[HN Gopher] Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over...
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Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
Author : jeremylevy
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-01-04 17:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| scifibestfi wrote:
| "People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming
| out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take
| them into the field and they literally don't believe anything
| unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they
| accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's
| discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed
| paper or not?' That's their view of science. I think it's
| pathetic.
|
| Gone into universities as bright young people. They come out of
| them brain dead, not even knowing what science means. They think
| it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No, that's academia. And if a
| paper is peer-reviewed it means everybody thought the same
| therefore they approved it.
|
| An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges, new
| scientific insights, they can never ever be peer-reviewed. So
| we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances.
| If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they
| don't come from the center of that profession, they come from the
| fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think
| of electric lights. They don't come from within they often come
| from outside the bricks. We're going to kill ourselves because of
| stupidity."
|
| -- Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist, research biologist,
| livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory
| Institute. He originated the Holistic management of agriculture
| to fight desertification.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkXZ3_ZmKzw
| kickout wrote:
| Yea, sadly I can relate to this quote. Modern science has lost
| it voice and purpose it seems and it nothing more than a
| glorified printing press of poor research and glad-handing
| consortiums.
| dekhn wrote:
| While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes
| through peer review because for every important problem in
| academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point
| out problems with the theory.
|
| "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification"
| is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different
| regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in
| particle physics or biology.
| [deleted]
| scifibestfi wrote:
| Most scientific breakthroughs in history did not go through
| peer review. That's a new consensus mechanism that was
| introduced not that long ago.
|
| Einstein was only subject to it once and didn't pass. Newton,
| Galileo and the rest were not subject to it at all.
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm not defending peer review; I never enjoyed it when I
| published. It certainly never made my papers any better.
|
| Newton and others all published and then discussed the
| details in person, a lot of the peer review was "off-paper"
| and "post-publication".
|
| Also, the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs, by
| count, occurred after peer review- mainly due to the
| unbelievable pace of breakthroughs due to technological
| advancement.
| cma wrote:
| That sounded interesting so I looked into it. It seems to
| instead support peer review.
|
| According to this [1], Einstein's paper that didn't pass
| peer review turned out to be wrong (it said gravitational
| waves didn't exist), and was later published elsewhere with
| different conclusions and fixing problems that the
| referee's report had already pointed out.
|
| > The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found
| that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the
| referee's report that he had dismissed so hastily. The
| referee had also observed that casting the Einstein-Rosen
| metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein
| equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent
| difficulty.
|
| [1]
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822
| mistermann wrote:
| > While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge
| goes through peer review...
|
| Only knowledge that originates in academia, and even then
| only a portion of it.
|
| > because for every important problem in academia, there's a
| competitor who is the best person to point out problems with
| the theory.
|
| While this may be generally true, it is not absolutely true.
|
| > "Holistic management of agriculture to fight
| desertification" is a non-quantitative science...
|
| _Partially_ non-quantitative.
|
| Also: it'a (partially) true, but so what?
|
| > ...and falls under a very different regime from, say,
| people working at the state of the art in particle physics or
| biology.
|
| Right: one is _known to be_ important, and the others are (at
| this point in time) _hoped to be_ important (as they have
| been in the past).
| college_physics wrote:
| The science knowledge base grows monotonically but not
| necessarily at a steady rate. Actually far from it.
|
| There was a time in the 19th century when people thought physics
| discoveries were complete. A few decades later all hell broke
| lose.
|
| The problem we have right now is that we are stymied on the
| complexity front (materials, chemistry, biology, medicine etc)
|
| Our mental / mathematical models that we use to understand the
| world and even enable us to ask original scientific questions are
| losing their edge when things get complex. These tools are 19th
| century stuff (including all the AI junk) and we have milked them
| for all they are worth
|
| I would hypothesise that a new period of discovery will correlate
| with some breakthrough in the mathematics of complexity. We had a
| few false dawns but not the real thing
| feoren wrote:
| > These tools are 19th century stuff (including all the AI
| junk)
|
| I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. I mean, you
| could claim that modern cryptography is based on ideas from the
| ancient Greeks (factoring numbers), and is therefore old and
| busted. Is every idea just derivative unless it uses a
| completely new kind of math?
|
| Software developers (maybe not you, but a large percentage of
| the users of this site) tend to automatically think older ideas
| are worse. But that's not true in math. Mathematical ideas
| don't expire. The idea of the number 7 is aeons old; the number
| 0 over a thousand years; the complex number _i_ 450 years. But
| the numbers 7 and 0 and _i_ are still extremely useful, in
| infinite combinations. If you think we have milked those
| numbers for all they 're worth, you have an extremely limited
| imagination.
|
| Sure, most of the "AI junk" is a combination of old ideas like
| linear algebra and gradient descent, but used at a scale orders
| of magnitude larger than their creators ever imagined. (And
| quantity has a quality all its own.) It's that _combination_ of
| ideas that is so powerful. Besides, backpropagation is a pretty
| damned novel idea. If you 're looking for the one truly new
| idea from AI, it's backpropagation.
|
| You are vastly underestimating the volume of the idea space
| available to explore simply by combining the ideas and
| materials we already have. Crossover is a better source of
| variety than mutation is. You may be right that truly new
| concepts are the "raw materials" of invention, but we never run
| out of the raw ideas we have, and they prove to be useful in
| their combination up to the limits of our imaginations. It's
| actually surprising how likely you are to come up with a
| reasonably good idea by simply considering a few randomly-
| selected ideas together.
|
| > we are stymied on the complexity front (materials, chemistry,
| biology, medicine etc)
|
| Again you seem like your standard is: if it's not an entirely
| new thing where nothing like it has ever existed before, then
| it's _boring!_. If you think the volume of the idea-space from
| combining the materials, chemistry, biology, and medicine we
| already have /understand is X, it's almost certainly at least
| 2^X, or even X! (factorial).
