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Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

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Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#81

From my training as a computer scientist, I am used to the idea that some problems are easy and some are plainly intractable. Perhaps that's also true in science and technology, and we are starting to exhaust all the easy directions. Still, many less techy problems remain, at least climate change and wealth inequality come to mind. Perhaps we'll see the biggest innovations in solving those in the future.

As a software developer, I’d want to see a rewrite to clean up the legacy bodges before we conclude we can’t add more. Also, wealth inequality isn’t a problem: how wealthy the people at the bottom are is. Wealth inequality is associated with fewer poor people and a higher standard of living because wealth inequality requires a wealthy society. What exactly are you “fixing”?

I'm not suggesting we can't add more, rather, that I find it conceivable that there is a barrier of technological progress that we can approach, but never reach. So the pace of progress will slow down.

Concerning wealth inequality, I do think it is a fundamental problem of society if a fraction of a percentage controls majority of the available resources even if the lowest half has their immediate needs met, but we can disagree on that all day and arrive nowhere.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's doing a rather bad job at filtering out obvious flaws, given the reproducibility crisis we've got on our hands. Everyone says peer review is very important, but when it comes to reviewers putting in the hard and boring work of actually checking the raw data, almost none do, so in truth, peer review is NOT important to most scientists.

And we nevertheless pay the price of adhering closer to orthodoxy for it, since effort being put in is a rather superficial "this paper sounds reasonable to me" filter, perhaps with some boxes that must be checked like p-value or sample size.

Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. I didn't mean that peer reviewing doesn't lead to gatekeeping, but that simply making something peer reviewed isn't enough, because ludicrously bad attempts at science can be peer reviewed.

Peer review is also obviously a bad solution for the reproducibility problem, given that we've got the problem now, concurrent with generations of peer reviewed manuscripts.

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