[HN Gopher] Against the burden of knowledge
___________________________________________________________________
Against the burden of knowledge
Author : mooreds
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-07-06 18:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theseedsofscience.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theseedsofscience.pub)
| quonn wrote:
| Regarding the number of researchers, of all of my friends who got
| a PhD only a single one did it because he liked research. For
| most it was a stepping stone for a totally unrelated career in
| industry and for some just the easiest option due to lack of an
| alternative.
|
| Given that, is is surprising that progress does not scale
| proportionally? Maybe, maybe not. For sure my comment is not
| backed by anything but anecdotes.
| gumby wrote:
| > Regarding the number of researchers, of all of my friends who
| got a PhD only a single one did it because he liked research.
|
| This is sad; luckily for me the percentage is higher among my
| friends. I suspect your experience is closer to the statistical
| mean (perhaps because there's a good chance your friends are a
| few decades younger than me and many of my friends).
|
| Also: I bailed out _because_ I didn 't like research, or rather
| because I very like the _practice_ of research but only ever
| worked on super obscure things, and I wanted to make a
| difference I could see. Also I didn 't want to have to deal
| with the culture of research funding and related bureaucracy.
| Not that there's anything wrong with those who do like that
| stuff! It just seemed not worth getting a doctorate; it
| definitely would have made some things easier but in retrospect
| I made the right call (for me!).
|
| There is a lot of basic research done that does make a
| difference but where that difference is unknown to the original
| researcher -- perhaps separated too far in time. I have found
| value in decades-old PhD theses in the life sciences, mainly
| physiology.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > There is a lot of basic research done that does make a
| difference but where that difference is unknown to the
| original researcher -- perhaps separated too far in time. I
| have found value in decades-old PhD theses in the life
| sciences, mainly physiology.
|
| Have you ever tried tracking down the author to express your
| appreciation? It might make their day (or month!).
| Calavar wrote:
| That's actually the system working as intended. There's not
| nearly enough faculty positions or even non-faculty research
| staff positions to accommodate all the PhDs who graduate. The
| presumption is that most people who graduate will go into
| something other than academia. If you want to see the system
| failing, look to humanities, where most people who get a PhD
| are legitimately interested in academics and yet they will, in
| the best case, be stuck as terminal adjuncts
| advael wrote:
| It's crazy how much institutional decay there is basically
| everywhere in this era. Like I grew up hearing stories about
| institutions being crazy effective compared to the ones I
| actually encountered. Sure, humans have always had folly, but the
| society we currently occupy is obsessed with often nonsensical
| metrics, rewards con artists disproportionately for gaming those
| metrics, and creates significant barriers for anyone trying to
| navigate the world through other means. There is no faculty in
| any academic institution untouched by the Reagan-era push to make
| colleges into degree factories, the administrative bloat caused
| by incursions of the demands of an increasingly muscular and
| obtuse finance sector (that also affects most other
| institutions), or the pervasive instinct to automate decisions
| based on dubious metrics, and most adults understand this at an
| intuitive level
|
| We are in a period of widespread outright institutional collapse.
| Institutional decay should be the null hypothesis when
| considering the causal factors behind any widespread problem
| devwastaken wrote:
| This is a natural outcome when governments create rules that in
| effect solidify a market practice. It becomes irrelevant over
| time and fails to change because the rules will not allow for
| it, and even if they did, committees are not known for being
| industry leaders.
|
| In education the solution is simple and effective - cut all
| federal student aid. The educational institutions that have
| strong industry ties and therefore the best outcomes will
| persist. Those that were warming chairs to hand out fake
| degrees will go under. Let it fail for the admins, because it's
| already failing the students.
| glompers wrote:
| Your posted suggestion, of defining the best outcomes as
| immediate job success, would solidify a market practice of
| lowering fences between town and gown (viable during only the
| past 3 or 4 generations) as the only viable way forward for
| educational bodies that intend to survive.
|
| Because I agree with your general statement that market
| situations lose relevance once legislated, I think the
| principle more naturally extends to mean:
|
| It is better to consider how to keep universities, whether
| research institutes or liberal arts universities, as a
| distinctive part of "the whole spectrum of techniques by
| which one generation transmits its insights and abilities to
| the next," Prof. Edsger Dijkstra's words. Not enshrine a set
| of commercial principles by which every piece of a spectrum
| must play.