|
| Besides, we _are_ coming up with brand new materials all the
| time! Materials science is one of the most exciting frontiers
| of human technology.
| college_physics wrote:
| Dont get me wrong, there is plenty of scope for interesting /
| useful applications of software and pattern matching at scale
| but those are more a form of "tech assisted social evolution"
| rather than the steady march of fundamental inventions and
| discoveries across the entire spectrum of knowledge that
| characterised the last few centuries.
|
| Old math can still have an impact at the margin (eg speeding
| up protein folding calculations etc) but its not the
| cognitive leap that would allow us to steer discoveries in
| more effective manner. Materials, medicine etc all very
| exciting and very active but also hampered by their intrinsic
| complexity.
| bandrami wrote:
| I know the danger of thinking this, but maybe we're just less
| wrong than we used to be?
| kickout wrote:
| And yet I've been trying to find $$ for one of the most
| disruptive agriculture technologies that could propel to
| sustainable ag to acreage unheard of. Nobody wants to take a
| chance.
|
| _shrug_
| zitstif wrote:
| [dead]
| LarryMullins wrote:
| All apparent exponential growth is just an S-curve we haven't
| found the inflection point of yet.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Theory of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn.
|
| Major breakthrough that disrupts the paradime. Followed by normal
| science with diminishing returns until the next paradime.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| When I worked at IBM, we were given generous cash incentives for
| filing patents. I am named as an inventor on about 40 patents. To
| be honest, only one of them was a genuine invention in my
| opinion.
| alexb_ wrote:
| May be relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-
| to-genetics-d...
| VictorPath wrote:
| Eugenics research is disruptive?
|
| Why not phrenology?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Studying the genetic basis for various characteristics is not
| eugenics, anymore than studying the atom is building a
| nuclear weapon. Abuse of knowledge should be controlled, but
| banning the pursuit of knowledge itself?
|
| That's just intentionally crippling our own understanding of
| the world, for fear that we might not like what we discover.
| That's hardly an unprecedented behavior, to say the least,
| but the cultures that have gone that direction are probably
| not the sort we might want to emulate.
| bendbro wrote:
| I too am a socialist. But I believe people are different:
| hereditarily and culturally.
|
| I assume only people like me and maybe a few like you will
| know what this means, but doesn't it upset you that I can
| freely say it?
| nafeen wrote:
| While there is no doubt that 'CD Index' has been declining over
| time, it is debatable whether it truly indicates a drop in
| 'disruption'.
|
| Let's take AI for example. Research papers that were published in
| 2019-20 have become obsolete within a year or less, and
| consequently get cited less and less, as more recent and
| derivative papers introduced better models. Does that make the
| older papers any less 'disruptive'? No!
| felipelalli wrote:
| Maybe it's wrong. At least in the chart, they are missing the
| Bitcoin invention in 2009 (technology). There was the last
| "disruptive" science in the area.
| Isamu wrote:
| 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.
| ffwacom wrote:
| I blame: the currency and inflationary environment
| photochemsyn wrote:
| That timeline correlates well with the corporatization of
| academic research timeline, which got started in the late 1970s,
| boomed in the 1980s and has steadily risen ever since. The
| emphasis in applied science is now on patents and return-on-
| investment, aka safe bets. This is certainly the direction that
| much of NIH fundings, as well as DOE funding, has taken. Part of
| this is that entrenched industries (natural gas and coal power,
| say), don't want federal funding going to disruptive competition
| (monocrystalline silicon PV development, say). This is reflected
| in how federal funds are distributed as well as what research
| programs are supported at the university level. For example,
| count the number of renewable energy departments in the USA
| academic system: miniscule funding -> no programs.
|
| It can't all be blamed on corporatization, however. The control
| of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests
| seems to be a major problem, i.e. innovative lines of research
| that threaten the status quo could threaten those cabals that
| control fund disbursement, so such efforts don't get funded. The
| stagnation of Alzheimer's research and the focus on the amyloid
| hypothesis seems to fall into this category. This kind of
| bureaucratic ossification is not new; the classic example is how
| Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of
| agricultural research for about three decades, much to the
| detriment of the understanding of plant genetics and crop
| development research in the USSR over that period.
|
| So it can be attributed to the rise of monopolistic
| corporatization on university campuses on one hand, and the
| growth of entrenched bureaucracies at the federal funding level
| on the other. Neither group wants the rug pulled out from under
| them by 'disruptive innovation'. There are many historical
| antecedents for this kind of situation, incidentally.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| > The control of funding agencies at the federal level by
| vested interests seems to be a major problem
|
| This is a fundamental problem with the nature of science and
| the nation state in that modern science is constituted by the
| nation state, not merely imposing into or upon it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvntr0J5eQk
| midoridensha wrote:
| If you're really smart, enough to make disruptive scientific
| discoveries, why bother doing that when you could learn
| programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance
| sector and make possibly more? If you stay in science, you'll
| earn peanuts and not even have any career stability since the
| academic track is so bad these days.
| urthor wrote:
| That's arguably an even greater point than anyone realises.
|
| All these geniuses... people are giving them jobs!
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| "why bother doing that when you could learn programming and
| work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and
| make possibly more?"
|
| Because it's boring and depressing. And one thing money can't
| buy, unless you're solely interested in accumulating money, is
| satisfaction with your life.
|
| Obviously not true for everyone, but we've got 8.8 million
| "scientists" (I'm not sure what they mean by the word).
| https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide...
|
| Most scientists don't work in academia. Some of those who do
| have stable jobs as staff instead of faculty positions.
|
| And this guy did it in his spare time while working at FAANG:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Every time I read one of these editorials on the topic of lack of
| available research, I just look at the huge list of significant
| problems that still exist for life on earth and wonder: "what are
| they thinking?"
| morphle wrote:
| 'Disruptive' science has declined -- and no one knows why
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
| feraloink wrote:
| 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, i.e. word frequency analysis showing more
| occurrences of "improve", "expand", "extend".
| snordgren wrote:
| 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.
