Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

blog.pnas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 241 posts

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#61

Post by lopis »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #38
walls wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has…

"SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship." From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement? If we kept up the pace of progress, we would ha…

In any field, you will have lower fruit to pick.

> We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.

How good were we ever at reaching the moon, though?

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#62

Post by PaulHoule »

kloch wrote: post #47
PaulHoule wrote: post #25

One thing obvious is the breakdown between theory and experiment in physics. Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics. Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to detect it on Earth. Einstein's prediction of how…

I don't understand why consensus jumped to the conclusion that there must be a new form of undetectable matter instead trying to figure out what we don't know about gravity. Theoretical particle physics is even worse. There haven't been any advances since the 1970's. Experimental particle physics has done a great job in verifying/testing the predictions from the 1960's/1970's but theoretical physicists are stuck in a…

My immediate take on "dark matter" was that there is something strange about gravity and inertia.

At the galactic level, however, there is a lot of cases where it seems you can see the mass distribution of dark matter. They've found starless hydrogen clouds that seem to be dragged around by a dark matter halo.

If you think about the evidence from galactic rotation curves you are likely to think that "this galaxy has some dark matter in it" but the modern point of view (which seems to work) is that "this dark matter has a galaxy in it."

When it comes to cosmology at the larger scales I don't really believe in the "multiple flavors of dark matter and dark energy" that is fashionable now. I wonder, for one thing, if the universe is really homogeneous at large scales and if that breaks the assumptions of current models.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#63

Post by BlueTie »

Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the same thing.

Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child. General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat. The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the people who are publishing the papers.

For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're giving up a lot of understanding.

If we give a mouse a maze that requires understanding of calculus or trigonometry to get to the cheese - the mouse just won't get there. Doesn't matter how many attempts we give it - the reasoning is beyond its capacity.

Why would humans be any different to our own upper limits of understanding?

(mostly stolen from a chomsky lecture called "the ghost and the machine")

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#64

Post by bjornsing »

echelon wrote: post #17
goalieca wrote: post #7

Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken. Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted tenure and funding points.

Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation functioning like that. Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies can reward innovators with more than just credentials. Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ... Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all economic drivers.

Something I often think about is how eccentric the leading researchers were in Einstein’s generation. Just look at a picture of the guy himself. Or consider Kurt Gödel, who starved to death when his wife was hospitalized because he could only eat food prepared by her.

Different times/cultures tend to put different personalities in charge, and that has a huge impact on what gets done. Overall I have a feeling the curious eccentrics are now out, and the charismatic corner cutters are in…

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#65

Post by ModernMech »

citizenpaul wrote: post #21

The entire college phd system is toxic and self serving. At my local college the guy the physic department building was named after was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood and when he died they just mothballed all his "projects" equipment. No one had any idea what it was or what to do with it and it filled a good part of the building. He was not easy to get along with and shot down anything that he…

> was obsessed with some weird thing that no one understood

Sounds like the beginning of every great scientist's biography.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#66

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

Emphatically not in global terms, but probably so in the United States.

Diffuse national priorities since 2000 have misallocated academic research, corporate R&D and government investment from hard-science to social science.

Also, the inverse relationship between the "financialization" of the US economy & the decline of applied science innovation is stunning. By way of example, applied sciences have lost a lot of talent to fintech jobs.

Similarly, the US-Russia cold war, for all its many downsides, did drive applied research. 20 years or so of low-intensity conflict in the ME wasted vast amounts of capital on logistics, munitions and purchased alliances that would have otherwise found its way to various DOD research programs.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#67

Post by ldng »

echelon wrote: post #17
goalieca wrote: post #7

Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken. Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted tenure and funding points.

Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation functioning like that. Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies can reward innovators with more than just credentials. Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ... Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all economic drivers.

And even then, can you really put the two first in the same bag as the others ? I have the feeling their research scope were noticeably broader, no ?

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#68

Post by InitialLastName »

f6v wrote: post #36
walls wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has…

I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.

> I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.

It takes even longer now while you wait in lines to get through the security parade.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#69

Post by mjburgess »

It's my view that most unexplained areas today are chaotic systems where reductionism fails: brain-body, ecological systems, etc. Even, i think, extremely fundamental physics.

I have the sense that "robust" science doesnt work here: the "explanation" is precisely the irreducible chaos. There isn't much more to be said than to point.

Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations

#70

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

photochemsyn wrote: post #56

It's worth noting that scientific progress in the Soviet Union seriously stagnated in the Lysenko era due to the prioritization of ideology and the destruction of independent science. I'd argue we are seeing the same thing in many western countries, especially the USA, under the ideology of corporate control of academic research. Much can be traced back to Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1980s, which allowed universitie…

Excellent observation apart from the profit-minded corporations bit. Corporate R&D spending has greatly increased, while USGOV spending has remained mostly flat.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...

Post reply on HN