|
| Immediate job success is a fickle master; it would be a shame
| to LinkedInify any society. In 1996, Dijkstra said, [0]
|
| > The University with its intellectual life on campus is
| undoubtedly a creation of the restless mind, but it is more
| than its creation: it is also its refuge. The University is
| unique in that on campus, being brilliant is socially
| acceptable. Furthermore the fabric of the academic world is
| so sturdy that it can absorb the most revolutionary ideas.
|
| > But it is not only a refuge for the restless minds, it is
| also a reservation for them. It does not only protect the
| restless minds, it also protects the rest of the world, where
| they would create havoc if they were let loose. To put in
| another way, the fence around campus is essential because it
| separates two worlds that otherwise would harm each other.
| The fence ensures that we have relatively little direct
| influence on the world "out there", but we would be foolish
| to complain, for our freedom to be as radical as we like is
| based on the fact that, for at least the first 25 years,
| industry and the world-at-large ignore our work anyhow.
| Currently, there seems to be a world-wide tendency to try to
| lower the fence; the effort strikes me as ill-directed.
|
| He had also been writing similar things in 1986 [1] and 1994
| [2].
|
| [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html
|
| [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD
| 988...
|
| [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD
| 117...
| devwastaken wrote:
| No one can live in a capital market without capital.
| Education has always been about capital markets -
| uneducated people are highly limited in their use. There
| has never been a school that was built for "free", it's
| always come from capital one way or another.
|
| It used to be primarily private capital, people who
| believed in it's purpose. Outside of the top 1% Now nothing
| is built without students and taxes footing the bill.
|
| If it cannot survive on its own merits then its existence
| is an abuse to the people it claims to support. Turn it
| into something else and let real solutions arise naturally.
| SgtBastard wrote:
| > uneducated people are highly limited in their use.
|
| >taxes footing the bill.
|
| It sounds like it is surviving only its own merits,
| merely shifted in time.
|
| (Admittedly, from the perspective of an Australian whose
| strongest institutions are all public and the private
| universities are a bit of a joke)
| advael wrote:
| No it hasn't? That's some insane revisionist history, and
| this is what I blame Reagan for. The attitude that
| universities and even education broadly primarily or
| solely exist for producing vocational training
|
| The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose
| universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists
| try to claim credit for all the progress in science and
| innovation that's happened since the industrial
| revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what
| we now consider academia predate it significantly, and
| it's important to note that they were not always viewed
| even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a
| direct economic sense. Most of their educational
| capability is a side effect of developing competency in
| training new researchers. People who fell off this track
| still often got a quality education and became better-
| rounded, and also people who could get to a university
| tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-
| fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring
| decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on
| this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot
| of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of
| that story but not the beginning of it
|
| Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should
| be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning
| universities into this role was misguided from the start
| devwastaken wrote:
| _ideas_ of how it should be and the actual circumstances
| today are completely different. That ideal is abusive
| because it is not reflected in reality, taking advantage
| of young naive adults.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What are you on about, mate? Universities significantly
| predate even the concept of capital. Not universities as
| a concept, but specific universities that you can go to
| today - notably Oxford and Cambridge, but many others in
| Europe. And their purpose has almost always been
| scholarship, _not_ employment. Most modern universities
| stem from institutions meant to find better ways to
| understand God 's work, and perhaps to better worship it.
| The Catholic Church was the primary "investor" for a long
| stretch of time, at a time when it was a more powerful
| "state" than almost any other in Europe.
| devwastaken wrote:
| If you can find me a university free of a capital market
| I am more than willing to be wrong. The _idea_ of
| universities generations ago are not at all how they are
| today.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You have claimed "education has always been about capital
| markets". I have exained that it hasn't. That we today
| live in a capitalist society and every single aspect of
| our lives is touched by capital to a higher or lower
| extent is a completely different claim.
|
| Furthermore, you suggested that this (obviously false)
| history of education being driven by capital markets
| should be taken as a guide to letting capital control our
| education _even more_ , as if the problem with
| universities today is that they are not capitalistic
| enough. The actual history suggests exactly the opposite.