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| 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.
| sybercecurity wrote:
| 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.
| Octabrain wrote:
| 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...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| This is a very natural consequence of the higher difficulty
| of maintaining one's career in academia. What is a natural
| consequence of the increased competition for those jobs.
| bilsbie wrote:
| 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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > 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).
| mb7733 wrote:
| 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...
| klyrs wrote:
| 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)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| This was considered in the paper: "Some point to a dearth of
| 'low-hanging fruit' as the readily available productivity-
| enhancing innovations have already been made19,27. Others
| emphasize the increasing burden of knowledge; scientists and
| inventors require ever more training to reach the frontiers
| of their fields, leaving less time to push those frontiers
| forward18,28. "
| klabb3 wrote:
| I've heard this too about number theory. Perhaps in that
| field, the paradigm shift lies in reducing incidental
| complexity? Or even managing it in a way that is better for
| humans?
|
| > it takes a PhD before people can even understand the
| frontier of most scientific fields
|
| It's interesting that we have this implicit view that hyper-
| specialization is the only way to advance. I always thought
| so too, but why really? If you think about it, specialization
| is very close to incrementalism. Groundbreaking paradigm-
| shift stuff can often be written down on a napkin, and rarely
| does it require a PhD.
|
| That said, to find treasure you have to go down a LOT of
| wrong paths before you (or someone else) ends up in the right
| one.
| morphle wrote:
| The grant/funding process itself slows down science.
|
| How to slow down scientific progress According to Leo Szilard
|
| https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science
|
| Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436
| hgsgm wrote:
| Low hanging fruit are picked.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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"?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| The Pareto principle is incredibly harsh, but such
| hierarchies seem to form naturally.
|
| My concern with your view is that in trying to "squash the
| gap", you end up doing so by making everyone poorer -- and
| society worse overall.
|
| Happy to agree to disagree; hopefully we can consider each
| other's perspectives in crafting policies.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| It's indeed not an easy issue, which is why I think there
| could still be lots of innovations to made in that space
| in terms of economics, politics, social sciences etc.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The GINI index in absolute monarchies is close to 1.
|
| Wealth inequality implies that some people disproportionately
| control the life production of other people. If you're in
| favor of a "great man" idea of progress this is a benefit. If
| you're in favor of individual power to direct production and
| innovation (along the lines of de Tocqueville or it's left-
| wing equivalent) this is a detraction.
| [deleted]
| ZooCow wrote:
| > 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| There are just too many gatekeepers and too many people who are
| used to doing things a certain way. The world is just more
| populous now. We also need to make sure that people can speak
| their minds freely and write freely without worrying about
| getting cancelled.
| mrfox321 wrote:
| 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!
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| To understand the fundamental problem with this paper and the
| "CD" measure of "disruptiveness", one need only look at Figure
| 1a, where three Nobel Prize winning papers and three patents are
| ranked on the "CD5" scale. Apparently, there are more disruptive
| discoveries than Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-
| stranded structure of DNA (CD5 0.62 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0),
| and Baltimore's discovery of reverse transcription is -0.55. One
| might argue the ranks of these two discoveries should be
| reversed, since DNA had already been shown to be the genetic
| material, but no one imagined that RNA could be converted to DNA.
| Likewise, the Wigler patent for transformation into eukaryotic
| cells (CD5=0.70) has certainly has had less effect on the world
| economy than Monsanto's patent on glyphosphate resistant plants
| (CD= -0.85).
|
| It's easy to make up a measure and then develop a story that
| explains why that measure is useful. Was Newton's theory of
| gravity disruptive, or consolidating. I'm thinking consolidating,
| since it allowed a lot of other things to make sense. Likewise,
| perhaps quantum mechanics was disruptive -- it sounds disruptive
| -- but it also consolidated a lot of confusing observations.
|
| (And lets not even mention the problem that when there are
| 1,000-times as many papers between 1940 and 2010, we might not
| expect 1,000-times as many disruptions.)
|
| This paper has a measure that sounds useful, and is certainly
| good for headlines, but it is very unclear that it provides any
| insight into the progress of science.
| dekhn wrote:
| You misunderstand why W&C was important (although, given your
| username, I assume you've already sat through the lectures): in
| elucidating (not discovering) the structure of DNA, they had a
| biophysical mechanism that explained heredity (specifically,
| that it was an antiparallel double helix with complementary
| bases, which immediately suggests a mechanism for replication).
|
| That recognition immediately led to a flurry of follow-on work
| confirming the mechanism and birthing molecular biology as we
| know it, which opened up vast new areas of science.
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| Yes, I know why it was disruptive. The question (for this
| paper) is, what other biological papers were more disruptive
| (since, based on the range of the scale, they barely made the
| first quintile).
|
| I think the more important question is, how do we validate
| the usefulness of the CD5 metric. And, why is it better to be
| "disruptive" than "consolidating"?
|
| Based on the examples shown (and others that I can imagine),
| it is unclear that it measures anything related to scientific
| significance.
| dekhn wrote:
| I had already discounted the measure as being too prone to
| sampling error to be useful. I don't think these things are
| really measurable, and even if you did measure it,
| "disruption" and "consolidation" are such subjective terms
| it would be arguable to have a single-dimensional slider
| that went between those extremes.
|
| Probably best to just say some of the greatest discoveries
| are both disruptive, and consolidating.
| baxtr wrote:
| Agreed. I think this is fundamentally a sampling rate
| observation.
