6 ms·

Sure, if you cherry-pick what you consider "progress," you can manipulate the numbers to show we've slowed down our rate of progress. Also, don't belittle "ref

by chasing 11y ago

Sure, if you cherry-pick what you consider "progress," you can manipulate the numbers to show we've slowed down our rate of progress. Also, don't belittle "refinements." Sometimes it's figuring out how to make a single airplane fly that's the easy part -- it's "refining" that idea into a global network of safe air travel where the real hard work and innovation happens. Anyway. This article is silly.

zzalpha 11y ago
Not to mention his dismissing computers as "interactive televisions", for example, is absurdly reductionist in an attempt to force his point. Agreed, terrible article.
- omginternets 11y ago
  Next step: the Internet is a glorified telegraph.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  I thought that was the stupidest part of the article until I saw this: "But consider that the amount of funding poured into medical research has skyrocketed in my lifetime, so that the progress per dollar spent surely is going down." Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_ (read: every society).
  - idlewords 11y ago
    This argument is actually correct when it comes to pharmaceuticals. The number of drugs discovered per $1B in (inflation-adjusted) research spending has dropped by a factor of 80 since the 1950's. Do a search on 'Erooms Law' for the relevant papers.
    - pixl97 11y ago
      Is that even an argument though? A better way to say the same thing is "Easy problems get solved first". Or another way to say it "You aren't going to spend a billion on a problem if you solve it in 10 million". What we have here is a measurement problem. For example looking at curing polio and curing AIDS as one issue is disingenuous, it tells us nothing about the complexity of the actual problem we are solving. To cure AIDS we may have to solve many hundreds of different problems, many of them usable in other applications.
      - idlewords 11y ago
        Read the paper (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.p...), it addresses these objections. The "easy problems" objection is just a form of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, where you redefine difficult problems to be the ones you haven't stumbled across a solution for.
        keithwhor 11y ago
        Uh, isn't that what makes a difficult problem... difficult? I don't think there's any redefinition going on. I'm not sure I've ever heard somebody say, "this is really easy, I can't figure it out."
        idlewords 11y ago
        The thing is we don't figure out drugs, we find them by inspired accident. The attempt to move to a "let's figure it out" approach with computational methods seems to be what's making us worse at drug discovery.
      - duaneb 11y ago
        > A better way to say the same thing is "Easy problems get solved first". This is a fallacy and undecidable. We can't evaluate the "hardness" of the problem or it would be solved already. Polio was WORTH CURING. It's not entirely clear fusion isn't just a pipe dream when we already are investing (and getting great returns) on renewable energy. Is it worth it? It's impossible to say (hello Hume), but we should at least be attempting to put timelines on solid goals to evaluate how shitty we are at guessing how much we should invest for what we understand.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    > Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_ (read: every society). Sure, but try quantifying a return on medical research investment. It makes much more sense in energy production.
amelius 11y ago
I agree with your points. However, I also feel that lately, the term "high-tech" has been subject to inflation. For example, nowadays, it seems that anybody who does something a little out of the ordinary with CSS is considered a "high-tech" worker. Or a company that basically runs a website that brings together service and demand is considered "high-tech".
- jlarocco 11y ago
  Have to agree. AirBnB and Uber are probably the biggest non-tech companies masquerading as tech companies. I can reserve a room on Hilton's website, doesn't make them a tech company.
varelse 11y ago
As an example, today's cars are radically different beasts compared to what we had in 1950 (or even 1980). They're safe, faster, lighter, and full of subtle drive-by-wire algorithms and technology. And there's a huge amount of science and engineering advances that made that possible. While I agree with his broad point that in-your-face radical advances are on the decline, there's a lot going on under the hood that's easy to miss. Taking that to an absurd extreme, if we all suddenly became immortal, it would be a huge advance, but we wouldn't look any different.

by chasing 11y ago

zzalpha 11y ago

Not to mention his dismissing computers as "interactive televisions", for example, is absurdly reductionist in an attempt to force his point. Agreed, terrible article.

omginternets 11y ago
Next step: the Internet is a glorified telegraph.
wutbrodo 11y ago
I thought that was the stupidest part of the article until I saw this: "But consider that the amount of funding poured into medical research has skyrocketed in my lifetime, so that the progress per dollar spent surely is going down." Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_ (read: every society).
- idlewords 11y ago
  This argument is actually correct when it comes to pharmaceuticals. The number of drugs discovered per $1B in (inflation-adjusted) research spending has dropped by a factor of 80 since the 1950's. Do a search on 'Erooms Law' for the relevant papers.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    Is that even an argument though? A better way to say the same thing is "Easy problems get solved first". Or another way to say it "You aren't going to spend a billion on a problem if you solve it in 10 million". What we have here is a measurement problem. For example looking at curing polio and curing AIDS as one issue is disingenuous, it tells us nothing about the complexity of the actual problem we are solving. To cure AIDS we may have to solve many hundreds of different problems, many of them usable in other applications.
    - idlewords 11y ago
      Read the paper (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2012-scannell.p...), it addresses these objections. The "easy problems" objection is just a form of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, where you redefine difficult problems to be the ones you haven't stumbled across a solution for.
      - keithwhor 11y ago
        Uh, isn't that what makes a difficult problem... difficult? I don't think there's any redefinition going on. I'm not sure I've ever heard somebody say, "this is really easy, I can't figure it out."
        idlewords 11y ago
        The thing is we don't figure out drugs, we find them by inspired accident. The attempt to move to a "let's figure it out" approach with computational methods seems to be what's making us worse at drug discovery.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      > A better way to say the same thing is "Easy problems get solved first". This is a fallacy and undecidable. We can't evaluate the "hardness" of the problem or it would be solved already. Polio was WORTH CURING. It's not entirely clear fusion isn't just a pipe dream when we already are investing (and getting great returns) on renewable energy. Is it worth it? It's impossible to say (hello Hume), but we should at least be attempting to put timelines on solid goals to evaluate how shitty we are at guessing how much we should invest for what we understand.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > Complaining that research is becoming more expensive in _dollar terms_ is stacking the deck against pretty much any society that has _economic growth_ (read: every society). Sure, but try quantifying a return on medical research investment. It makes much more sense in energy production.

amelius 11y ago

I agree with your points. However, I also feel that lately, the term "high-tech" has been subject to inflation. For example, nowadays, it seems that anybody who does something a little out of the ordinary with CSS is considered a "high-tech" worker. Or a company that basically runs a website that brings together service and demand is considered "high-tech".

jlarocco 11y ago
Have to agree. AirBnB and Uber are probably the biggest non-tech companies masquerading as tech companies. I can reserve a room on Hilton's website, doesn't make them a tech company.

varelse 11y ago

As an example, today's cars are radically different beasts compared to what we had in 1950 (or even 1980). They're safe, faster, lighter, and full of subtle drive-by-wire algorithms and technology. And there's a huge amount of science and engineering advances that made that possible. While I agree with his broad point that in-your-face radical advances are on the decline, there's a lot going on under the hood that's easy to miss. Taking that to an absurd extreme, if we all suddenly became immortal, it would be a huge advance, but we wouldn't look any different.