| rexpop wrote:
| Education has to be broader than industry, or we'll all end
| up slaves.
| devwastaken wrote:
| You cannot live in a capital society without capital. There
| is not nor has there ever been an education system
| disconnected from industry until government subsidy and
| "support" did it. This is because once there is free money
| there is no longer a natural market effect and
| organizational failure is acceptable and funded.
| advael wrote:
| It's crazy how people just make shit up and say it so
| confidently. Most education prior to the industrial
| revolution was considered a luxury for the wealthy, and
| its value was not considered in terms of producing
| economic value directly
| lordnacho wrote:
| > Most education prior to the industrial revolution was
| considered a luxury for the wealthy,
|
| In fact this is still the case in many ways. There are
| loads of kids studying things that are not directly
| economically useful, mainly for their own enjoyment and
| as a luxury status symbol.
| rexpop wrote:
| > loads of kids
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong, but...
|
| This narrative is very heavily purported by right-wing
| propaganda outlets. I wonder what you mean by "things...
| as a luxury." Do you mean MBAs, or history majors? And,
| what do you mean by "loads?" Do you have any data to back
| this up?
| gary_0 wrote:
| I think they mean the general study and refinement of
| culture and knowledge for its own sake--the kids who go
| to college/university for language arts, fine art, music,
| theatre, history, philosophy... these classes are widely
| attended, but have a reputation for not being useful for
| gainful employment. (Plenty of famous writers, poets,
| artists, actors, musicians, and journalists have such an
| education, but the rest of their classmates probably did
| not end up employed in the same sector.)
|
| Side note: it's not just the far-right that disparages
| higher academia as effete elitism. The far-left has done
| so as well, notably during China's Cultural Revolution,
| and within Soviet Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, etc. Being
| an academic at the wrong time in history means you have a
| good chance of ending up in a gulag or concentration
| camp.
| devwastaken wrote:
| It's a fact, money doesn't come from nowhere and for
| nothing. You can see it for yourself if you do the work.
| It doesn't matter how things were eons ago - it matters
| how it is _now_.
| detourdog wrote:
| I agree with everything you said but I really doubt Reagan is
| to blame for the degree factories. That was more of a Clinton
| push.
|
| We have many social ills delivered by Reagan and some you
| mentioned.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >We are in a period of widespread outright institutional
| collapse
|
| who is "we"? This thesis is easily tested by zooming away from
| the US for a second (I know, very hard exercise). The burden of
| knowledge is visible everywhere even in countries that have
| drastically improved their governance. Lee Kuan Yew used to
| lament the increased levels of education at the expense of
| family formation, experts are getting older everywhere from
| India to China, to Indonesia and South Korea, making the same
| gains in computing performance is harder and harder regardless
| if you're in Taiwan or Arizona. Capital required for economic
| growth, or drug discovery cost or any other reasonable proxy
| for the cost of new ideas also increases everywhere.
|
| Institutional collapse is completely coincidental to the basic
| mechanism that is perfectly well laid out in the article. To
| build better knowledge you need to account for the old
| knowledge and then some, so pretty much by definition it's an
| information theoretical necessity that better ideas get more
| expensive.
|
| Try to imagine a world where the theory is actually true that
| there is no burden of knowledge and the reason is institutional
| collapse. Then you'd have countries where the life expectancy
| grew faster than when we invented soap and antibiotics. You'd
| have places that make advances in computing as we did in the
| 80s and 90s. You'd have places where VC's invest less money
| every year but get more returns every year. It'd be a
| completely bizarre world compared to the one we're in.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Institutional knowledge is even actively destroyed. There is
| only so much you can maintain with written procedure; rather,
| for all of human history, institutions have mainly relied on
| the _people_ and _culture_ that make them up. But the "modern
| wisdom" is that you avoid such reliance on people--the
| _employees_ , the rank-and-file--at all costs. Executives must
| maintain absolute leverage against workers, so institutional
| knowledge has to be ignored as a factor. Every employee must be
| maximally expendable and easily replaced. You know that one
| senior team who knows how to reliably carry out some important
| function? Too bad, we're firing them (or denying them raises,
| or replacing their manager with a toxic sycophant, same diff)
| and then we'll just have to manage.
