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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

#161

Post by int_19h »

zmgsabst wrote: post #50
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #10

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 is not a problem, it's a symptom. Economic rent is the problem.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#162

Post by unsupp0rted »

Mezzie wrote: post #158
unsupp0rted wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be that human brains can only do so much physics, which is a tiny subset of all the physics there is. It’s amazing upright apes can figure out the speed of light or postulate and find the Higgs Boson in the first place. How much physics do we expect the smartest dog in the world to do? What if we 10x’d its lifespan? At some point either: 1. There is no more physics 2. We build beings that can do physics that…

Looks like time to pivot to bioengineering and get better physics brains. ;)

I wonder if we’d have any luck engineering a brain that can visualize higher dimensions the way we visualize 3d.

It would be cool to have a brain that sees time, just as an incidental consequence of what’s happening in higher dimensions.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#163

Post by mansoon »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #162
Mezzie wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like time to pivot to bioengineering and get better physics brains. ;)

I wonder if we’d have any luck engineering a brain that can visualize higher dimensions the way we visualize 3d. It would be cool to have a brain that sees time, just as an incidental consequence of what’s happening in higher dimensions.

My brain did this once. It doesn’t work very well anymore after that.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#164

Post by mansoon »

klabb3 wrote: post #128
klyrs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There’s not a lot left that fits on a napkin. All sequences of tokens below length n have been enumerated.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#166

Post by crocowhile »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #92

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…

Whatever CD is measuring, is going down as a trend. So one cannot blame the obviously ethereal nature of CD for this.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#167

Post by dguest »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #92

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…

Boring title: "Scientific authors follow more citations when reading modern papers".

When I read a modern paper, I skim a lot more of the references. Getting to a cited paper is often just two clicks: there's a reference to the bibliography, and from there a link to arXiv (or some other public repository). As papers get older the bibliography might not link to arXiv, or might not link to a digitized paper at all. Those older papers are more time consuming to use as a reference. Scientists aren't lazy but they also don't have infinite time.

Put another way: papers form a graph, this result suggests that older nodes are traversed less frequently. I think the metric they propose is useful, but we could rephrase this all as measure of how useful papers are as a node (where CD = -1 is most useful, CD = 1 is least useful).

In short, this result might just mean paper discovery is getting easier. That's a good thing. We can wring our hands endlessly about how there's less low hanging fruit (there is) or about how academia is rotting away (as though it was ever different), but those conclusions are big jumps from what this paper says.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#168

Post by dguest »

Attrecomet wrote: post #51
pclmulqdq wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems unlikely that a patent clerk, even one with a PhD in physics, would be allowed to publish in a physics journal today. The gatekeeping has gotten a lot more strict.

https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-ein... This article mentions Einstein being offended that his paper was submitted to peer review by Physical Review, and submitting it elsewhere instead: "We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorised you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the – in any case erroneous – comments of…

These days Einstein could just put his paper on arXiv and worry about publication later. The physics community goes nuts about arXiv results all the time. There's zero review if you have a university email (or national lab etc).

I tend to agree that peer review has flaws. But given the ease with which someone can publish anything with no review whatsoever it seems reasonable that peer review might shift to fill a niche that is slower and less disruptive.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#169

Post by bawolff »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #10

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.

Climate change seems like one of the techiest of problems.

I think wealth inequality is too ill defined to even be a problem. If anything i would argue it is only a problem if class mobility is low and that is where the focus should be.

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