[HN Gopher] A Defense of Weird Research
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A Defense of Weird Research
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-02-25 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asteriskmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asteriskmag.com)
| mc_maurer wrote:
| I'd even argue that the declining rate of scientific advancement
| is due to the academic track moving towards the same short-term
| thinking that plagues parts of the private sector. When the
| incentive structure is towards pumping out publications, there is
| way less breathing room for the patient development of good
| science and novel research. Plus, null results coming from
| excellent research are treated as useless, so the incentive is
| towards finding obvious, positive results, especially for early-
| career scientists.
|
| The total result of the current academic incentive structure is
| towards the frequent publication of safe, boring positive
| results, especially pre-tenure. Academic research needs to become
| LESS like the quarterly return driven private sphere, not MORE
| like it.
| boplicity wrote:
| What declining rate of scientific advancement? Do you have a
| reference to support this claim? Curious.
| jeaton02 wrote:
| Pretty influential one:
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338 "The
| number of researchers required today to achieve the famous
| doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times
| larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More
| generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the
| exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find."
| oersted wrote:
| You could argue that those current researchers are doing a
| lot more than those in the 70s. It is difficult to quantify
| how much harder the doubling problem becomes every time,
| and how much more effort it takes to solve. But the fact
| that, after decades of yearly exponential improvement,
| costs have consistently grown only linearly. More
| specifically, only x18 cost for doubling after roughly 40
| iterations (2^40 is massive). I mean that's phenomenal by
| any standards.
| not2b wrote:
| That one, though, is because we are running into physical
| limits: if we want to build things out of atoms, we can't
| make features that are half an atom thick. Even above that
| scale, physical effects that used to be ignorable, like
| quantum tunneling, no longer are.
|
| From the late 70s through about 2005, scaling semiconductor
| generations was easy. MOSFET scaling followed rules
| formulated by Dennard, which provided a fairly easy method
| of scaling semiconductor designs from one generation to the
| next, keeping power density roughly constant and
| continually improving performance. The problem is that by
| around 2005, if you did it that way, your gates were no
| longer switches, they were dimmers, and leakage power
| started to dominate, and that meant that chip architectures
| had to change radically to keep on scaling.
|
| So, we can no longer just scale designs from one generation
| to the next, we have to come up with completely new
| approaches. That's much harder.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
| dguest wrote:
| I feel like there's some fundamental fallacy in the idea that
| "a declining rate of scientific advancement" is a sign that
| the field is somehow being corrupted or rotting out from the
| inside.
|
| Science isn't like other commodities. In most of recorded
| history it is only ever produced, never destroyed [1], and
| the product is basically free to replicate [2]. The result is
| massive inflation: it might be hard to make a profit growing
| corn the same way we did 200 years ago, but doing a 200 year
| old science experiment is utterly pointless outside a
| classroom demonstration.
|
| So making science that is worth paying for is just always
| going to get harder. And yet we equate science with other
| industries when we expect anything less than billion dollar
| experiments to yield fundamentally interesting results. This
| doesn't mean science is somehow getting worse, or that the
| practitioners are to blame, it just means it's evolving to
| attack much more difficult problems.
|
| All this being said, there are plenty of ways to reform to
| keep the progress going: reproducibility is theoretically
| easier than ever, and yet many journals aren't requiring open
| datasets or public code. We need to keep the pressure on to
| evolve in a positive way, not just throw up our hands because
| things are harder than they were when we knew less.
|
| [1]: Ok, there are some examples were lots of information was
| destroyed, and a bias from what is recorded.
|
| [2]: I don't mean repeating the same experiment, just that
| the results from one experiment are trivially disseminated to
| millions of people.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| All of this is the result of scaling issues. For most of the
| history of science, it was a endeavor pursued by very few
| people. Then we started sending everyone to university,
| eviscerated our economies, and expanded the research workforce
| a thousandfold. More maybe.
|
| There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less
| grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-
| competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire
| catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication
| mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be
| trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful
| reform is possible.
| searine wrote:
| I don't think it is that pessimistic.