|
| Even non-commercial organizations where a healthy culture might
| still form are affected due to carry-over from the much larger
| corporate sector. I mean, nobody working _anywhere_ can expect
| to stay with the same firm until retirement; that 's just not
| the done thing anymore.
|
| So the decay has spread everywhere.
| frogeyedpeas wrote:
| Sometimes low barriers result in better results.
|
| If the rent in a city is too high you are not going to get the
| MOST interesting restaurants, bars, and clubs. You are going to
| get only the businesses that will DEFINITELY convince an investor
| to write a check to dump on such high rents; regardless of
| whether that is a good idea or not.
|
| The PhD cohorts for R1 Universities hasn't really gotten any
| bigger than 50 years ago. The number of academic jobs hasn't
| really gotten any bigger either. The only people having success
| in the system are the types of people that seem low-risk to the
| system.
|
| So of course we should expect a decline in innovative ideas as
| time rolls on. The only way to reverse this is to literally
| create more tenured jobs (or perhaps temporary tenure ex: 10
| years you're guaranteed employment) and increase the size of PhD
| student cohorts so that they are large enough that iconoclasts
| can fit in again.
| advael wrote:
| You make a really good point. Defining risk in terms of
| financial ROI and trying to assess it algorithmically and
| default-gating more and more endeavors behind such risk
| assessment is a surprisingly coherent model for a lot of
| widespread modern rot
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Thanks for being one of the few commenters questioning the
| microconomic angle itself. In my view, the problem is that no
| rational economic agent will ever embrace the idea that
| research _should_ be expensive. Well some very few of us do,
| we realize that we are competing against Nature and the
| Universe ( _not_ other economic entities), so one of the
| sensible avenues left to us is to try and recuperate all the
| losses that have _already_ gone into past research. (maybe
| Kepler was trying desperately to salvage Hellenic
| heliocentrism? He also had a thing for platonic solids, after
| all)
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| There is another way.
|
| Reinvent the way academic careers work. No need to even have
| the concept of tenure. No need to get a PhD degree to be
| recognized as someone researching something.
|
| Anyone should be able to publish research without being on such
| restrictive terms. The article's main takeaway is that the
| institution of academia has perverse incentives that hold back
| innovation. I believe the way jobs and degrees are structured
| are part of that.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| How do you decide which researchers to invest in? Ultimately
| you need some kind of institution to organize this, and I
| promise you it will end up very similar to a university.
|
| Also, tenure is generally seen as a very important part of
| research. Without tenure your livelihood is dependent on your
| output and your relationships, which creates numerous
| perverse incentives. You can't research things which might
| lead nowhere, or you'll lose your job. You can't prove some
| other senior researcher wrong, or they might work to have you
| fired.
|
| With tenure, this all goes away: you are free to choose your
| own path in research, and empowered to know you don't have
| any superiors who can lose you your livelihood if you step on
| their toes, or their friends' toes. Of course, this is the
| ideal. In practice, lots of tenured professors actually want
| to become ever more wealthy and powerful and are not content
| with the guarantees of their tenuership.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I mean, anybody _can_ do research and publish their papers in
| whatever journal. There's no rule stating you need a PhD to
| do that
| beryilma wrote:
| > I mean, anybody can do research and publish their papers
| in whatever journal.
|
| Not really true. Publishing research in a reputable journal
| without an academic affiliation is many times more
| difficult. Sure you don't need a PhD to publish, but you
| pretty much need an academic affiliation.
|
| Good or bad, researchers without an affiliation are often
| taken as crackpots.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _But then, Copernicus came along with the heliocentric model
| which, in its simplest initial form, made worse prediction than
| the tuned-up Ptolemaic model. But the burden of knowledge was
| dissolved in an instant. Improving the Copernican model meant
| shifting orbital paths from perfect circles to ellipses. It had
| nothing to do with the epicycles and perihelions of the Ptolemaic
| model and none of that burdensome knowledge was necessary to
| expand the frontier anew._
|
| disagree here. it does not make it easier. to show why a new
| model is right or superior means having to understand the old
| models well enough to show it's wrong or suboptimal. hence
| knowledge.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think people have recognized that the current research grant
| system tends to reward safe, status quo ideas, and discourage
| potentially revolutionary risky long shot ideas. Its been talked
| about for a long time now. Maybe even decades at this point.
|
| The hard part is what to do about it.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder had video on this exact subject.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
| immibis wrote:
| Note that Sabine Hossenfelder is a rather unreliable source
| for anything outside her field of expertise.
