The 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…
> It is a partially self-correcting problem. Leaders die.
But the next people do the same. One major question that the younger generation doesn't ask is, 'how do I not repeat that mistake when I have power?'
Often paraphrased as "Science advances one funeral at a time". Perhaps increasing life expectancy is what's holding progress back?
That makes sense, but I like the idea of longevity, and wouldn't want to their the baby with the bathwater. Maybe instead we could have some "term limit" for academic work?
I think we see the same “ageing stagnation” in business — where increasingly old business leaders don’t retire and maintain a stranglehold on resources.
I think we need a more general cultural shift that the current generation needs to build up the next generation instead of keeping a death-grip on power that destroys their children and grandchildren.
This 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 biggest issue in academia is the push for the number of papers you publish. You see it especially in Machine Learning, where garbage papers are continuously released with very biased tuning to "show how we beat a superior model" along with not releasing any code to ensure that no one could refute their paper, meanwhile those junk papers are securing your tenure and giving you prestige in the industry. It's one big joke.
Physicist and Bayesian pioneer E. T. Janes had a pithy take on this theme: In any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in possession of it. From Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, E.T. Jaynes, 2003.
I'm not sure about 'seldom' but what do I know? However the point is taken in that lots of people know this if not the metrics involved but when anyone questions the Establishment, too often the response is 'follow the science' and then they are sidelined or cancelled from areas of public discourse. Of course some of these questions and comments might amount to nutty nonsense or personal aggrandizement in which case it's open to others to demonstrate this. Isn't this most effectively done by skipping the smart rhetoric and dealing with the facts of the matter? This then leads to searching counter-questions for the initial questioner - great!
Incidentally might there not be the odd new idea buried in one of the two million publications published in around thirty thousand journals every year? Who knows?
This 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…
DEI stuff is not at all what's blocking new ideas in science, but your post implies it.
You should speak with some researchers. Entire categories are off limits because DEI politics. I could cite many examples, but one which comes to mind now is that of Noah Carl, formerly of Edmund's College, Cambridge University in England: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-noah-carl-is-fightin...
He deigned to research politically contentious topics like migration and IQ. He wasn't just defunded. He was fired.
`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 th…
There's definitely a sweet spot, and I don't think we're near the optimum. For a lot of people, I think grants actually aren't "Fund me thinking up an innovative idea", but are taking an innovative idea that's emerged from pilot data, a side project, etc. and spending X years formalizing and solidifying it.
This 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…
Don't like being made aware of your compliance in racist institutions? Want to just do your "science" as people outside the institutions are subject to mass incarceration?
That makes sense, but I like the idea of longevity, and wouldn't want to their the baby with the bathwater. Maybe instead we could have some "term limit" for academic work?
I think we see the same “ageing stagnation” in business — where increasingly old business leaders don’t retire and maintain a stranglehold on resources. I think we need a more general cultural shift that the current generation needs to build up the next generation instead of keeping a death-grip on power that destroys their children and grandchildren.
I don't know of any such companies, but US politics is getting done by very old people.
The major players are now typically around 80, and that seems bad for many reasons!
This 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…
I was in graduate school in the 1990s when anti-sexual harassment training started to come in, and there were plenty of complaints about that.