|
| Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather
| have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful
| piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a
| paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those
| high-quality papers that get cited.
|
| Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown
| to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is
| incremental and slow.
| sfpotter wrote:
| There's tons of very interesting and rewarding research to
| pursue. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because so
| much of the research pursued currently is neither interesting
| nor rewarding. You have to be brave, creative, and
| independently minded in order to realize that this research
| is just around the corner. The current academic system
| doesn't select for people with these traits (rather, it
| selects for people who are good at taking tests and following
| rules).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 1. The incentive is to get grants. Papers, sure...but grants
| really. The problem is that grants are effectively smaller than
| they used to be due to inflation, and so you have to have
| multiple R01 level grants to fund the lab. Grants must be
| understandable and seem feasible to get funded...the
| competition is incredibly high....so this limits attempted
| scope. So to survive, you write grants that are simple and easy
| to achieve.
|
| 2. In general, the problems are harder today than they were 40
| years ago. We are constantly delving into problems plagued by
| noise and heterogeneity. This makes progress much tougher.
|
| 3.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What value is there in "research" that doesn't do anything weird?
|
| How can it even justify the name on the previous sentence without
| the quotes?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > What value is there in "research" that doesn't do anything
| weird?
|
| Plenty of value, I think. It's e.g. not weird at all to
| research very mundane things like "can we track as many
| diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what
| other health outcomes happen". Or something like "let's test if
| this chemotherapy drug is more effective than this other
| chemotherapy drug".
|
| Sure there is radical, weird research, like rock licking or
| maybe some sociological study on fetishes. But I think there's
| space for both the weird and non-monetizeable research (think:
| 16th century lacemaking in a european country that doesn't
| exist anymore) and the monetizeable research (some
| incrementally improved LLM model probably).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| By the bar people are calling research "weird" right now, no,
| "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10,
| 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen"
| doesn't qualify.
|
| What qualifies is "can we track as many diabetic people as we
| can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health
| outcomes happen by using only the same procedure and data
| other people have been using for a while so that it has been
| on the news more than a few times".
|
| And yeah, you still have a point in that it may still be
| useful. But it's either something people blatantly ignored
| for some reason, or it's not really research, but product
| development.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I think metadata studies are pretty useful actually. Broad
| questions like "what medical conditions does diabetes
| cause" can be investigated in that way. It's definitely not
| weird at all. But when people say "weird" I think people
| mean things that don't have immediate economic use, for
| example, a literature phd that is on the depiction of black
| hair in books from countries with black majorities vs books
| from countries with black minorities.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But when people say "weird" I think people mean things
| that don't have immediate economic use
|
| How on Earth does, for example, the "shrimp threadmill"
| paper not have immediate and obvious economic use?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Replication is important but I wouldn't call it weird.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| meanwhile, the in-person NIH study section I was going to serve
| on was just turned virtual, but the SRO hinted that full
| cancellation is on the table.
|
| I am sickened at furious at the actions of this administration on
| science.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I just received the "postponement" aka cancellation notice for
| the NMBH study section.
|
| A whole round of funding opportunities sunk for no damn reason.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Almost all legitimate scientific research can be accurately
| described either in a way that sounds weird, possibly useless, or
| in a way that sounds important and useful.
|
| The former is usually characterized by describing the details of
| the experiment, which are meaningless to the untrained audience,
| the latter is characterized by describing its ultimate goal.
|
| This could sound like a blind defense of "trust the experts",
| which can be a problematic attitude. The point is that someone
| you can't answer the latter question, then any critique should be
| suspect. If the researcher can't answer the latter question
| concisely, then a closer look is definitely warranted.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| The first two paragraphs are FUD and can be safely skipped. The
| second paragraph sets up a straw-man.
|
| After that, however, the rest of the article seems to be a good-
| faith attempt at defending general public funding of science. It
| does use the straw-man as a crutch a few times, and it neatly
| avoids the real problems like the slew of reworded papers on
| known junk science, or the ideologically targeted wolf-in-
| science-clothing research that clogs "the pipeline."
|
| It doesn't change my opinion that the pipeline appears to need a
| hard reset.
