So long as significant new evidence is allowed into the light, evidence that must eventually be accounted for, all's well. But to the extent that there are those who'd prefer to hide it, or disallow, hand-wave away, or use ad hominem attacks against those who present that evidence, there's a problem.
Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#22Perhaps the FSF could work on some sort of open patent license that says if you use this patent in an invention you are not allowed to use it with any other unexpired patent unless it is also under the same license. That way, a culture of open source could be created in the non-software world that would move innovation into the private sector and out of academia by letting private companies more easily share their engineering with each other.
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#23This primarily I think applies to ACADEMIC science. The funding game in academic science is kind of miserable. Researchers eager to maintain positions for their post docs and grad students etc pay high levels of attention to which way the funding story is going -> ie, telling funders what they want to hear is the key skill. This is not always focused on new ideas. That's because it is pretty horrible not to get funde…
`The funding game in academic science is kind of miserable. Researchers eager to maintain positions for their post docs and grad students etc pay high levels of attention to which way the funding story is going -> ie, telling funders what they want to hear is the key skill. This is not always focused on new ideas. That's because it is pretty horrible not to get funded, so getting funding is a top priority?` I think t…
Idk. There's a sweet spot when it comes to novelty and funding, and I'm not sure it's always where it should be. I also think there's a certain relativism about novelty, in that what is novel in a subfield might look pretty conservative to an outsider.
All these studies of grants etc are overshadowed by this problem, which is that they typically use citations etc as some kind of metric of quality. The problem with that, in turn, is that over a reasonable study span, variation in those citations is going to be driven by self-seeking behavior. That is, what's popular is what's funded, but also what's cited. There's a certain bias in it, in that you don't learn about the novel studies that never were studied due to being too novel, and the truly paradigm shifting papers, which are cited at high rates, are kinda washed out by the hundreds or thousands of papers that just kinda creep along.
It's difficult for me to put into words what's on my mind. But when I think of colleagues who are well funded, even those I consider friends and people I respect, I don't think of their work as being innovative. It's very much in the status quo. Very technically well done, but basically data generating machines within a status quo paradigm.
The things that shake things up tend to come from elsewhere, from industry or accidents or secondary reanalysis of old data, or things that get funded off of miscellaneous sources scrounged together. It's as if true innovation happens regardless of grants, or in spite of it, and after everyone agrees it's the accepted thing, then it gets funded, after the fact.
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#24Politics
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#25[PLUG]
We are addressing some of this by providing a platform to discuss and publish negative results as part of the ERROR Workshop: https://error-workshop.org/
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#26The thing about this article is it seems to make the implicit assumption that hostility to novelty is a bad thing. I don't think that's justified. Obviously, allow no new ideas into a field and it will die but allow too many new ideas into a field and you have a recipe for the field becoming a pseudo-science. Before you propose changes to allow more ideas in, it would be appropriate to have some measure of whether a…
That's not really the zeitgeist in tech circles like here on Hacker News. Galileo syndrome and the whole disruption mindset means here we even have programmers wanting mathematicians and physicists to stop doing algebra with Greek letters and symbols.
In the end, quackery is much more likely than truly disrupting ideas.
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#27This primarily I think applies to ACADEMIC science. The funding game in academic science is kind of miserable. Researchers eager to maintain positions for their post docs and grad students etc pay high levels of attention to which way the funding story is going -> ie, telling funders what they want to hear is the key skill. This is not always focused on new ideas. That's because it is pretty horrible not to get funde…
You’re absolutely implying it’s a bad thing and I don’t know why you’re pretending otherwise.
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#28The notion that established field leaders, like large trees, stifle the undergrowth of new ideas, is not new. It is a partially self-correcting problem. Leaders die. However, there's no telling what some of the undergrowth that sprouted at the wrong time might have grown into were it given more light. Asking how we can do better is worthwhile.
A worse problem manifests when fields come to be dominated and policed by a commonly accepted orthodox dogma.
A less controversial example might be the common perception in Physics during the late 19th century that all the big things had been sorted out, and what remained was to fill in increasingly small blanks. This was a terrible sort of dogma to grip an entire discipline since it actively encouraged ambitious new minds to look elsewhere for discovery. Who knows what discoveries might have been made earlier if this kind of fatigue hadn't gripped all of Physics?
Modern examples are bound to be more controversial. e.g. Anyone looking for a silver lining in climate change is going to run into outrage and difficulty getting publications or funding. However, common sense tells us that huge, complex changes to massively complex global systems are bound to be, themselves, complex and mixed. Of course there will be good aspects, and taking advantage of them may be the key to dealing with the bad. Just suggesting this is enough to make you a pariah in many circles though. What kind of valuable and beneficial work simply isn't being done because of this?
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#29This article needs Wittgenstein to edit it. The empirical claim is:
"Science" "blocks" "new ideas"
I add quotes because these words aren't well defined as is. The article presents the following as evidence:
When a researcher dies, another takes their places and starts a different stream of research. The issue with this as evidence is that it takes a very generous definition of "blocks". If I get hired for a job instead of you, have I "blocked" you from taking the job? It's also trying to imply that the now-dead researcher was stifling innovation, but fails to show that the new line of work is more novel than the existing work that the deceased researcher was working on.
The next piece of evidence is that work that cites unique pairs of journals will be more cited outside of the journal its published than within. But this stretches the definition of "new ideas". Interdisciplinary work isn't necessarily novel. Often, it will simply involve the application of known techniques from one field to the domain of another.
The third is an experiment where they condition on the novelty of papers according to keywords, and measure the likelihood of getting a grant. This also stretches the definition of "new ideas" into a new dimension, where unfocused work is considered more novel. They also claim that it's concerning that having cited the authors work previously increases the likelihood of the author getting a grant; as though knowing that someone produces quality work shouldn't improve the odds of funding for more work.
In summary, the issue with writing like this is it never bothers to actually define the thing its measuring ("novelty"), and instead borrows multiple other definitions ("novelty is interdisciplinary", "novelty doesn't cite popular works in the field", "novelty means having more keywords"). In doing so, it says nothing about novelty itself (instead talking about "novelty") and so doesn't provide any insight as to whether there is sufficient novelty within academic science.
Edit: A more concise way to make this point - https://xkcd.com/2610/
Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
#30So long as significant new evidence is allowed into the light, evidence that must eventually be accounted for, all's well. But to the extent that there are those who'd prefer to hide it, or disallow, hand-wave away, or use ad hominem attacks against those who present that evidence, there's a problem.
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