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| Hence, more savvy researchers would rather get private funding
| instead of jumping through grant hoops.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| There isn't an infinite amount of grant money to go around, and
| of course handing it out to any crackpot that comes along is
| going to be a nonstarter. It seems to me that the solution is
| somewhere in between the two extremes.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| My observation is that both of those could be linked. We might be
| reaching the limits of technology.
|
| It means that to push boundaries we need more money to
| buy/construct new tests. In other words, you need exponentially
| more money. Which leads to the kind of blockbusterization of
| science. You don't get hundred blockbusters each year, instead
| you get two, by team with track record. Which sounds a lot like
| institutional decay.
| dartos wrote:
| I think you're putting the cart before the horse.
|
| Needing exponentially more money is the decay. The
| blockbusterization of science is a symptom.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Exponentially more money isn't just sign of institutional
| decay. Resources/energy required to discover X ray is a grain
| of sand on a beach compared to energies required to discover
| Higg's boson.
|
| That's just energy. Compare cost to make an X ray tube vs
| LHC.
|
| Science used to be able to snatch low hanging fruit. Now
| those are picked, but people still expect same rate of
| innovation.
| dartos wrote:
| > but people still expect same rate of innovation
|
| This sounds like the decay, not the rising cost. I'm sure
| every researcher understands this, but not every executive
| or shareholder. The lack of trust in your workers / focus
| on hyper growth is the issue.
|
| Like you say, discoveries become more expensive over time,
| but we're seeing similar institutional decay in non
| research institutions as well, so that can't be the only
| factor.
|
| Like how much more expensive is it to teach a single
| college student now than it was 20 years ago. In all
| honesty, probably much cheaper. Especially when you start
| looking at online classes.
|
| So why is college in the states so much more expensive?
| It's largely because of administrative bloat, which, among
| many other weird incentives, are symptoms of decay.
|
| And why would you need administrators? IMO, it's because
| you're unwilling to trust small departments or individuals
| to tech effectively.
| mncharity wrote:
| I've repeatedly encountered research I'd have liked to use, but
| which was inaccessibly buried by the pipeline from academic
| research to patents, to optional failed startup, to bigco
| portfolio entombment. And wished for an industrial policy dialed
| more towards a progression from research, to open source and
| community exploration, to cottage commercial, to small-scale
| industrial. Or consider a slider from non-competes, to California
| I'm-working-at-a-competitor-tomorrow, to China and-I've-brought-
| stuff - I'd like to see more California and China than not. Our
| optimization for pharma and VC, often seems terminally ill fitted
| for progress along many vectors.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I think the example from the history of astronomy the author
| provides can by turned against him. It was the accumulation of
| astronomical observations and the refinement of ever and ever
| exacter measurements that provided the basis for the transition
| in ther scientific community from the heliocentric to the
| geocentric system, that took between one and two hundred years,
| depending when on lets it start (Copernicus or a predecessor) and
| end (Galileo, Kepler or Newton).
|
| If we look for example at the career of Kepler, we see that he
| had to accumulate expert knowledge of both systems and that he
| arrived at his later so-called laws not by a sudden insight, but
| through tireless work, trying again and again over several years
| to make sense out of series of measurements that did not really
| make sense in either the Ptolemaic or Copernican system.
|
| It was not the epicycles that worried the late medieval
| astronomers, but the fact that according to their geocentric
| theory the earth was not really exactly in the center of the
| deferent. Correspondingly, however, the sun was not really at the
| center of the Copernican system either. Both systems lacked
| elegance, and both systems were more or less equaly in accordance
| with the observational data. To solve this debate and to make
| progress, the strategy of the most famous astronomer of his time,
| Tycho Brahe, was to collect better measurements. And it were
| these accumulated measurements that enabled his pupil Kepler to
| develop a solution. In a sort, he was lucky. Only the data for
| the planet Mars, which he considered first, was exact enough to
| match an ellipsis. His data for Jupiter or Saturn would not have
| allowed him to come up with one.