|
| Pace of publishing and observations have dramatically as you
| rightly point out.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| jjk166 wrote:
| Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not
| overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming
| an ever more complete and accurate view of reality. Disruption
| really just means stumbling upon something unexpected. Once you
| know there is something there, it opens up a whole world of new
| avenues for studying in that space, but it doesn't really make it
| any easier to find something unexpected again.
|
| Consider for example deep sea archaeology. When you find a
| shipwreck, there's going to be a flurry of activity as people
| study the shipwreck, and the more they answer the questions they
| started with, the more new questions they are going to want to
| ask, so even long after the initial discovery there's going to be
| a continuous string of studies refining knowledge about that
| wreck. And this is true of every wreck. But finding one shipwreck
| doesn't generally make it easier to find the next, assuming the
| same resources, new wrecks are going to be discovered at a pretty
| steady rate. So the number of discovered wrecks grows linearly,
| but with each being revisited regularly, the cumulative amount of
| research done on all wrecks grows geometrically.
|
| Similarly discovering a new chemical opens up many possibilities
| for studying that chemical, likewise for a new phylum of
| bacteria, a new type of star, you can only see something for the
| first time once, but you can take closer looks forever. We should
| expect the ratio of new things to look like a graph of 1/x.
|
| Perhaps it's weird that the absolute number of disruptive papers
| is holding steady. While there are competing forces at work - on
| the one hand we have more scientists with better instruments, but
| on the other hand the low hanging fruit is gone and they must go
| ever further to find something new - there's no fundamental
| reason these two forces should perfectly counterbalance. I might
| posit our society has a certain appetite for discovery and we
| adjust our allocation of resources to science and innovation to
| maintain this continuous stream of disruptions, but I at least
| feel that scientific breakthroughs tend to excite people about
| science and desire to double down on science, not pull back.
| Perhaps more realistically we just move the goal posts as to what
| we consider disruptive such that the top X discoveries of the
| year are always "groundbreaking." Regardless of the why, this
| definitely the more interesting part of the story.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I think the same processes that turn nimble and innovative
| startups into large and heavy enterprises apply to countries and
| institutions as well. As academia and research institutions
| develop, they become more complex, valuing process over result
| and consensus over conflict. Increasingly, disruption of
| consensus is perceived as disruption of the institution itself
| and risk-aversion and incrementalism are rewarded.
|
| I hate to be a doomsayer, but this seems to be a general
| trajectory that most of the western world is on.
| iskander wrote:
| Currently running a research lab and this fits with my anecdotal
| experience of what ideas and approaches are considered fundable
| by the NIH and NSF.
| breck wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| Doesn't it just stand to reason that there's less to discover,
| that what there is mostly isn't the low-hanging fruit (and unlike
| actual fruit, it's not regrowing), over time?
| spawarotti wrote:
| That's what I was thinking, too. Perhaps we already know
| majority of what there is to know, when it comes to fundamental
| concepts? Probably plenty of work left in improving our tools
| and engineering solutions, like machine learning-based
| software, as well as in understanding the intricates of
| biology. Maybe mathematics, too. Maybe improvements in these
| will cause another golden age of discovery. Like, understanding
| biology enough to gain significantly extended lifespan, which
| means much more expertise can be built by one individual.
| shae wrote:
| You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing
| research.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| And you can't get through peer review if you did. That process
| maintains consensus.
|
| Albert Einstein failed peer review the one time he was
| subjected to it. Newton was not subject to it at all.
| specialp wrote:
| He was asked to address some questions and make revisions. He
| was so aggravated that his paper was subject to peer review
| at all that he withdrew it. But his subsequent submission to
| another journal did incorporate some of the referees
| concerns. Einstein was a great scientist but he too was wrong
| sometimes. [1]
|
| His 1905 seminal papers were not peer reviewed per-se but the
| journal's editor who accepted the paper was Max Planck! So it
| was reviewed by another legendary physicist.
|
| These days science has branched off into such specialized
| areas that another specialist in the field is needed for
| review. Whether that should be an anonymous referee, or
| someone else it is still valuable to catch errors and
| determine the soundness of the techniques. Also the
| selections of those peers is something for debate too.
|
| [1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.211
| 782...
| [deleted]
| jjk166 wrote:
| Well you get the funding before you do the experiment and thus
| before you know whether it's going to disagree with existing
| research. If you have the results before you do the experiment,
| you're not doing science.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, grant proposals normally expect you to provide
| preliminary results. The more controversial your proposal,
| the better your preliminaries have to be. Especially you have
| to convince the funding deciders that you did the appropriate
| positive and negative controls.
| ricksunny wrote:
| The chicken-and-egg problem illustrated in this thread
| seemed like the most appropriate place to highlight: So
| (see disclaimer at the end) there is a publication I
| appreciate called Seeds of Science. My understanding is
| that it is (in part) intended to offer a pathway to work
| around structural failure in comventional peer review; As
| its web page describes:
|
| " What is a 'Seed of Science'? It is a speculation, an idea
| for an experiment, a novel observation, a thought-provoking
| question and discussion, the highlighting of an under-
| appreciated problem, or an unorthodox research study"
|
| They got an ACX Grant last year from AstralCodexTen to
| pursue this.
|
| ---
|
| CoI Disclaimer: My work is published in SoS.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment
| that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to
| throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird
| results because they are bad at conducting research.
| dekhn wrote:
| Literally every preliminary result I got was from an
| experiment that was explicitly not funded for the purpose
| it was requested for. That is, by year 2 of my grant, I
| was spending my monies on stuff I hadn't proposed, to
| prepare for the next grant proposal.
|
| I guess part of the reason I exited academia was because
| I was bad at conducting research :)
| bobsmooth wrote:
| So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town
| you just starve. The more things change the more they stay the
| same.
| sampo wrote:
| > So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of
| town you just starve.
