There are just too many gatekeepers and too many people who are used to doing things a certain way. The world is just more populous now. We also need to make sure that people can speak their minds freely and write freely without worrying about getting cancelled.
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
141–150 of 172 posts
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I had already discounted the measure as being too prone to sampling error to be useful. I don't think these things are really measurable, and even if you did measure it, "disruption" and "consolidation" are such subjective terms it would be arguable to have a single-dimensional slider that went between those extremes.
Probably best to just say some of the greatest discoveries are both disruptive, and consolidating.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#143When I was in grad school I had done measurements of the magnetic anisotropy of amorphous compounds. I had found an interesting link between the structure and the magnetic properties which is surprising since the material is amorphous, the material properties should be isotropic yet these had a preferred magnetization axis. During the discussions of these results with my advisor I was told in very clear terms that he would not let me publish results that contradicted a paper of his from the 1980s.
I didn't push back, because I had no power and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there and start making money after being scammed out of 5 years of my life where I poured a lot of effort and got shit pay. I lost respect for my advisor and I was stunned by how un-scientific his response was when it came to correcting his 1980s results. My measurements were more accurate and were strongly supported by structural measurements he never did and couldn't do back then. But he was more interested in protecting his "legacy" of his paper with 13 citations.
So petty and small. I dropped those efforts and was able to get out completely obviating those results, never mentioned them in my thesis even.
Anyway, my point is that I'm not surprised that scientific results are lame, vanilla, uninspired. When the committees that decide on what gets funded are all 65+ dinosaurs stuck in their ways, very few disruptive ideas will be founded because you're disrupting the very research that got the committee members clout and recognition.
As they say, change comes a funeral at a time.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#144Earlier 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.
The chicken-and-egg problem illustrated in this thread seemed like the most appropriate place to highlight:
So (see disclaimer at the end) there is a publication I appreciate called Seeds of Science. My understanding is that it is (in part) intended to offer a pathway to work around structural failure in comventional peer review; As its web page describes:
" What is a 'Seed of Science'? It is a speculation, an idea for an experiment, a novel observation, a thought-provoking question and discussion, the highlighting of an under-appreciated problem, or an unorthodox research study"
They got an ACX Grant last year from AstralCodexTen to pursue this.
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CoI Disclaimer: My work is published in SoS.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#145"all metrics seem to decline as we keep adding more metrics"
it's called bureaucracy
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#146Nice to see numbers put to this. I remember thinking through a bunch of tech/science that I was familiar with, and realizing that most (not all) of the fundamentals in every case were known by the early 60's, and we've been working out the (very important) details ever since. Nuclear, electronics, chemistry, biology, etc.
plenty of counter-examples, I'm sure, but like once you know the structure of DNA and it's fundamental operations, the remaining discoveries will have a smaller impact.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#147So, 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 .
> The physical realm seems largely picked clean,
Famous Last Words
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
> The physical realm seems largely picked clean, Famous Last Words
It's a great meme, but memes are only good for estimating the future, and while the future can indeed be strongly influenced by the fact that much of human cognition is meme-based, there are also many other influences on it.
This and many other pieces of very useful knowledge are there for the taking in the metaphysical realm, just as was the case hundreds of years ago in the physical realm, prior to the rise of science (a metaphysical phenomenon itself).
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#149Related ongoing thread:
How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 - Jan 2023 (20 comments)
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#150A 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…
This was considered in the paper: "Some point to a dearth of ‘low-hanging fruit’ as the readily available productivity-enhancing innovations have already been made19,27. Others emphasize the increasing burden of knowledge; scientists and inventors require ever more training to reach the frontiers of their fields, leaving less time to push those frontiers forward18,28. "