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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

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

seydor wrote: post #38
asdff wrote: post #7

I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what is called for by grant funding agencies for their own research initiatives. If you want disruptive science, fund it then. That's all everyone wants to do in science, but the bills need to be payed somehow, so you play the game the funding agencies want you to…

The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts a…

> The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing?

I think there's plenty enough of competition in academia. And competition alone doesn't help, because the metrics over which one loses or wins the race are not correlated with short or long-term worthiness. And while we can describe, even if somewhat vaguely, what makes worthy science, there's no way I know of to have a stable system in which that metric drives funding.

> Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward

This research at least has some feedback: Google funds it because it expects to make money off using its results in practice, so the research has to be at least somewhat correlated with reality. Unfortunately, this structure also means that "open ecosystem" isn't pursued.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#62

Post by snordgren »

feraloink wrote: post #17
morphle wrote: post #5

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

Good article. Interesting finding at the very end: >Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. So... maybe this is because having more people doing scientific research doesn't yield more breakthroughs. More people doing scientific research DOES yield more incremental achievements, as the study found,…

The number of highly disruptive studies remaining the same seems impressive enough to me. I expect diminishing returns to be the long-term norm in science. The low hanging fruit get picked first, and every breakthrough means one more concept that the next generation of researchers have to learn and incorporate into their work.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#63

Post by TeMPOraL »

zmgsabst wrote: post #46
seydor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts a…

That’s because our financial system is controlled by power hungry but small minded sociopaths.

That's an apt way of describing the voter base :). Or the market at scale.

That's the major problem humanity faces. Individuals wielding concentrated power are dangerous, but they're also at least capable of thinking about something other than their immediate short-term interest. The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#64

Post by saalweachter »

Attrecomet wrote: post #53
fckgnad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filters out a lot of kook theories but I'm sure some revolutionary stuff from some Goodwill Hunting genius has been filtered out as well.

Fun fact: peer review isn't gatekept. There are peer reviewed young earth creationist articles out there: https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-review... So "peer review" isn't holding back kook theories at all on its own. At best, journal prestige is bolstered by it, which the journal can then translate into holding them back. The track record is a bit unclear, though.

I view peer review as respecting the time of the journal subscriber. Someone filters out the things that are obviously flawed before wasting everyone else's time.

Journal aren't just a magic upload into scientific consciousness; it takes time and energy to read and process them.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#65

Post by goodcanadian »

ctchocula wrote: post #48
derbOac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're pointing to is far more insidious than I think is usually recognized. People can point to incentive structures like grants etc, and to the implications in terms of the meaning of metrics etc but the real harm is in how it shifts mental focus and attention collectively. It's not ok to let minor things or things you think are obvious go anymore to focus on bigger picture issues, that might be "riskier" but…

Higgs, who hypothesized the Higgs boson back in the 70s, has only published 2-3 papers in the decades since. Before it was announced that he won the Nobel prize, his University was deciding between forcing him out or gambling on him potentially winning the Nobel prize which would bring more reknown to the department. He has commented recently saying if he were a young, freshly minted PhD today he would not have gotte…

This reminds me of a comment from an academic nearing retirement that I heard second-hand. It was something to the effect that applicants for Assistant Professor (or Lecturer) positions have CVs that are as good as or better than what applications for tenure looked like 20-30 years ago.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#66

Post by breck »

On the paper front, I have a number of published scientific papers with citations. My 3 most important papers—that will go down as turning points in the history of computer science—have a combined 0 citations, and 2 of them not only were not in a journal, but they were even flagged and removed from arxiv.

On the patent front, well patents are for parasites.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#67

Post by themaninthedark »

Attrecomet wrote: post #53
fckgnad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filters out a lot of kook theories but I'm sure some revolutionary stuff from some Goodwill Hunting genius has been filtered out as well.

Fun fact: peer review isn't gatekept. There are peer reviewed young earth creationist articles out there: https://www.cnet.com/culture/creationists-launch-peer-review... So "peer review" isn't holding back kook theories at all on its own. At best, journal prestige is bolstered by it, which the journal can then translate into holding them back. The track record is a bit unclear, though.

A peer review young earth creationist journal would still gatekeep anything that did not come from a young earth perspective. >Papers can be in any scientific, or social scientific, field, but must be from a young-earth perspective and aim to assist the development of the creation model of origins

The problem is that inherently peer review is designed to act as a brake: >Peer review, in which a scientist's paper is scrutinized by a group of colleagues, is designed to find errors and weed out half-baked ideas.

But in blocking you are going to reject ideas. >And although some have criticized peer review for rejecting new ideas just because they're too radical for the establishment to stomach

How much of a problem and how many revolutionary ideas are stopped, I don't know. I am more concerned about the reproducibility problem in science.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#69

Post by rich_sasha »

Maursault wrote: post #41
rich_sasha wrote: post #11

I wonder if this is to do with major vs minor breakthrough. Take physics. As I read it, modern fundamental physics is mostly some combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are both early 20th century inventions. They weren't necessarily genius in particular in-depth analysis, rather they were genius new concepts that created a whole new blank canvas to fill in. What did the field look like just b…

> but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? This is apparently a common misconception regarding a lecture given by Lord Kelvin in 1900 concerning "two clouds" in physics.[1] In fact, Max Planck solved the ultraviolet catastrophe, also in 1900, by assuming electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets of energy called qu…

TIL; very interesting!

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#70

Post by ZooCow »

> The intuition is that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors

This intuition seems to overlook the culture of citations in the patent space. There, the incentive is for applicants to be over inclusive with citations. This is combined with the increasing ease with which references can be found.

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