|
| Your income level is probably higher after leaving academia
| and going to work in industry. So you probably starve more by
| staying in academia.
| paro_nej wrote:
| Disruptive work doesn't necessarily need to disagree with
| previous results.
| miguelazo wrote:
| >and no one knows why
|
| Really?
|
| Too much talent going into trivial tech ventures. The shift
| towards rentier capitalism in the US, especially in terms of
| cheap money/QE being used for share buybacks instead of R&D. The
| colossal cost of higher education in the US, with grad stipends
| barely budging until literally this month. Fewer people willing
| to tolerate the (mostly) toxic culture of academic advisors
| overseeing Phds and post-grads. Google Scholar skewing papers to
| exist more for popularity/citation prevalence. The Internet as
| the biggest distraction in the history of humanity. etc. etc.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Ok, so the average has declined - has the raw # of disruptive
| studies increased? The definition of 'disruptive' here is based
| on the ratio of citations of [study] vs citations of [study's
| references]. If the number of papers increases, do we want a
| proportional increase in studies that "send a field in a new
| direction?" Or do we want incremental studies to be improving
| rigor, comprehensiveness, and clarity?
|
| IMO, it'd be much better to look at the Avg. CD of the top N% of
| CD scores over time - that'd give me a much better idea of if
| disruptiveness is changing, as disruptiveness is a "best paper"
| phenomenon anyway.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| 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 before them? I always forget
| the details, but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs
| to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? I wonder
| if it looked similarly uninnovative. The canvas they had was
| full, and they needed a new canvas for true innovation.
|
| Now the thing is, I think true disruption, like GR and quantum
| physics, is not limited by the number of postdocs, but by truly
| genius insights. Einstein wasn't even working as an academic when
| he came up with Special Relativity. So the number of papers
| written isn't a proxy for pace of revolution.
|
| Not to mention, since number of published papers has become a
| _target_ , it has become useless as a _measure_ of progress.
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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 quanta. Albert Einstein also solved the
| ultraviolet catastrophe in a paper he published in 1905, for
| which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922, by, as always,
| standing on the shoulders of giants, hypothesizing that
| Planck's quanta were actual particles. These particles are
| known today by a word coined by physical chemist Gilbert Newton
| Lewis in a letter to Nature in 1926, namely, photons.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.16033.pdf
| rich_sasha wrote:
| TIL; very interesting!
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| It might be that human brains can only do so much physics,
| which is a tiny subset of all the physics there is.
|
| It's amazing upright apes can figure out the speed of light or
| postulate and find the Higgs Boson in the first place.
|
| How much physics do we expect the smartest dog in the world to
| do? What if we 10x'd its lifespan?
|
| At some point either:
|
| 1. There is no more physics
|
| 2. We build beings that can do physics that we can't
|
| 3. We're stopped dead in our tracks at the limit of our ability
| to comprehend things that apes weren't built to comprehend
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| We get around this in part by not understanding (or at least
| remembering our understanding of) many of the basics. Such as
| this guy who looked things up in a textbook:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889
|
| A bunch of blind people could theoretically construct a model
| of an elephant, if they work together well.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It also seems unlikely that a patent clerk, even one with a PhD
| in physics, would be allowed to publish in a physics journal
| today. The gatekeeping has gotten a lot more strict.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-
| ein...
|
| This article mentions Einstein being offended that his paper
| was submitted to peer review by Physical Review, and
| submitting it elsewhere instead:
|
| "We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for
| publication and had not authorised you to show it to
| specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address
| the - in any case erroneous - comments of your anonymous
| expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the
| paper elsewhere."
|
| I just recently ended up there via this blog:
| https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-
| fall...
|
| which argues, not unconvincingly IMO, that peer review is a
| failed experiment which tries to stop bad science at the
| price of also stopping brilliant, unconventional science,
| where instead we would profit more from letting the
| scientific public do the sorting instead of hand-picked
| specialists. The author phrases it as science being as strong
| as its strongest links, not as weak as the weakest one, and
| we should do everything to get the brilliant crazy ideas.
| OJFord wrote:
| > the price of also stopping brilliant, unconventional
| science, where instead we would profit more from letting
| the scientific public
|
| Also currently on the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257150
|
| In brief, London 'man off the street' solves 20k year Ice
| Age drawings mystery, published in Cambridge Archaeological
| Journal via contact with Durham professor. (And he is first
| author.)
|
| I don't say that to disagree with you by the way - it's
| undoubtedly a rare example.
| fckgnad wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| themaninthedark wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I'm not sure it filters out kook theories, given the
| replication crisis.
|
| Rather, journals promote well-connected kooks at the
| expense of less well-connected kooks and happen to
| occasionally publish some science as a byproduct.
| codethief wrote:
| I disagree, at least in math there have been many instances
| recently where laymen (with a PhD) found some new and
| exciting results[0] and got to publish them, and I don't see
| why it would be any other way in physics.
|
| Most recent example: https://www.quantamagazine.org/long-out-
| of-math-an-ai-progra...
| ablatt89 wrote:
| I agree, I think we're discounting genius insight as the
| primary driver of innovation and ground breaking science, and
| we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable
| time frame or a time frame even within a lifespan.
|
| I think perhaps we've also partially lost the meaning of ground
| breaking research given the constant news articles on "ground
| breaking science" and the constant overinflation and
| exaggeration of one's papers and achievements.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable
| time frame
|
| Yes, and we can't expect it to occur in a socially confined
| over-structured environment either. Academia has changed a
| lot since then, with peer review hell, publishing pressure,
| etc. I mean, are we really pretending to be surprised that a
| system of incrementalist incentives produces incrementalist
| results?