|
| Accumulated knowledge was not an obstacle, but the basis for
| Keplers insights. That we might get a different impression is a
| result of simplifications that happen after a scientific
| community reaches a conclusion. At that stage such a theory
| becomes textbook knowledge: a student needs no longer acquire the
| accumulate knowledge of the previous period, but only the
| successful doctrine. These doctrines appear and are all too often
| presented as ingenious insights from geniuses, instead of
| cumulation points of a collective work of generations of
| scientists and scholars.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Parallax Nick is a thoroughly researched channel on these
| topics.
|
| https://youtube.com/@parallaxnick637
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| Another article of not really independent interest: "Investing in
| the Unknown and Unknowable"
| https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/investing-unknown-a...
|
| PS: Since these are articles penned by academic economists rather
| than pro scientists, it'd be nice to hear criticism from an
| economic (or finance) angle..
| biophysboy wrote:
| Knowledge is not always cumulative, but you have to be aware of
| its prevent contradictions to refute them. This is a point in
| Kuhn's "Structure of scientific revolutions" that I think is
| neglected
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The comparison the author makes with astronomy doesn't support
| their point at all.
|
| First, it agrees with the notion of a burden of knowledge, by
| agreeing that improving the Ptolemaic model took huge amounts of
| time to learn its intricacies.
|
| Secondly, the Copernican alternative worked not because it was
| simpler, but because the Ptolemaic model was _wrong_. There is
| never a guarantee that a model we currently is is wrong and can
| be replaced by a substantially simpler model. Maybe someone
| brilliant will come along and find a simpler model than quantum
| electrodynamics, but maybe they won 't: it's absolutely possible
| that, say, QED is the right model, and we can at best make it
| _even more_ complex to explain more details of phenomena.
|
| Finally, tools only get you so far. Tools don't necessarily
| encode some of the scientific knowledge you need to advance
| fields. They are a separate track from it.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| We compile knowledge into institutions to reduce the burden of
| knowledge, distilling vast information into simple phrases.
| However, the rapid technological and cultural changes over the
| past 80 years have hindered the formation of new institutions. As
| technological improvements slow down, we will likely see more
| established institutions emerge, reducing the burden of knowledge
| and allowing us to break through the current knowledge ceiling.
| benreesman wrote:
| No, ideas are not getting hard to find. Ideas are getting harder
| to discuss.
|
| There has never been such a ripe time to find such ample reason
| to propose and discuss new and radical ideas. And there has never
| been such a hostile time to looking into it.
|
| In physics we've lost 50-70 years to string theory and related
| nonsense and the people still working on effective quantum field
| theories have had to re-brand as working on "quantum information
| / quantum computing" to stay in rent and lab desks. There aren't
| many serious QFT people who doubt Everettian epistemology but
| it's still nothing undergraduates hear about. Most serious non-
| string gravity work comes out of Perimeter and Marletto/Deutsch.
|
| In economics and finance we still put our hand into the sink
| shredder of the Chicago-style strong-form EMH, as resoundingly
| and empirically disproved by Simons (may he rest). And we
| continue to embrace Friedman-style supply side economic policy,
| without peer the nastiest wealth transfer from those with surplus
| away from those facing scarcity at the barrel of a gun in
| absolute terms ever. It never trickles down.
|
| In the fundamental epistemology of our day we are surrendering
| the reigns of influence to people who market chat bots trained to
| lie convincingly at scale.
|
| Knowledge, and the new ideas that approximate at the limit the
| derivative of knowledge are under attack. They're under attack by
| some rich guy's choice for the job he did well and decided to
| keep in the family.
| gampleman wrote:
| If we had a rather good way of attracting, selecting and
| retaining top scientists then by power laws inherent in any
| creative/competitive endeavour we'd expect that by increasing
| funding drastically to get more people employed we'd only see
| very marginal improvements, as the wider base of the talent won't
| contribute all that much.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Heretical opinion: we should have much stronger merit-based
| gating on access to university. You can get in if you can
| demonstrate facility with real analysis, matrix algebra, and
| Bayesian reasoning.
|
| Imagine how much the general level of educational noise would
| be reduced in universities, and how much more space there would
| be to do meaningful research.
