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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

#71

Post by Octabrain »

bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the truth over anything else. Naive me, I guess...

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#72

Post by sybercecurity »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #52
bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

More than that though. Modern science research is a highly hierarchal and managed enterprise. It's led, or at least its funding is controlled by, the risk averse managerial class who can only think it terms of returns on investment.

9/11 (believe it or not) had a lot to do with that in IT/computer engineering research (and likely other fields) with government funding. After the attacks, the US Federal government moved to stressing development more than blue sky research. That drew all the funding away from fundamental science to projects that could be made into a product in 3-5 years and focused on addressing some issue of the War on Terror.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#73

Post by Isamu »

There’s an intuition that recent products and inventions are more incremental and that historical innovations are more revolutionary- in the sense of lacking precedence.

But this is an effect of the simplification of history, and when you read the detailed technical histories you can see how remarkably incremental the old innovations were.

We can easily see the precedents of recent innovations but not for older ones.

This is pointed out in the book I am reading on the development of the turbojet, which only looks more unprecedented than it really was.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#74

Post by Ygg2 »

bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

> Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Hasn't that always been the case? It's said science advances one grave at a time.

I suspect that there isn't a single cause but a cluster of them.

One possible issue is that high level science needs more and more energy (like LHC) and more and more intelligence to crack (most science prizes are teams).

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#75

Post by mb7733 »

bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Is there any evidence that this has gotten any worse over time? Planck's principle[0] is nothing new.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle?wprov=sfl...

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#76

Post by mrfox321 »

I've heard another interesting argument, at least for disruptive science/research from industry.

Lower corporate taxation incentivizes the hoarding of cash. Prior, corporations were incentivized to allocate more funding towards their industry research (IBM, Bell Labs, etc).

Would love some counterarguments, here!

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#77

Post by klyrs »

bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

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 kidding, if you understood that you'd have proved the conjecture)

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#78

Post by bilsbie »

Octabrain wrote: post #71
bilsbie wrote: post #44

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the…

Good questions.

It’s always been a problem but I’d say these factors make it worse:

1. It’s harder for individuals or small groups to make breakthroughs. We need larger groups and more expertise as well as expensive equipment to continue making discoveries. More hands in the pie make more gatekeepers and less risk taking.

2. In general our entire society is “circling the wagons”. I’m not sure why but we’re more tribal than normal. Science isn’t immune from the trend.

I could go on. It’s a big topic.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#80

Post by braunboffel »

Moissanite wrote: post #58
zmgsabst wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D printing seems a good example: Extruded plastic took off before resin printers because the patents expired a few years earlier. As far as I can tell, we could have had the 3D printing revolution in the 90s or early 2000s, but instead we locked the technology away to only be used in a few esoteric commercial applications until the patents expired.

Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.

> Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.

How much is the license cost?

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