[HN Gopher] How to slow down scientific progress, according to L...
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How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard
Author : jasoncrawford
Score : 162 points
Date : 2023-01-05 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| deanCommie wrote:
| For those that accept the author's premise and thought
| experiment. What's the recommended alternative?
|
| Let's take a humanist approach and say the biggest problems
| humanity need to solve right now that we aren't doing enough on
| are life extension and energy generation/storage/distribution.
| Even 5 years ago, "AI" might've been on the list, but that seems
| to be booming with progress, and between CRISPR/mRNA we also seem
| to be making incredible progress on disease cure/prevention.
| Meanwhile, with longer lifespans, and cheap available energy who
| knows what other advances we might unlock.
|
| OK, how do you proceed with maximizing scientific progress?
| hasmanean wrote:
| Focus on the problem, not the solution.
|
| If the problem is that our civilization is using too much
| energy, the solution may not be fusion power. It might be
| redesigning suburbs (a design problem) or making people
| adaptable enough to live with one another in close quarters (a
| social problem) or making it easier to switch houses and move
| close to where they work (an economic problem).
|
| The best spur to innovation is when you are getting results.
| Redefining the problem you solve is one way to get that.
| [deleted]
| unstrategic wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the effect of venture capital in the present
| day.
|
| > First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their
| laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications
| for funds
|
| Convince talented technical innovators that the best way they can
| apply themselves is to become a 'business person'"; then, talk to
| VCs and feel important by spending a lot of money instead of
| building something
|
| > Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would
| concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were
| pretty certain to lead to publishable results
|
| Do whatever VCs think is hot
|
| > For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific
| output
|
| The last 15 years?
|
| > There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would
| get grants. Those who wouldn't would not, and pretty soon they
| would learn to follow the fashion, too.
|
| Yep.
| nverno wrote:
| Except VCs lose all their money pretty quick if they never get
| it right, and don't get rewarded (to the same extent) for
| following along with whatever is in fashion. So, there is
| another, more fundamental, factor there- one that drives VCs to
| invest in things that are thought to be under-funded but have
| potential.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Honestly, it seems like trends for VCs cycle at around the
| same frequency as paradigms in most academic fields (on the
| order of around a decade). Unless the VC gets caught with
| their pants down right at the end of the transition, they'll
| probably turn a profit.
| nverno wrote:
| > Unless the VC gets caught with their pants down right at
| the end of the transition, they'll probably turn a profit.
|
| Sure, it's like investing in stocks. But the incentives for
| VCs and academics are totally different. In academia,
| volume is a big part of prestige (not for everyone, of
| course, and to many people's dismay), whereas for VCs
| they're looking for that one huge disruptor, and are often
| willing to miss on hundreds to hit it.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| As one who actively participates in this parlor game, I disagree
| with the premise. Prior to writing proposals, I would have
| thought writing proposals was a huge waste of time and effort.
| However, we have a saying that no good idea goes to waste. When
| writing, you have to be clear and concise and your idea has to be
| good to get funding. If you don't get funded, you usually get
| good, useful feedback. You get better, your ideas get better, and
| the person reviewing them has learned what many scientist in the
| field are proposing as the best new directions for research.
| These are all valuable uses of time that might otherwise be spent
| learning how to make your ideas better, how to communicate them
| better, and how better understand what is going on in the field.
| In other words, things that you would be doing anyway.
|
| I think the biggest problem facing science right now is the scale
| at which it is occurring. My field does not have this problem,
| but I can't imagine what it's like trying to stay on top of the
| literature in e.g. medical sciences. Paper writing and peer
| review work at much smaller scales - there are order hundreds
| scientist in my field and I think it's functioning just fine. For
| fields with thousands and 10s of thousands of active researchers,
| I think there needs to be a different way to vet and organize
| information. I don't know what that is exactly but it might look
| something like twitter (can't believe I'm writing this!). On
| second thought, maybe it looks more like HN!
|
| The misalignment of incentives can be problematic as well, but
| arguably, not the biggest problem.
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| If you write out an idea that sounds plausible and well-
| thought-out, it doesn't mean that reality will agree with you,
| it means you have become a better politician. If you have
| passed it through a committee, and they agree with your idea,
| it means you are closer to the zeitgeist, not to reality.
|
| As any one in here knows from troubleshooting complex systems,
| the first seemingly sensible idea is usually wrong. To
| understand, you need many ideas, and to systematically update
| your model and disprove each hypothesis, using the evidence,
| and the build up in your intuition, to tune your next
| hypothesis. Science is more about hacking than it is about
| getting a well-written paper past a committee. The feedback
| loop shouldn't be slowed down with a political step.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| > it doesn't mean that reality will agree with you, it means
| you have become a better politician
|
| This is true, and we're reliant on the reviewers being in
| touch with reality, which I gather is not always the case,
| though in my (limited) experience it has been. Writing
| proposals does feel different than writing papers and I do
| worry about getting too divorced from reality. I endeavor to
| stick to nonfiction!
|
| The slowing of the feedback loop is only necessary if you
| wish to fund your work from sources that require it. Self
| funding through other means would have advantages.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sounds like the effect of filling up the YCombinator
| application form.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| From my perspective[1], the problem with writing everything
| you're going to do upfront is that it's a terrible way to
| develop new ideas.