| contingencies wrote:
| The cost of complexity is inherently wicked. We could discuss its
| impacts on HR, on R&D, on supply chain, on education, on
| manufacturing or project management. However, let's stick to the
| core: the vast majority of investment-related decision making
| systems are still stuck in a finite-dimensional reality barely
| evolved from a spartan economic rationalism analytical milieu
| derivative of double entry book-keeping functionally based upon
| entrenched inefficiency and a lack of timeliness. Regulators,
| insurance, and other aspects of society with ill-deserved
| critical veto capability do not just support or require but
| effectively celebrate this uncompromising backwardness, whereas
| it should actually be banished. We desperately need holistic
| decision-making taking in to account factors lying outside of
| this purview. Academics, entrepreneurs, frustrated youth,
| competent industrial craftspeople and environmentalists are
| unlikely allies at the coal face.
| lumb63 wrote:
| Put another way, I think one of the author's arguments is "what
| if we're pouring more and more effort into research in an area,
| because our primary abstraction is _wrong_?" That would make it
| harder and harder to continue to roll the ball up an increasingly
| steep hill. And I think in some fields, they may be right. It's
| akin to how in math some problems are very difficult in Cartesian
| coordinates but trivial in polar coordinates. For instance, it
| seems to me that the existence of the "wave-particle duality" in
| physics and our inability to explain quantum-scale phenomena in a
| way that makes intuitive or logical sense to people is the canary
| in the coal mine that we took a wrong turn a while back. That's
| not to say it's true in every field, but that's one that has
| stood out to me for a while.
|
| I think another cause could be bureaucratic. From what I
| understand, several hundred years ago, research was funded by
| rich patrons who wanted some credit in relation to discoveries.
| Nowadays there is a giant, lurking, centrally planned grant
| machine that distributes money to researchers. And as we know
| from economics, central planning becomes increasingly untenable
| as the system becomes larger. Results get worse as the complexity
| skyrockets.
|
| Additionally, if we are going to blame the "burden of knowledge"
| in any capacity, we have to acknowledge the abysmal education
| system (in the US). An anecdote which I will never forget is, in
| 6th grade we had a student who had recently immigrated from
| India. By his own telling, he was an average student there. But
| compared to native students, he was light years ahead in math. We
| learned multiplication in third grade, division in fourth grade,
| long division and fractions in fifth grade, or something like
| that. He had learned multiplication in first grade, and all of
| division in second grade. While our smartest students in sixth
| grade were grappling with pre algebra, he was bored in classes
| with the eighth grade algebra students. Our education system has,
| since experiencing that, seemed to me deeply flawed; there really
| is no reason an efficient and effective public education system
| should take 12+ years to be able to have a child ready for
| college and then another 4+ in college to have them ready to
| contribute to an isolated field.
| aeim wrote:
| > "what if we're pouring more and more effort into research in
| an area, because our primary abstraction is wrong?
|
| Absolutely; perhaps "thinking of knowledge in terms of physical
| environments" also helps to illustrate why - sometimes the only
| way to get to where we want to be, is to redefine where-and-how
| we begin
|
| Concretely, looking up a unconquered mountain: it may seem as
| though many approaches are viable, but when attempt proves
| otherwise, the only option might be to return to base, and
| consider a new origin for approach
|
| I think this also helps illustrate why "progress by accrual
| alone" is so inherently flawed. Sometimes you must begin again,
| in whole, but also in part - because "you can't get to anywhere
| from anywhere"
|
| In fact, for almost all domains other than science, beginning
| again is such an optimal remedy to progress dead-ends, it's
| operational
|
| Writers know what's up - kill your darlings. Software engineers
| too, famously - measuring software progress by lines of code
| added is counter productive - we learn to be unsentimental,
| delete and reconsolidate often. This is the continual
| redefinition of the "origin" of where we continue-on-from
|
| Though it does require a change in perspective: written words,
| and lines of code - not as asset, but liability. Redundant
| words, code or literature, is contrived complexity.
| Unnecessary, and after a while, prohibitive to progress. I
| think science hasn't done this yet? - _we_ know that naming
| things is hard, but perhaps for science, calling every artifact
| 'literature' doesn't help...
