[HN Gopher] Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
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Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
Author : bhaprayan
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-04-24 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattsclancy.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattsclancy.substack.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| For fields especially resistant to new ideas, Egyptology takes
| the prize.
|
| Thus far surface luminescence has been used only once, and
| produced results only just barely acceptable. A chip from a
| facing stone of one of the Giza pyramids, and from the Valley
| Temple showed an age of 5000 years, +/- 500 years, where the
| officially assumed age is 4500 years. That was enough of that!
| Jun8 wrote:
| I didn't know about surface luminescence dating. For others
| who'd like to read the paper on using it to date monuments:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263201697_Surface_l...
| eesmith wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S129620741...
| ?
|
| "Surface luminescence dating of some Egyptian monuments",
| Journal of Cultural Heritage, Volume 16, Issue 2, March-April
| 2015, Pages 134-150
|
| > Surface luminescence dating to Egyptian monuments of the age
| range 3000 B C to Hellenistic times has been applied for first
| time. Monuments include the Giza plateau (Sphinx Temple, Valley
| Temple, Mykerinus), the Qasr-el-Saqha, the Khasekemui tomb and
| the Seti I Temple with Osirion at Abydos. Equivalent doses were
| measured by the single and multiple aliquot additive and
| regeneration techniques, and dose rates by portable gamma ray
| probes, and with laboratory counting and dosimetry systems. The
| resulted ages have confirmed most conventional Dynastic dates,
| while in some cases, predating was obtained by some hundred of
| years. The dates are discussed in the light of current
| archaeological opinions.
|
| From the conclusion:
|
| > Different calculated and archaeological ages, beyond one
| standard error, were noticed for one sample at Valley Temple at
| Chephren's complex (limestone), one at Sphinx Temple
| (granitic), and one at Seti II Abydos (sandstone).
| tempnow987 wrote:
| 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 funded, so
| getting funding is a top priority?
|
| Adding to this there is a major push now on DEI and other types
| of policy work which are not always directly scientific idea
| focused. Then there are compliance costs (you need to train your
| researches on project costing / job codes for payroll,
| procurement processes with federal funds etc) and ideally get
| them the NIH training (see below for a reading list).
| me and white supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and
| Become a Good Ancestor, Layla F. Saad The New Jim
| Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle
| Alexander United States and Racism Systemic:
| Explicate the systemic nature of institutionalized racism, Steven
| Turam How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to
| Black Resistance, Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin
|
| https://www.training.nih.gov/2020_inclusion_anti-racism_and_...
|
| So you have a lot on your plate - not that this is a bad thing,
| but just to be aware of it.
| russdill wrote:
| The funding game is a miserable slog, but people are in
| academia because they want to do _their_ research. If they
| wanted to use their expertise to obtain a paycheck, there are
| typically much better opportunities to do so.
| Fomite wrote:
| `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 this is oft, but not always, overstated (note, not the
| bit about the funding game being miserable - it is). I've had a
| relatively successful track record as new faculty, and my best
| scored grants are also my most daring. Significance and
| Innovation is one of the criteria the NIH reviews on, and
| funding is tight enough that a "meh" score there can torpedo a
| grant. Getting to know what your funder (and most importantly,
| your particular program officer) wants is critical, but what
| they want is not always "safe" science.
|
| The advice I give my trainees is "Learn how to tell your story"
| and "Stop blowing off your Specific Aims page, it's the most
| important."
|
| `Then there are compliance costs (you need to train your
| researches on project costing / job codes for payroll,
| procurement processes with federal funds etc)`
|
| Almost all of this is handled by departmental staff or a
| sponsored programs office at every institution I've ever been
| at, using the indirect costs that Hacker News is always so fond
| of talking about.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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 that, in
| turn, is that over a reasonable study span, variation in
| those citations is going to be driven by self-seeking
| behavior. That is, what's popular is what's funded, but also
| what's cited. There's a certain bias in it, in that you don't
| learn about the novel studies that never were studied due to
| being too novel, and the truly paradigm shifting papers,
| which are cited at high rates, are kinda washed out by the
| hundreds or thousands of papers that just kinda creep along.
|
| It's difficult for me to put into words what's on my mind.
| But when I think of colleagues who are well funded, even
| those I consider friends and people I respect, I don't think
| of their work as being innovative. It's very much in the
| status quo. Very technically well done, but basically data
| generating machines within a status quo paradigm.
|
| The things that shake things up tend to come from elsewhere,
| from industry or accidents or secondary reanalysis of old
| data, or things that get funded off of miscellaneous sources
| scrounged together. It's as if true innovation happens
| regardless of grants, or in spite of it, and after everyone
| agrees it's the accepted thing, _then_ it gets funded, after
| the fact.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't too
| big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain a
| pretty big funding line) life is better all around?
|
| My own indirect experience is not NIH, but gov lab related
| work. This is I think more bureaucratic because the labs have
| funding streams, and the key goal can be not to f it up. That
| might move things to a somewhat heavier compliance model.
|
| I'm not against indirect costs rates, they are a HUGE
| efficiency winner to avoid needing to push paper at the
| individual level. That said, the system it funds is not
| itself that efficient.
|
| UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for
| 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there
| though.
|
| So if you get $400K in the door you get to "keep" $160K of
| it.
| Fomite wrote:
| `All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't
| too big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain
| a pretty big funding line) life is better all around?`
|
| Absolutely. The standard in my field is somewhere between a
| 50% and 100% soft money position. Mine is only 25%, and
| while I could probably fish around for a position at a more
| prestigious university, it's a big boost to my ability to
| go "Yeah, that seems neat, lets do it" and thus a major
| quality of life boost.
