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Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?
- mchannon 10y agoTL;DR: Yes.
- bgun 10y agoApparently Betteridge's Law holds less true for science journal articles. :)
- kepano 10y agoReminds me of the old Max Planck quote: "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."
- drostie 10y agoThat would be because that quote inspired the research. However the mechanism that they discovered is actually somewhat more subtle; it is that "rockstar scientists", intentionally or not, suppress radical new ideas coming into their disciplines. Since radical innovation is by and large something that the community-as-a-whole has (in the sense that each person has a tiny probability of coming up with the radical idea so the actual idea-havers are kind of randomly selected from the community), either implicit effects of "oh things are moving so fast in that field, these people are so smart, I will never measure up" or explicit effects of people in the field saying "why the heck would you pursue that path, it's obviously bonkers and we're doing so much better with this other approach..." convince those community members to not come forward with their radical innovation, even as it's sorely needed. Rather than the opponents of the idea dying, they are interested in the cases where the supporters of an idea die, which allows these radical ideas to come out of the woodwork.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 10y agoA good argument for allowing aging to progress naturally.
- wuschel 10y agoOne of our group leaders in our research institute learned physics at the dawn of quantum mechanics, saw theory translate into practical applications (e.g. laser technology), and then boost and transform theory again. She is 90+ now. It was great to hear from her how long it took for the right theories to overcome the barriers of adoption, how fashion works in science, and how many things we think as new are actually really old stuff in new clothes.
- 1propionyl 10y agoEven more important than forming synapses is the subsequent pruning of synapses. I imagine the same principle applies to networks of people as does to networks of neurons.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThat's a profoundly critical element of learning and creativity, by a fair amount of psychological work I've seen lately.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- reasonattlm 10y agoIt happens over a shorter timeframe than funerals are needed to explain. The past decade or decade and a half has been long enough to see outsiders having significant influence in the aging research community, steering it from determined non-intervention to greater willingness to work towards therapies capable of addressing the causes of aging. All of the players are the same at the start and the end, aside from the new faces coming in from outside.
- jamesrcole 10y agoThat's interesting, but still that's only in one field. I'm curious if others can comment on the rate of change in other fields?
- douche 10y agoUnfortunately we've seen similar leanings in more politicized fields.
- elliotpage 10y agoGiven that new ideas in a field often get reviewed by incumbents in said field (due to the requirements of pre-publication peer review) this can certainly delay their uptake or even full examination. This kind of ingrained conservatism can delay progress both of a field and those examining it. It is a catch-22 as you want qualified reviewers to examine a paper so it isn't bunkum but equally those reviewers may slow it down because it is a valid advance in contrary to their position. Perhaps a move to post-publication peer review and greater pre-print deposition would help, but that would take a deep cultural shift.
- arcanus 10y agoAs someone who's published in Bayesian inference, that quote has always struck a cord. I've met countless young researchers who embraced Bayesian practices. And all the opposition seems to come from older hands. It's finally turning a corner... Because of retirement!
- jtraffic 10y agoIn my field the embrace of Bayesian methods seems to have come because of increases in computing power, rather than a decrease in "opposition."
- rspeer 10y agoI'm guessing what you're talking about is using Bayesian techniques to compute something useful, which nobody will stop you from doing. The part that has opposition is using a Bayesian justification for the experimental results in a paper -- presenting a conclusion about how we should update our beliefs because of the experiment, instead of a p-value. Right now it seems pretty common to translate Bayesian experimental results sloppily into frequentist ones to get them past reviewers.
- jtraffic 10y ago> Right now it seems pretty common to translate Bayesian experimental results sloppily into frequentist ones to get them past reviewers. This is interesting. I'm glad for a different perspective. I chalk this up to differences across fields, because my experience is so different. My advisor learned Bayesian statistics from Arnold Zellner a few decades ago, and his synopsis of the class was: "It was great in theory, but we could't implement it." Once computers made if more possible, it seems to have spread rather quickly, possibly because computing power was the last piece of a mostly complete puzzle. It's almost to the point that reviewers prefer the Bayesian approach, in my neck of the academic woods.
- Fomite 10y agoThis is pretty much my experience as well - accessible Bayesian methods (and now accessible causal inference models) were a major portion in those methods being adopted.
- Qwertious 10y agoMaybe we should have scientists rotate through unrelated professions on a pre-set schedule? Just putting it out there. Killing scientists to stimulate progress is out for ethical reasons, obviously.