| buran77 wrote:
| A lot of the obvious questions on the table were answered,
| even without an answer we at least have the question. Today
| true, groundbreaking innovation needs someone to identify the
| new questions. It's like doing science in a bubble and you
| need someone to take a massive new one and merge it into our
| own. Right now we're not opening wide doors, but just
| refining and adding almost imperceptibly to an already huge
| bubble. We're grinding in the game because we can't find the
| boss on the map or can't beat it yet.
|
| Besides the current structure of research and the known
| weaknesses (misaligned incentives, funding issues, etc.)
| science in general today ran out of low hanging fruit. The
| last unexplored or unanswered riddles may need prerequisites
| that are outside of the current boundaries so someone needs
| to open the door do a vast new bubble that has more
| _relatively_ low hanging fruit.
|
| Also humans _probably_ (don 't quote me on that :) ) can't
| come up with any new questions or answers unless they are
| already at the edge of that bubble. And they each see and
| understand a smaller patch of that surface as it expanded.
| Stumbling onto new thinks is exponentially harder.
|
| This is what those revolutionary discoveries did for us in
| the past: Opened the door to a new world where the hard
| answers were suddenly a bit easier, they made sense.
| drdrek wrote:
| Its just the evolution vs revolution periods... In any field 99%
| of the time advancements are slow and incremental, than a new
| idea sparks a revolution and you get a lot of advancements in a
| short period of time. This is just the nature of scientific
| progress.
|
| In the early 20 century new ideas in physics and mathematics
| sparked a revolution and we are slowly unraveling the benefits of
| it ever since. For 40 years we had evolution in the AI research
| field, now we have a revolution, I do not know when it will die
| down but after a while we will just start to build over the ideas
| we discovered and a long period will pass before we do another
| jump. Same with psychology, economics, biology...
| morphle wrote:
| Alan Kay wrote an essay on how large scientific breakthroughs
| where done [1], further discussed in [2]. The funders and the
| systems of funding of science are to blame for the deciline, for
| example they won't fund problem finding anymore.
|
| [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf
|
| [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE
| urthor wrote:
| Alan Kay's advocacy for funding science is a truly eminent
| life's work.
| version_five wrote:
| The first half of the 20th century had a lot of "low hanging
| fruit" in physics and chemistry that basically came out of the
| enlightenment. Things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. I
| wouldn't guess that's always the steady state for research.
|
| The war may have had something to do with it too, I know a lot of
| advances (like radio / microwave engineering) have roots in the
| war efforts. But I suspect it's more of just a dry spell because
| we pushed forward in the 18th-20th century and ran out of ideas
| nafeen wrote:
| Wouldn't we be presented with another bout of "low hanging
| fruits" in the second half of 21st century when tectonic shifts
| happen in quantum computing, superconductivity, ai, ar/vr/mr
| etc.?
| jrumbut wrote:
| I'm left a bit conflicted by what conclusions to draw from this
| effort.
|
| How much of this is due to how much easier it is to publish
| something these days? Every statistics package spits out
| publication-ready charts and tables, Latex/Word has automated
| much of the typesetter's art, drafts can be communicated
| instantly via email, there are instantly searchable and linked
| databases of papers, etc, etc.
|
| Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists
| were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into
| something an editor could read, attaching hand drawn figures,
| then heading down to the post office to mail the draft in. That
| draft then had to be copied and mailed to reviewers, who then
| mailed their opinions back, every step taking at least a few days
| of communication overhead. It was a different world and it
| gradually changed with widespread adoption of different
| technologies.
|
| Also how does this interact with another pair of common
| suggestions for improving science: publishing negative results
| and doing more replications? Is this a sign that those two good
| practices are already occurring? Is it possible that the higher
| rate of disruption was due to shoddier work in the past?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many
| scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand
| manuscripts into something an editor could read
|
| This was done well into the 1980s, if not longer.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Nice to see numbers put to this. I remember thinking through a
| bunch of tech/science that I was familiar with, and realizing
| that most (not all) of the fundamentals in every case were known
| by the early 60's, and we've been working out the (very
| important) details ever since. Nuclear, electronics, chemistry,
| biology, etc.
|
| plenty of counter-examples, I'm sure, but like once you know the
| structure of DNA and it's fundamental operations, the remaining
| discoveries will have a smaller impact.
| perardi wrote:
| So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this
| paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of "disruptive".
| _(Also, can we just stop using that word? Such a though-
| terminating cliche at this point.)_
|
| But let's accept that we are seeing less fundamental
| breakthroughs in science. Is that a failure of the system...or,
| depressingly, what if we really are hitting the limits of what we
| can model and describe?
|
| In a roughly 200 year timespan, we figured out the at least the
| rough outlines of...wow, where even to start...electromagnetism,
| general and special relativity, quantum mechanics as it relates
| to field theories and chemistry, genetics, and computability. We
| really picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and what if there
| just isn't any fruit left to easily get at? There's certainly
| things like dark energy that we don't have particularly
| satisfying theories for at all, but, the basics? We seem to have
| good models.
| mistermann wrote:
| The physical realm seems largely picked clean, but there is
| bountiful fruits available in the metaphysical realm - shame
| that ~no one can see it, _despite complaining about it
| constantly_.
| worik wrote:
| > The physical realm seems largely picked clean,
|
| Famous Last Words
| mistermann wrote:
| It's a great meme, but memes are only good for _estimating_
| the future, and while the future can indeed be strongly
| _influenced_ by the fact that much of human cognition is
| meme-based, there are also many other influences on it.
|
| This and many other pieces of very useful knowledge are
| there for the taking in the metaphysical realm, just as was
| the case hundreds of years ago in the physical realm, prior
| to the rise of science (a metaphysical phenomenon itself).