|
| `UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for
| 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there
| though.`
|
| This is not how you calculate indirect rates.
|
| Indirect rates are a percentage of your direct rates. If X
| is the money you get for your lab (i.e. direct costs) and
| the indirect rate is 60%, then the actual calculation is
| 1.6X = 400,000, so X = $250,000.
|
| If you want to point a finger at the thing that's probably
| the most harmful to the funding of science, it's not
| indirect rates. IMO, it's that the NIH budget cap for a
| modular R01 was set at $250,000 in direct costs in *1999*
| and has never moved from that.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| 25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting
| projects range! Do you have responsibility for other
| positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know
| someone who was very stressed because their proposals
| "carried" a fairly large group of folks.
|
| Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick
| there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to
| layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or
| just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y
| (indirect) = total award?
| Fomite wrote:
| Answering this bit first:
|
| `Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick
| there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to
| layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or
| just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y
| (indirect) = total award?`
|
| Yeah, this is how that math works, at least at my
| institution, with some rare exceptions.
|
| `25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting
| projects range! Do you have responsibility for other
| positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know
| someone who was very stressed because their proposals
| "carried" a fairly large group of folks.`
|
| It really is awesome, and I'm tremendously privileged to
| be in that position. It's especially nice in my field
| (infectious disease epidemiology) because in basically
| all outbreaks, the work we do is uncompensated for ~ 6
| months or so and then you sort of hope for grants to back
| fill it (I had, for example, done my best work on the
| pandemic prior to getting any funding for it).
|
| You have however nailed the primary source of my stress -
| keeping "my" people funded. Graduate students (the
| downside of my position is its in a place where TA lines
| are functionally non-existent), postdocs, etc. are my
| responsibility, and keeping them funded is most of the
| reason I write grants.
|
| We're experimenting for some staff positions (because
| 100% funding a staff scientist on grant money is daunting
| and terrifying for a single PI) with using a pool of
| funding, to address that while four of us may be able to
| pay 25% of a data analyst, none of us can pay 100%, with
| gaps in that backfilled by some institutional resources.
| mxkopy wrote:
| While I would agree that DEI isn't directly about science, it
| certainly helps the end goal of understanding some phenomenon
| as holistically possible.
|
| I think these sorts of policies are aimed more towards
| administrators rather than researchers, which for some reason
| are often the same people.
|
| I think academia could benefit from adopting the music
| industry's approach to managing talent - i.e. the managing and
| talent are usually kept separate.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I don't find the measure of novelty in the article convincing.
| This seems more like a proxy for how inter-disciplinary the work
| is.
|
| It also isn't necessarily a bad thing if most research aims to be
| somewhat safe, though of course this should not be taken too far.
| "Safe" research means there is a good chance of obtaining useful
| results. Usually we know this because we're using e.g. a known
| and established method on a somewhat unknown, but focused
| problem.
|
| More risky research is also needed, but even then it might be
| possible to split it into parts that still have value on their
| own. There is certainly a problem here for younger scientists as
| they need results to advance their career. That usually means
| that somewhat safer, but not too safe research is in the best
| interest of those researchers.
| tigerlily wrote:
| My former academic supervisor's former academic supervisor died
| in 2009. He was big name in his field.
|
| When I offered my condolences, my professor said "It's ok. When a
| mighty tree falls, it can be sad, but it means the light can
| reach all the little saplings down below".
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about this article is it seems to make the implicit
| assumption that hostility to novelty is a bad thing. I don't
| think that's justified. Obviously, allow no new ideas into a
| field and it will die but allow too many new ideas into a field
| and you have a recipe for the field becoming a pseudo-science.
|
| Before you propose changes to allow more ideas in, it would be
| appropriate to have some measure of whether a field is too tight
| or too in the amount of ideas it allow now.
| nostrebored wrote:
| That would require a level of meta awareness about science that
| adherents of specific fields just don't have.
|
| People could've said the same about phlogiston.
|
| We live in an age where we assume we are right about most
| things, that's completely historically unjustified.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| So long as significant new evidence is allowed into the light,
| evidence that must eventually be accounted for, all's well. But
| to the extent that there are those who'd prefer to hide it, or
| disallow, hand-wave away, or use ad hominem attacks against those
| who present that evidence, there's a problem.
| tmoertel wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd add a minuscule idea to this important quote, those who
| settle themselves as authority often have deep insights and can
| see the limits of accepted ideas. Those who are taught the
| latest truth rarely have it, they admitted the paradigm as is.
| They contribute to the inertia.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| It's funny that the article rather explicitly rejects such
| theories of malfeasance/corruption/etc. and, instead, points to
| cognitive effects interacting with the decision-making process
| as a plausible cause that is compatible with assumptions of
| good faith and competence.
|
| So, arguably, the only person confident of being in possession
| of the truth is the one with the ready-made cynical quote.
| sva_ wrote:
| "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
| opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
| opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is
| familiar with it." -- Max Planck
| narrator wrote:
| Perhaps the FSF could work on some sort of open patent license
| that says if you use this patent in an invention you are not
| allowed to use it with any other unexpired patent unless it is
| also under the same license. That way, a culture of open source
| could be created in the non-software world that would move
| innovation into the private sector and out of academia by letting
| private companies more easily share their engineering with each
| other.
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