- Verdex_2 10y agoCross pollination of disciplines also seems to bring out great ideas, which makes your (obviously first) proposal sound even better. Unfortunately, I feel this is similar to that one dessert on the front page of the menu at an expensive restaurant. It looks delicious and tastes even better, but as soon as the bill comes you wondered what in the world you were thinking.
- dexterdog 10y agoWouldn't it be better for the old scientists to be the ones that go out and cross-pollinate since they can bring something to the new endeavors?
- santaclaus 10y agoI've seen firsthand evidence that jumping between subfields of a given discipline can have great results. A couple of the seminal papers in our field came from super senior researchers moving into simply different areas.
- im3w1l 10y agoCorrelation doesn't imply causation. Maybe they got a very promising idea and chased it into a different subfield? Or maybe there is a filter effect where only the brightest and most ambitious can be bothered to change fields.
- BurningFrog 10y agoProfessorial term limits? Could be a good system, but I don't see the professors endorsing it.
- oblio 10y agoThere's a deeper question here: how does this apply to politics and what are we going to do about it as life spans become longer? It's a really tricky topic...
- curtis 10y agoThis reminds me of "Clarke's First Law" [1]: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s_Laws https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s...
- Roboprog 10y agoReminds me of a Douglas Crockford presentation (which is obviously referencing this idea) where he talks about computer science progress, and having to wait for people to die or retire before practices change: "Are they gone yet? Can we stop doing X now?"
- Analemma_ 10y agoWhen he said X, did he mean it as a generic variable, or the X Window System? Because the latter would be a lot funnier.
- Roboprog 10y agoHah! No, I put in "X" because I forgot the details, and X changes over the years, anyway. But I like your comment.
- Roboprog 10y agoAlso, "X" for me is OOP as the sine qua non of programming practice. I mean, the concepts of Simula 67 were promoted endlessly in the 80s, but I'm tired of being stuck with that as the primary design mechanism. "COBOL with separate compilation and parameters" is what we seem to be stuck with, even though the advances in hardware and garbage collection software have made FP type stuff practical now, rather than something that was scoffed at back in the 80s with the advent of microprocessors posing as general purpose computers :-)
- aisofteng 10y agoThis idea dates at least to Kuhn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
- lossolo 10y agoSo true: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172ec3fb0b6ce654c191f214360.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172e...
- idreyn 10y agoWhy not link to the author's website? http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3947 http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3947
- HillaryBriss 10y agoThe abstract of this paper says: Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist (relative to control fields). In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average. I haven't read the paper, and maybe this is just completely wrong, but wouldn't we expect the number of published papers by non-collaborators to rise no matter what? I mean, a star scientist is dead now. There are no more papers coming from that person. Of course other people's papers fill the gap. The number of journals didn't change. The number of articles in an issue of each journal didn't change. These journals need to get articles from someone.
- eternalban 10y agoDidn't Bohr sideline Einstein when the latter was very much alive and kicking?
- jostmey 10y agoYes it does!
- Balgair 10y agoThe quote is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does occasionally come up as a real issue. I have an anecdote on it: A former fellow grad student was expressing their dis-belief that though there was a lot of work done in the brain with electrical signals, there is effectively no work done on measuring the magnetic properties of the brain or neurons. The much older and much more esteemed PI that was also present simply shut the student down, to the point of telling them to 'shut up'. "There are no magnetic fields in the brain", I think was the quote. The student, misunderstanding the situation, pressed onward and challenged the PI on fMRI and the like. The discussion turned into a 1-sided argument where the PI basically told the student that they were an idiot and that things like fMRI were useless (actually a debatable point at the time, re: the dead salmon experiments). I'll say I never quite trusted PIs after that dressing-down, they seem to be more concerned about their mortgages than their legacies.
- zeristor 10y agoThis would suggest that a hidden cost of enhanced longevity would be social sclerosis.
- dpatrick86 10y agoI hope there are concomitant strides in being able to maintain a youthful cognitive flexibility.
- htrp 10y agoLet's get to clinical immortality before worrying about scientific stagnation.
- Mz 10y agoLet's not. Let's go ahead and assume such things matter in the here and now and are actively in the way of getting to clinical immortality (assuming clinical immortality is even possible).
- dredmorbius 10y agoI believe that's been proposed, though I can't think of specific references offhand. Certainly amonst the unintended consequences one might care to consider.
- nabla9 10y agoThe young must kill the old.