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 - Jan 2023 (20
| comments)
| ablatt89 wrote:
| I think that the expectation that "ground-breaking" discoveries
| in science should follow some linear or predictable timetable is
| not reasonable. Is the time period between "ground-breaking"
| discoveries supposed to be every 5 years, every 10 years?
|
| The volume of papers has increased significantly, and publish or
| perish kinda stinks, but it's not just an issue of funding, but
| some (many?) researchers publish and exaggerate about the
| importance and difficulty of their research to receive an "I am
| smart" badge on social media. Although, despite this increase in
| volume of crap tier papers, the article seems to think it's not
| correlated:
|
| "Declines in disruptiveness are also not attributable to changing
| publication, citation or authorship practices..."
| derbOac wrote:
| 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 nonobvious. The way that plays out too is
| incredibly dependent on your institutional social environment
| etc.
|
| So much of this is difficult to easily quantify in ways that
| can be easily studied. I loved this paper for example, but it's
| easy for me to think of papers in my own field that would look
| "disruptive" in terms of citation networks but are really the
| same content. There's these weird shifts I've seen happen in
| reading old literature and during my career, where big shifts
| in who is being cited will happen for quixotic social reasons.
| Usually it's basically politics or ignorance of big parts of a
| field, who will get introduced to an idea by a particular
| author or group. Lots of chaotic citation patterns and feedback
| loops.
|
| Add in shifts in what's motivating grant and paper topics and
| it really damages authentic scientific discourse. So much is
| driven by looking like a brilliant scientist and not by
| scientific progress. People aren't dumb either and they are
| very very good at looking like brilliant scientists.
| ctchocula wrote:
| 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 gotten tenure with his publication record. That seems
| insane to me and a bitter critique of today's incentive
| structures created by the funding system we have that rewards
| incremental work over real breakthroughs.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| 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.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| When I was in grad school I had done measurements of the magnetic
| anisotropy of amorphous compounds. I had found an interesting
| link between the structure and the magnetic properties which is
| surprising since the material is amorphous, the material
| properties should be isotropic yet these had a preferred
| magnetization axis. During the discussions of these results with
| my advisor I was told in very clear terms that he would not let
| me publish results that contradicted a paper of his from the
| 1980s.
|
| I didn't push back, because I had no power and I just wanted to
| get the fuck out of there and start making money after being
| scammed out of 5 years of my life where I poured a lot of effort
| and got shit pay. I lost respect for my advisor and I was stunned
| by how un-scientific his response was when it came to correcting
| his 1980s results. My measurements were more accurate and were
| strongly supported by structural measurements he never did and
| couldn't do back then. But he was more interested in protecting
| his "legacy" of his paper with 13 citations.
|
| So petty and small. I dropped those efforts and was able to get
| out completely obviating those results, never mentioned them in
| my thesis even.
|
| Anyway, my point is that I'm not surprised that scientific
| results are lame, vanilla, uninspired. When the committees that
| decide on what gets funded are all 65+ dinosaurs stuck in their
| ways, very few disruptive ideas will be founded because you're
| disrupting the very research that got the committee members clout
| and recognition.
|
| As they say, change comes a funeral at a time.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Patents went from real innovation to Legalese BS and market
| protection in the past decades.
|
| Also I suspect most innovation are being done outside of papers,
| especially when you have "reviewer 2" ready to be nitpicky at
| every minor detail, so you make it more bland and maybe skip one
| juicy part or another
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| "all metrics seem to decline as we keep adding more metrics"
|
| it's called bureaucracy
| asdff wrote:
| 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 play.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| 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?
|
| It almost seems as a new model would take the world by storm,
| but it doesnt seem to arise. Even private research often falls
| for the same pitfalls, like how Deepmind keeps seeking to
| publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an
| open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science
| forward.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's because our financial system is controlled by power
| hungry but small minded sociopaths.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| If what you are saying was true then NIMBYism wouldn't be
| a problem, and we also wouldn't have any large "open
| spaces" left.
|
| The problem is more parochialism than it is short-term
| thinking. And both sets of entities (powerful individuals
| and aggregate masses) are capable of parochialism.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing
| decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.
|
| I think this is a dangerous delusion:
|
| Historically, centralized control has been a disaster
| because those individuals wielding power _believed_ they
| could think of something greater... but actually lacked
| the skill. So we ended up with simplistic concepts that
| failed at scale, ideas that never could work because they
| missed key details, etc. By contrast, society gets on
| with the business of building the future in spite of and
| not due to that meddling by centralized power.
| [deleted]
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants,
| even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-
| gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the
| "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees
| prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas.
| I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in
| terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of
| science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that;
| sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come
| back with lessons learned.
| jslakro wrote:
| Another pertinent paper from 2021:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11184
| morphle wrote:
| This is an earlier publication of the same paper before it was
| published in Nature.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I get that in this context "patents" should be seen as the
| announcement of a new innovation, a surrogate of the innovation
| itself if you will, but setting that aside for a moment I'm
| struggling to imagine how patents could ever do anything but slow
| down disruption.
|
| Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely
| available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those
| holding the patents. EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give
| people the freedom to innovate on top versus stopping anyone who
| does. Shouldn't the former always be more disruptive of the
| status quo? I can imagine this is an oversimplification though so
| I'm open to hearing counterintuitive examples where the opposite
| is true.
|
| And to be clear, either way I'm not saying this is good or bad in
| and of itself - in some cases it might slow down essential
| improvements, in others it might be good to have speed limits for
| change so that things don't break.
| this_was_posted wrote:
| You could argue that there is more economic incentive to invent
| new things as discoveries are worth more if you alone have the
| right to use them. This in turn could lead to more investments
| in research that lead to more inventions that increase
| disruption.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I know that that has been one argument in favor of patents
| since forever. But that ignores the part where competing
| parties are not freely allowed to build on another person's
| patent, which is essential for making good improvements.
|
| And you can see this play out in the history of invention.