| Herring wrote:
| To be a conservative is to have great difficulty with change and
| "weird" things you have never seen before. It's a core
| personality trait, and takes years of education/travel/meditation
| to loosen.
| jpadkins wrote:
| good article on the general defense of public funding of science,
| but does not address the current policy changes that well. It
| avoids questions like:
|
| - should we borrow money (from future tax payers) to fund basic
| research now? Given the $2T deficit, it's not clear this optimal
| strategy for our grandchildren. Especially given how close we are
| to monetary collapse if we continue to borrow from the future at
| the rate we have the last 5 years.
|
| - who controls the priorities and agenda of the public funding?
| In a constitutional republic, the will of the people should be
| reflected in the agenda of the science funding. We just had a
| presidential election, and this is democracy in action. It's not
| clear that science funding is even going down, the executive
| branch is simply steering research funding away from topics it
| doesn't think is a priority for the American people.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > Especially given how close we are to monetary collapse if we
| continue to borrow from the future at the rate we have the last
| 5 years.
|
| Source for this claim?
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| Those are fair questions! My answer to the first one is in
| three parts:
|
| 1. In absolute terms, the amount of money we're talking about
| (e.g. NSF+NIH) is a drop in the bucket compared to $2T; it's
| been well-covered elsewhere, but scientific research funding
| simply isn't a significant contributor to the federal budget
| (and its deficit). It's a rounding error next to defense,
| social security, medicare, and medicaid.
|
| 2. Basic scientific research is an investment in our
| grandchildren's lives and health, and one that (as described in
| the article) historically has resulted in a very good rate of
| financial return.
|
| 3. When trying to cut costs, it is important not to be penny-
| wise and pound-foolish. These decisions are difficult, and if
| we want to have a hard look at what science gets funded, that's
| fine... but we need to do that in some kind of organized,
| serious, and systematic way, and that process absolutely has to
| involve the people doing the work at _some_ level, as well as
| (ideally) other stakeholders (e.g. the people who might be
| affected by whatever the research would be accomplishing). A
| chainsaw is not the right tool for that job.
|
| As to the second question, about priorities and agendas, this
| one's a bit trickier. First of all, let's be clear: we are not
| seeing a "steering" of research funding. What we are seeing is
| more of a "indiscriminate slashing" based on truly nonsensical
| and heavily politicized grounds: -
| https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/nx-s1-5295043/sen-ted-cruzs-l...
| - https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-reexamines-
| exist...
|
| Besides funding of new research grants, the bigger impact is
| actually in education, training, and workforce development.
| Training grants are being badly affected, and because of the
| threats to indirect costs and the general uncertainty about
| future research funding levels, many universities are
| dramatically decreasing their number of PhD admissions this
| year, or eliminating them altogether. I also know of several
| programs aimed at scientific workforce development that are on
| the chopping block, and we are worried about our existing
| students losing their funding mid-way through their PhDs.
| Again, that's not "steering", unless you mean "steering" in the
| sense of "steering American science off a cliff". We are, in
| the most literal possible sense, eating our seed corn. I'm
| reminded of that reservoir in California that was recently
| ordered to dump a bunch of water, which means that the farmers
| in that part of the state won't have as much as they are going
| to need this summer. That's what is happening in science right
| now, as we speak.
|
| Secondly, I don't quite know how to say this, but it's not
| really the executive's job to decide which grants get funded.
| That's up to the scientific and programmatic leadership at
| funding agencies, together with the existing and well-defined
| scientific peer review process. We did indeed just have an
| election, but our system of government is very much not a
| dictatorship. This is literally part of why Congress set up
| dedicated agencies to administer scientific and medical
| research; those projects need to persist beyond any single
| election and need to be insulated somewhat from day-to-day
| politics. Congress making those funding decisions was also an
| expression of democracy in action.
|
| Also, this is why funding agencies are staffed by career civil
| servants with domain expertise, and why funding agencies have
| extremely well-documented and carefully designed peer review
| processes in place, and why scientists from all over the
| country give up lots of time to participate in those processes
| several times per year. Undermining all of this process and
| structure --- which is in place to try and mitigate biases and
| ensure as much objectivity as is possible in an inherently
| subjective world --- is one of the best ways I can imagine to
| ensure that government-funded research becomes more
| ideologically-driven, not less.
|
| Anyway, that's my two cents!
