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Science Is Getting Harder

mattsclancy.substack.com

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Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#131

Post by dale_glass »

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…

> 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.

That's just an excuse to exploit people. The same nonsense as with teachers. "We want teachers that are passionate, not there just for the money". Bah.

In the end we're trying to get stuff done, and it doesn't really matter whether the pipes are kept clean by somebody really passionate for sanitation, or somebody who just thinks the pay is good enough to tolerate the smell.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#132

Post by alecco »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #125

We are in need for new metrics beyond citation count or quantity of published papers. A century ago, there was more content in each paper than it is today. This is mainly related to the incentives that exist today to publish, e.g. for getting a raise in salary or getting a getting a new academic position. I like to cite older papers because I can reference them multiple times in a single manuscript, reducing the numb…

20 years ago there were discussions about PageRank applied to citations. But as we all know, it can be manipulated, too (SEO).

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#133

Post by mike_hearn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #115
mike_hearn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

But other countries during the same period caught up and became first tier competitors, also rising from the ashes. Japan was nuked twice and by 40 years later was out-competing US industries. As the story goes, the USSR fell partly because Boris Yeltsin did a random 'spot check' of a US supermarket on a trip to visit NASA and couldn't believe what he saw.

At any rate, a full discussion of this might be off-topic, but let's say that it's a pretty uncontroversial idea in economics that a state run economy (like science) tends to be less efficient and produce lower quality outputs

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#134

Post by mike_hearn »

Fomite wrote: post #111
mike_hearn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But we're not talking about percentage shares, we're talking about relative changes and budgets rose significantly over the past 50 years. The increase in federal spending in the USA stopped between 2005-2015, but "university" and "philanthropy" continued rising (same problems more or less), and of course spending in other countries continued to rise. Also the rise restarted:

https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-2021-us-spen...

"Small boost this year completes 4 years of substantial growth despite Trump ... NIH's budget now stands at $42.9 billion, a 33% rise over its 2016 level of $32.3 billion. Similarly, spending by DOE science tops $7 billion, compared with $5.4 billion in 2017, a boost of 30%. NASA science programs rose by 8% and 11% in 2018 and 2019, respectively, before slowing in 2020 and 2021. NSF's budget, now nearly $8.5 billion, has grown the least among the four biggest federal science agencies. But even so, a 14% rise since 2017 compares favorably with an overall increase of only 4% during the second term of former President Barack Obama."

So these are massive spending increases, regardless of what industry is doing.

There's something else we need to watch out for here. Corporate research isn't famous for its high production of papers, but the evidence that "science" in general is getting harder is based on paper-related metrics. It's possible that science hasn't really been getting harder, but that corporate R&D has been sucking the best science out of the academic realm into a place where fewer papers are published overall, so there's less to cite. The fact that the most cited paper of all time is an obscure biology paper and that pharma spending is such a large component of "basic science", is suggestive of this.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#135

Post by scscsc »

When a field is young, it is simpler to make important discoveries, so in that sense, science is (obviously) getting harder.

But most of the graphs can be explained by the sheer number of papers being published.

Academics have the perverse incentive to publish as many papers as possible, instead of discovering as many interesting things as possible, because items published is way easier to measure than real progress made.

Therefore there is a significant paper inflation problem. People might today write 10 papers with LPUs (least publishable unit) with stuff that would have been a single technical report 30 years back.

This is much worse than it sounds, because it affects productivity significantly in subtle ways: it takes effort to publish those 10 papers, it takes effort to read up and review the 10x papers of others, and it takes time to think about LPUs instead of concentrating on the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, due to the way the research system is set up, it is not likely things will improve.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#136

Post by hatmatrix »

spicymaki wrote: post #62
foobarbecue wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a scientist at heart, and my PhD is science, but this is a very good description of why I decided to work as an engineer instead.

I worked for a midsize company that required the CEO be named on all patent applications. I am not sure engineering is exempt.

I believe this happened at Theranos as well.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#137

Post by gspr »

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…

> 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.

I did not experience this in my 8 years in academic math (PhD + postdoc). Maybe it differs a lot from field to field, but mine was positively teeming with unsolved problems. More importantly, it's teeming with paths that will clearly lead to more unsolved problems (of all difficulty and importance levels).

In fact, the thing I miss the most from academia is probably helping new students blaze some of those new paths. Both for their sake, and as a way for me to discover new problems for myself.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#138

Post by popcube »

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,…

this is restricted in physics, e.g., life sciences need as more as they can get money, they even do not have enough money to pay assistant, there are so many species waiting for identifying, even use old protocol, scientists still need to pay salary, specimen storage fees...

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#139

Post by WalterBright »

mike_hearn wrote: post #133
dragonwriter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

But other countries during the same period caught up and became first tier competitors, also rising from the ashes. Japan was nuked twice and by 40 years later was out-competing US industries. As the story goes, the USSR fell partly because Boris Yeltsin did a random 'spot check' of a US supermarket on a trip to visit NASA and couldn't believe what he saw. At any rate, a full discussion of this might be off-topic, bu…

It may be uncontroversial in economics, but it politics (at least in the US) central economic planning is always proposed as the solution for every problem.

For example, the current infant formula crisis was entirely the result of government management of production, distribution, and pricing of it. But the suggested fix is to have the government launch a criminal investigation of Abbot.

Re: Science Is Getting Harder

#140

Post by WalterBright »

Fomite wrote: post #111
mike_hearn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your evidence only is about volume of spending, which has no bearing on efficiency.
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