|
| Outside of academia, where you just do shit to see what
| happens, you can get through maybe a dozen different "idea
| iterations" in a month, and within a short span of time you've
| really got an understanding of what does and doesn't work.
|
| In academia, where everything has to be justified, it seems
| like it takes decades to reach the same level of understanding
| that you could get independently in months.
|
| Of course, because your're more methodical and precise you can
| much more certain that you haven't made as many errors, but as
| a human being who doesnt know what the hell you're doing you'll
| almost always learn more from playing with something
| spontaneously 50 different ways than carefully planning 5
| approaches.
|
| I feel like science as a whole would be much more effective if
| we split it into two separate tasks: trying to wrap our heads
| around new things, and then only after this has done do we
| begin to formalise things. The current model of pretending we
| know how to approach new things from day one just seems to
| stifle progress and prevent bad paradigms from dying.
|
| [1] I left my PhD due to complete frustration with the system
| after first year - kept getting pushed towards the goal of
| "going through the motions" and adding to the pile of polished
| turds that is decoding algorithms for brain-computer
| interfaces. Still bitter about it 6 years later, probably will
| be until the day I die.
| kkylin wrote:
| I second this. My field (applied math) isn't super-dependent on
| having a grant, and writing a proposal once every couple years
| isn't a chore, and it's a good exercise to put your plans on
| paper in a coherent way and try to trouble-shoot obvious
| problems. And I can always opt out if I don't feel like it -- I
| just have to pay my own way to conferences (no big deal), not
| have a summer salary (fortunately no big deal for me), and my
| grad students have to do more teaching and take longer to
| finish. The travel and student funding, honestly, are the main
| reasons I bother anymore.
|
| OTOH, life scientists I have talked to or worked with (both in
| basic & medical research) seem to be writing proposals _all the
| time_ , and that just seems really unpleasant in all sorts of
| ways, on top of problems that have been discussed here _ad
| nauseum_.
| fghorow wrote:
| Szilard certainly nailed it with this piece.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| We can see that after the establishment of the National Science
| Foundation is that many companies have had organizations that
| have also accelerated scientific research. Also before the
| national Science Foundation most people that participated in
| Science already had money to begin with considering the great
| amount of money required to not be working in a factory. Also the
| companies are self sustaining.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858 - Jan 2023 (139
| comments)
| theK wrote:
| Its an interesting notion. If you can control the sum of all
| scientific sponsorships surely you will be able to control the
| subjects of research. And yes in 1940 30 million would surely go
| a long way to do this but it is 2023 and there are thousands of
| bodies offering research grants, usually chaired by senior
| members of academia that mostly tend to contribute indirectly any
| way.
|
| I think the slowdown in physics we are witnessing today has not
| much to do with this effect and more to do with pragmatic aspects
| like capitalism and the next order of magnitude in complexity
| that we need to master to make headway.
|
| EDIT: clarity
| curiousllama wrote:
| > Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things
| would be considered interesting, others not. There would be
| fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those
| who wouldn't would not, and pretty soon they would learn to
| follow the fashion, too.
|
| Have fashions taken over? What was science like before fashions
| took over?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| It was what Szilard, von Neumann, Feynman, and others were
| doing.
| dtech wrote:
| not an insider, but apparently it's almost impossible to get
| funding in (theoretical?) physics outside outside of quantum
| mechanics.
| scythe wrote:
| I assume that what you're trying to say is that it's almost
| impossible to get funding in _fundamental_ physics outside of
| _string theory_ , which at least might be true. There are
| lots of people with funding in theoretical (or at least
| computational) physics who aren't doing quantum mechanics,
| like nearly all of astrophysics, much of acoustics and fluid
| dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, etc.
| varjag wrote:
| String theory has been out of fashion for at least a
| decade.
| Thrymr wrote:
| What part of modern theoretical physics is "outside" quantum
| mechanics? General relativity, sure, but arguably the most
| interesting problem there is how to make it compatible with
| quantum mechanics.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > What was science like?
|
| The tyranny of the tenured elderly:
|
| "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_ , Scientific Autobiography
| and Other Papers
| ablatt89 wrote:
| Lots of conflicting views held by the scientific community:
|
| * Science is progressing too fast * Science is progressing too
| slow with not enough breakthroughs * The barrier to publish is
| too high and is wrought with politics * There's too many papers
| published and we need a higher bar as not everyone is a genius *
| My research is important and deserves funding * Others research
| is trivial and they don't deserve funding * Committees suck, they
| do nothing, just gate-keep who gets money and there's politics
| involved * X research is trivial, shouldn't receive funding,
| someone has to stop this * The public should understand what
| we're doing research on * A lot of the research being published
| is being exaggerated in quality, difficulty and correctness
|
| I guess it's no different than the conflicting views of any
| community. If there's no conflict, things get stale.
| bombolo wrote:
| there are many researches on going, so all of these opinions
| can be valid at the same time
| [deleted]
| ShaneCurran wrote:
| Reminds me of this 1944 field manual from the CIA[0] about how to
| sabotage organizations.
|
| [0]: https://www.hsdl.org/c/view?docid=750070
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