| For example, Edison stopped other people from doing research
| on the light bulb. Meanwhile the Netherlands was a country
| without IP laws at the time so Phillips quickly ended up
| producing the superior _and_ cheaper product. No patent laws,
| bigger disruption. Similarly the Wright brothers were
| notorious for holding back aviation with their patents.
| mnau wrote:
| James Watt and his patents on steam engine are also an
| interesting case. Efficiency gains basically stopped for
| duration of the main patent patent and exploded later.
|
| On the other hand it is also case for more innovation due
| to necessity, e.g. his patent on beam connection to a shaft
| (linear-to-rotary movement) required others to come up with
| a different solutions (e.g. sun and planet gear).
| yobbo wrote:
| > Compare making it freely available to anyone
|
| The original idea of a patent is that it must reveal the
| "secrets" behind an invention, in return for a "temporary
| monopoly". It's supposed to help diffusion of technology by
| publishing trade secrets, not to "incentivise" research.
|
| I think what is actually happening is that patents are made
| obtuse/opaque containing little meaningful information. They
| are then used as playing cards in patent licensing deals
| between big corporations.
|
| There is no longer any hope for patent clerks to do meaningful
| inspection of patents to determine if they are legitimate.
| Instead, it's left to lawyers/attorneys to play something out
| in court.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Patents have always been written in precise but vague terms.
| If you take that as the language and understand the structure
| of them, they can be quite readable, although you will often
| need to use outside knowledge and critical thinking to
| determine how to actually replicate the invention.
| Moissanite wrote:
| I lost a lot of faith in scientific research when I had to
| spend time reviewing patents in an early job.
|
| The fact that I was looking into battery materials (a
| notoriously over-hyped sector) certainly didn't help, but
| some of the approved parents were laughable. They included
| core materials which had been historically known to be useful
| in batteries (and hence shouldn't qualify for protection),
| but then also every possible element-wise substitution of the
| same structure - many of the resulting materials would not
| even have been stable, never mind viable as a battery
| component. There were also instances of multiple patents
| covering the same material, suggesting that any prior-art
| searches were not being done rigorously.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give people the freedom to
| innovate on top versus stopping anyone who does.
|
| Everyone is free to innovate on top of any pre-existing,
| current patent. They simply can't profit on their new
| innovation without licensing the patent. However what they can
| do with their new innovation is patent the innovation itself.
| This newly patented innovation prevents the original patent
| holder from profiting off of the new innovation, and thus
| incentivizes the original patent holder to license their patent
| to the new patent holder (or vice versa).
| jean_tta wrote:
| You make two assumptions:
|
| - There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and without
| patents
|
| - Without patents, discoveries would be freely avalaible
|
| As far as I know, two (related) arguments are generally made
| for patents:
|
| - Patents create an indirect (by preventing the competition
| from using your invention) or direct (by licensing it) monetary
| return to innovation, potentially leading to more innovation
|
| - If a company wants competitors not to copy their innovation,
| they can 1. keep it secret or 2. disclose it and patent it;
| without patent the choice is between 1. keep it secret or 2.
| disclose it and have everybody copy them. In this case, patents
| lead to more innovation being made freely avalaible (with a
| delay!).
|
| Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far as I
| know, contentious.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _There are as many revolutionary discoveries with and
| without patents_
|
| I explicitly don't: I mentioned the patent stops others from
| innovating on top of the patent. The necessity of patents to
| be public is one I had not considered though, being a force
| against trade secrets is a good counterpoint.
|
| > _Whether patents lead to more or less innovation is, as far
| as I know, contentious._
|
| Honestly, I really have trouble accepting this. Not that I
| have an answer, but with the idea that researchers haven't
| been able to find _some_ sensible way of measuring this by
| now. I already mentioned the example of light bulbs. Surely
| there are enough similar historical scenarios available to
| analyze where one can make use of global differences in IP
| laws and other variables to simulate control groups?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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.
| Moissanite wrote:
| Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the
| technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.
| braunboffel wrote:
| > Similar story with e-ink; the license costs for the
| technology are the main blocker to wider adoption.
|
| How much is the license cost?
| jean_tta wrote:
| You do here:
|
| "Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely
| available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those
| holding the patents. [...]"
|
| You take the situation where there _is_ a revolutionary
| discovery, with or without patents, and then wonder about
| the effect of patents on the next innovations. In doing
| that you do not consider that may be a revolutionary
| discovery with patents, and none without.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| - Grant funding
|
| - Tenure requirements
|
| - Job duties (both requirements and limitations)
|
| - Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC
|
| - Credentialism
|
| - A "Pain point" focus would tend to be more incremental than
| truly disruptive
|
| On the good side there may be some decrease of disruptive
| inventions and discoveries because we are also focusing on
| eliminating the externalities of current and previous inventions
| and discoveries. It's a lot easier to make wildly new things if
| you aren't worried about their side effects.
| urthor wrote:
| Remind me, in the history of the physical sciences, how many
| "groundbreaking breakthroughs," came from academics teaching
| undergraduates?
|
| My mind is genuinely struggling...
|
| Certainly not Curie, Einstein, Fleming worked in a hospital.
|
| Maybe the problem is...
|
| Undergraduates!
| feraloink wrote:
| >Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC
|
| This is a big problem. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Research are the
| first that come to mind. Same is true for mostly government-
| funded initiatives like the one where Marc Andreessen invented
| Mosaic browser, that eventually became Netscape Navigator. I
| don't recall the project name. Do we even do that anymore?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| We still have DARPA. We also have ARPA-E, ARPA-H, and HSARPA.
|
| A variety of DOE national labs and core facilities (including
| NCSA where Mosaic was developed) still exist and are funded.
|
| We may need more to take up the slack of the corporate
| research facilities.
| paro_nej wrote:
| > Wang and his colleagues have found that big teams are more
| likely to produce incremental than disruptive science
|
| Interesting observation.
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