard this too about number theory. Perhaps in that field, the paradigm shift lies in reducing incidental complexity? Or even managing it in a way that is better for humans?

> it takes a PhD before people can even understand the frontier of most scientific fields

It’s interesting that we have this implicit view that hyper-specialization is the only way to advance. I always thought so too, but why really? If you think about it, specialization is very close to incrementalism. Groundbreaking paradigm-shift stuff can often be written down on a napkin, and rarely does it require a PhD.

That said, to find treasure you have to go down a LOT of wrong paths before you (or someone else) ends up in the right one.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#129

Post by dekhn »

scifibestfi wrote: post #127
dekhn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory. "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or…

Most scientific breakthroughs in history did not go through peer review. That's a new consensus mechanism that was introduced not that long ago. Einstein was only subject to it once and didn't pass. Newton, Galileo and the rest were not subject to it at all.

I'm not defending peer review; I never enjoyed it when I published. It certainly never made my papers any better.

Newton and others all published and then discussed the details in person, a lot of the peer review was "off-paper" and "post-publication".

Also, the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs, by count, occurred after peer review- mainly due to the unbelievable pace of breakthroughs due to technological advancement.

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