|
| I also think that science catastrophically misunderstands
| "beginning again". Finding new origins is easiest for those who
| haven't been conditioned to only see one. It doesn't take
| magical genius, just (selective) ignorance. This is why (non-
| trivial) revolutionary paradigms often come from outsiders (or
| historical scientists who did not complete the endurance test
| of the modern day burden)
|
| I can't help but think that scientific genius is based on "eh,
| fuck that, i'm sure there's a better way"
|
| It's as if, when Kuhn wrote "Structute", a million normies
| cried out in pain, and because they'd already been conditioned
| to one origin, and couldn't stand the idea of "newbs" getting
| credit, vowed to prove that "progress by iterative accrual
| alone" was all that was necessary. And here we are
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| > This is why (non-trivial) revolutionary paradigms often
| come from outsiders (or historical scientists who did not
| complete the endurance test of the modern day burden)
|
| Can you give me an example of this in the last century? Or
| even historically?
| aeim wrote:
| Why artificially limit the (historical) set-of-all non-
| trivial revolutionary paradigms to the last century?
|
| Current academia seem to treat the phd (implicit modern) as
| a minimal barrier to credibility (which is curious for
| several reasons). But given the modern phd is a relatively
| recent invention, this heuristic ought to exclude every
| paper written by those who predate this new form/
| qualification. Of course, historic progress seems to be
| revered most of all
|
| The point isn't to suggest that the modern form was beyond
| historical figures (though I suspect given the nature of
| earlier scientific progress many might _choose_ to not
| endure the modern form), but more frame the question "had
| they (historical figures) been conditioned to think
| narrowly, within the contrived 'lanes' of modern isolated
| disciplines, would they still have thought as they did?"
|
| All of Hofstadters "analogies which shook the world"
| (surfaces and essences) necessarily depend upon thinking
| across arbitrarily plural scopes of phenomena, and deeply
| -- with commitment to the premise that the deepest
| understanding of our universe which that they might
| contribute to the endeavour, frames an implicit "universal
| general domain" of characteristic forms which apply
| universally. This is the opposite of isolated special-
| domain thinking/ stay in your lane/ etc
|
| Education includes learning and conditioning. I wonder if
| the degree to which we stress test conditioning impacts
| ongoing learning, specifically open learning, learning
| across (artificial) boundaries of special-domains
| tuatoru wrote:
| > in 6th grade we had a student who had recently immigrated
| from India. By his own telling, he was an average student
| there. But compared to native students, he was light years
| ahead in math. We learned multiplication in third grade,
| division in fourth grade, long division and fractions in fifth
| grade, or something like that. He had learned multiplication in
| first grade, and all of division in second grade.
|
| Whether he knew it or not, he was lying to you in claiming he
| was average. India's education system is notoriously poor.
| thntk wrote:
| Besides the burden of knowledge and the flaws of academic
| funding, another factor to explain the slowdown in scientific
| progress is: _the world has more things to be entertained with_ ,
| including books, comics, games, movies, music, p@rn, social
| media. These things have dramatically increased over the past
| decades, meanwhile the number of hours in a day did not increase
| at all.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Great example:
|
| " Ptolemy and his astronomical ancestors explained these
| "retrograde" motions with the extra loops you see in the map
| above called "epicycles." By the 15th century astronomers had
| accumulated centuries of meticulous measurements and incorporated
| them into complex orbital paths, matching their observations.
| Learning these models and taking enough measurements to improve
| one of them took an entire lifetime of monastic devotion to
| studying the stars. The burden of knowledge was immense.
|
| But then, Copernicus came along with the heliocentric model
| which, in its simplest initial form, made worse prediction than
| the tuned-up Ptolemaic model. But the burden of knowledge was
| dissolved in an instant. Improving the Copernican model meant
| shifting orbital paths from perfect circles to ellipses. It had
| nothing to do with the epicycles and perihelions of the Ptolemaic
| model and none of that burdensome knowledge was necessary to
| expand the frontier anew."
| its_ethan wrote:
| Yea a cool example, and sure there are others around this time
| where "we" figured out previous thinking was just fully wrong.
| But the author then also says:
|
| > There are thousands of other examples.
|
| Really? Thousands? Are they all similarly examples of pre-
| scientific method/ pre-industrial revolution knowledge? How
| many of these "thousand" examples have happened since 1850? Why
| didn't he list any that have happened in the last 50 years?
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