Every time I read one of these editorials on the topic of lack of available research, I just look at the huge list of significant problems that still exist for life on earth and wonder: “what are they thinking?”
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
131–140 of 172 posts
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#132Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming an ever more complete and accurate view of reality. Disruption really just means stumbling upon something unexpected. Once you know there is something there, it opens up a whole world of new avenues for studying in that space, but it doesn't really make it any easier to find something unexpected again.
Consider for example deep sea archaeology. When you find a shipwreck, there's going to be a flurry of activity as people study the shipwreck, and the more they answer the questions they started with, the more new questions they are going to want to ask, so even long after the initial discovery there's going to be a continuous string of studies refining knowledge about that wreck. And this is true of every wreck. But finding one shipwreck doesn't generally make it easier to find the next, assuming the same resources, new wrecks are going to be discovered at a pretty steady rate. So the number of discovered wrecks grows linearly, but with each being revisited regularly, the cumulative amount of research done on all wrecks grows geometrically.
Similarly discovering a new chemical opens up many possibilities for studying that chemical, likewise for a new phylum of bacteria, a new type of star, you can only see something for the first time once, but you can take closer looks forever. We should expect the ratio of new things to look like a graph of 1/x.
Perhaps it's weird that the absolute number of disruptive papers is holding steady. While there are competing forces at work - on the one hand we have more scientists with better instruments, but on the other hand the low hanging fruit is gone and they must go ever further to find something new - there's no fundamental reason these two forces should perfectly counterbalance. I might posit our society has a certain appetite for discovery and we adjust our allocation of resources to science and innovation to maintain this continuous stream of disruptions, but I at least feel that scientific breakthroughs tend to excite people about science and desire to double down on science, not pull back. Perhaps more realistically we just move the goal posts as to what we consider disruptive such that the top X discoveries of the year are always "groundbreaking." Regardless of the why, this definitely the more interesting part of the story.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#133Earlier 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.
That sounded interesting so I looked into it. It seems to instead support peer review.
According to this [1], Einstein's paper that didn't pass peer review turned out to be wrong (it said gravitational waves didn't exist), and was later published elsewhere with different conclusions and fixing problems that the referee's report had already pointed out.
> The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee’s report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty.
[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird results because they are bad at conducting research.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#135So, 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…
The physical realm seems largely picked clean, but there is bountiful fruits available in the metaphysical realm - shame that ~no one can see it, despite complaining about it constantly.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#136"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…
> While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review...
Only knowledge that originates in academia, and even then only a portion of it.
> because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory.
While this may be generally true, it is not absolutely true.
> "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science...
Partially non-quantitative.
Also: it'a (partially) true, but so what?
> ...and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.
Right: one is known to be important, and the others are (at this point in time) hoped to be important (as they have been in the past).
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#137>and no one knows why
Really?
Too much talent going into trivial tech ventures. The shift towards rentier capitalism in the US, especially in terms of cheap money/QE being used for share buybacks instead of R&D. The colossal cost of higher education in the US, with grad stipends barely budging until literally this month. Fewer people willing to tolerate the (mostly) toxic culture of academic advisors overseeing Phds and post-grads. Google Scholar skewing papers to exist more for popularity/citation prevalence. The Internet as the biggest distraction in the history of humanity. etc. etc.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird results because they are bad at conducting research.
Literally every preliminary result I got was from an experiment that was explicitly not funded for the purpose it was requested for. That is, by year 2 of my grant, I was spending my monies on stuff I hadn't proposed, to prepare for the next grant proposal.
I guess part of the reason I exited academia was because I was bad at conducting research :)
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#139A 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.
The grant/funding process itself slows down science.
How to slow down scientific progress According to Leo Szilard
https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science
Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#140To 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…
You misunderstand why W&C was important (although, given your username, I assume you've already sat through the lectures): in elucidating (not discovering) the structure of DNA, they had a biophysical mechanism that explained heredity (specifically, that it was an antiparallel double helix with complementary bases, which immediately suggests a mechanism for replication). That recognition immediately led to a flurry o…
Yes, I know why it was disruptive. The question (for this paper) is, what other biological papers were more disruptive (since, based on the range of the scale, they barely made the first quintile).
I think the more important question is, how do we validate the usefulness of the CD5 metric. And, why is it better to be "disruptive" than "consolidating"?
Based on the examples shown (and others that I can imagine), it is unclear that it measures anything related to scientific significance.