[HN Gopher] The diffusion of scientific discovery
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The diffusion of scientific discovery
Author : nerdlogic
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-06-01 19:18 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tchristos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tchristos.com)
| nologic01 wrote:
| There is something that rings true about the metaphor. Discovery
| is mostly an incremental process of trial and error around a
| neighborhood which occasionally probes a new opening and then
| there is a rush of activity in that new plane.
|
| The simplest mathematical model of this might be a Levy flight
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight
| smitty1e wrote:
| I don't understand the need for a labyrinth. Why not simple
| particles in solution?
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| I don't understand it either, but I do think it reflects what
| academia really feels like
|
| and I imagine the closer the academic research is to real world
| industry uses, the more obstacles there will be (due to 'trade
| secrecy', and the like)
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| I think it's the metaphor for spending your research career
| banging your head against a wall (in this case - literally)
| unclesaamm wrote:
| While I think simulations and models are interesting, this model
| is just way too simplified to give any real insight. Here's an
| example of a leading scholar in the field -- Allie Morgan --
| developing a simple model on this exact question!
| https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
|
| > Title: Prestige drives epistemic inequality in the diffusion of
| scientific ideas
|
| > Abstract: The spread of ideas in the scientific community is
| often viewed as a competition, in which good ideas spread further
| because of greater intrinsic fitness, and publication venue and
| citation counts correlate with importance and impact. However,
| relatively little is known about how structural factors influence
| the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea
| originates might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate
| the role of faculty hiring networks, which embody the set of
| researcher transitions from doctoral to faculty institutions, in
| shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the
| importance of where in the network an idea originates. We
| consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty
| at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the
| U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476
| associated publications. Analyzing five popular research topics,
| we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does facilitate
| the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a
| mechanism, we then analyze its potential consequences using
| epidemic models to simulate the generic spread of research ideas
| and quantify the impact of where an idea originates on its
| longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research from
| prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than
| work of similar quality originating from less prestigious
| institutions. Our analyses establish the theoretical trade-offs
| between university prestige and the quality of ideas necessary
| for efficient circulation. Our results establish faculty hiring
| as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic
| advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a
| theoretical lower bound for the impact of structural inequality
| in shaping the spread of ideas in science.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads
| more quickly and completely than work of similar quality
| originating from less prestigious institutions.
|
| That's a bit of a leap though, isn't it? How to establish that
| the works are of 'similar quality'?
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