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Given the $2T deficit, it's not clear this optimal strategy
| for our grandchildren.
|
| The deficit doesn't matter: 1) we owe money that we print
| ourselves, and 2) reducing public debt just expands private
| debt.
|
| That being said, I think that Trump's economic strategy is
| smartly focused on the real problem, which is the massive trade
| deficits that we've been running since Reagan. The problem
| isn't government debt, it's foreign debt. Cutting government
| spending with a continuing trade deficit just forces the
| private sector to borrow more to make up for lack of government
| spending.
|
| https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/socialprovisioning2/chapte...
|
| We're not borrowing anything from future taxpayers. We are
| building the world we will hand to them. The problem isn't the
| degree of investment, if it were effective (i.e. profitable)
| investment it would obviously be good. The problem is if we're
| investing money _badly_. Endlessly borrowing in order to buy
| imports is an obvious sign of domestic malinvestment.
|
| When government is failing, it should be not be getting any
| smaller. It should be expanding and improving the things that
| work while reforming, replacing, or eliminating the things that
| don't. Conservatives only seem to understand this when
| demanding crackdowns on poor people committing street crime.
|
| edit: cheerful perspective for Trump cynics from Varoufakis:
| https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterpl...
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Trade deficits are _good_ , they are a privilege of empire.
| Foreign countries give us finished goods and services, and in
| return we give them green pieces of paper, which most of the
| time they give straight back to us in investment. What's bad
| about that? Thinking trade deficits are bad is just
| discredited mercantilism with a new coat of paint.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because eventually people will stop taking your green
| pieces of paper, and you won't have the domestic
| infrastructure left to physically attack them and take
| their goods like you once could?
|
| Thinking trade deficits are good never had an argument
| behind it, it was a retroactive justification for domestic
| infrastructure neglect, government cuts, and the coddling
| of the wealthy that began with the Reagan administration.
| The arguments for it are similar to the arguments for
| running a bunch of personal credit card debt "It's free
| money, take it, let them try to get it back."
|
| The USA can't live as a parasite forever.
| paulorlando wrote:
| There's something (maybe innate) about belief in advancement vs a
| cycle.
|
| Historian Will Durant noted that the ancient Greeks thought of
| history as a vicious circle that repeated again and again. E.g.
| there was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato,
| or Aristotle.
|
| Related, ancient Greek historian Polybius pushed a theory called
| anacyclosis, with six repeating stages of history, a concept
| explored by others as well. Polybius' stages were monarchy,
| tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy (mob-
| rule).
|
| Support for this theory came from the historical evidence that
| the ancient Greeks had, looking around at their 1500 city states.
| Notably, the six stages come in pairs that proceeded through a
| good-bad sequence (for example monarchy as the good form and
| tyranny as the bad form). Those city state examples tended to
| proceed in the order listed and not the reverse. Thus, the cycle.
|
| So the weird research concept (whether good or bad) can be seen
| as a symptom of our times?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Ancient Greece was also a society that was much closer to the
| Stone Age than ours.
|
| I'm not sure we can really internalize many lessons from what
| were at best Iron Age societies, and the fruits of technology
| weren't well spread.
|
| When my great-grandfather was born, people in our village eeked
| a hand-to-mouth existence that wasn't much different from that
| our ancestors would have lived 1500 years ago.
|
| When I was born, vaccines became normalized, electricity
| existed, indoor plumbing became common, etc.
|
| The fact that human capital is now being nurtured and enabled
| in most societies, we can actually see major changes being
| unlocked.
|
| I mean, if we're brutally honest - has scientific and
| engineering research really slowed down?
|
| Artifical Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Global
| Communication, and Handheld Oracles have become normalized in
| just 25 years. This is the kind of technology you'd see in
| science fiction 30-40 years before today.
|
| For every negative about a technology you can also point to a
| positive. It's not technology that's the issue - it's humans.
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