- anthonyskipper 10y agoMarvin Minsky died and we have a revolution in AI. Jeff Hawkings called that one in "on intelligence"
- Analemma_ 10y agoI don't know if I agree with this. We're having a revolution in NN-based statistical modeling and machine learning, not AI. And it's not happening because Minsky was holding back the field, it's happening because GPUs improved to the point where these models could work and investing in them made economic sense.
- mturmon 10y agoI think you may be kidding (and if so, hats off, because citing Hawkins as a sage, and misspelling his name, is some choice dry humor). But in case you aren't: The whole "Minsky and Papert killed the perceptron" lesson-in-a-nutshell was a historical anecdote at the time the connectionist resurgence started in the 1980s with backprop. I.e., Minsky was already in the distant past by the 1990s, having no influence on connectionism or the NIPS crowd, from which large-scale machine learning eventually sprung.
- jpttsn 10y agoAlternative: Collaborators are the same age? Next up: a curve showing that friends of WWI vets decrease their tuna consumption when the WWI vet dies, relative to their non-friends.
- malodyets 10y ago> The Digest is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate attribution of source. It sounds like they want CC-BY, but as it stands they haven't really licensed the digest in an understandable way.
- dredmorbius 10y agoUsing CC-BY would be an improvement, though the intent here is at least relatively clear. I've seen worse. Went a few rounds back in the 2000s with a developer who'd claimed simply "this has no copyright". I pointed out the several problems with that claim, and the (almost wholly) trivial approaches to fixing them. He ... wasn't interested.
- 5ilv3r 10y agoThat's the WTFPL in a nutshell.
- dredmorbius 10y agoNo. It is, legally, difficult to divest yourself of copyright. Some people say it's possible, some people say it isn't. It's not difficult to divest yourself of your exclusive rights under copyright. Which is what the WTFPL accomplishes. It's a subtle but significant distinction. Similarly, you could: 1. Simply disclaim any copyright interest. "I disclaim all copyright interest in this work." 2. Disclaim any exclusive rights: "I disclaim all rights under copyright in this work." 3. Allow others any exclusive rights: "I grant to all parties any exclusive right under copyright." Etc. The fundamental problem is that under Berne Convention copyright, which dates to the early 20th / late 19th century (I'd have to check) in at least some jurisdictions, copyright is manifest at creation in any work. Which means these very words as I'm writing them. And there's no procedure for disclaiming those rights. The Berne Convention rules have been adopted widely particularly since the 1970s. Again: there are those who disagree that you can't claim a work is "uncopyrighted", but the ambiguity of such a comment (and the trivial means by which that ambiguity is removed) makes certain uses highly imprudent.
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- k__ 10y agoI think if people were immortal this would solve the problem, because you don't have the "this only pays off after I die anyway" mentality. Sadly most people think waiting till the nonbelievers die is the way to go and not much money is spent in immortality research.
- dredmorbius 10y agoYou're failing to consider any number of reasons this wouldn't fix the problem: 1. Future-value discounting. Even an immortal may well value present experiences over future ones. 2. Consolidation of power. There's little evidence that any system based on perpetuities won't result in the accumulation of wealth and/or power in a limited set of hands. 3. Strategic intentional long-term power consolidation. If you live forever, you'll be concerned forever about upstarts seeking to claim / disrupt your space / power base.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoThe idea that science advances only when old scientists die is used to promote the idea that science has nothing over politics. It is anti-science propaganda. I will say this though. Young scientists are hungry and there not enough positions for them. Every department has that old rockstar or two who doesn't really push the boundaries of science anymore, but takes up available positions. When they retire or die, new people come in who are still young and full of energy.
- jmcmichael 10y ago> The idea that science advances only when old scientists die is used to promote the idea that science has nothing over politics. It is anti-science propaganda. Sounds to me like you believe that science proceeds without politics. > Young scientists are hungry and there not enough positions for them. Every department has that old rockstar or two who doesn't really push the boundaries of science anymore, but takes up available positions. When they retire or die, new people come in who are still young and full of energy. This process you've described here resembles the political process we observe in government (or any human social system that involves a competitive hierarchy), with the exception that in government the problem of 'taking up available positions' is attenuated by the existence of term limits for most leadership positions.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoOf course there are politics in research. But that is moving the goal post. The question is whether politics and science are equivalently grounded, and they are not.
- dredmorbius 10y agoYou're moving the goalpost. Your initial claim was that the idea was promoted "to prove that science has nothing over politics". None of the major exponents or scholars of this concept of whom I'm aware -- Bohr, Kuhn, Oreskes, and others -- have as their primary motivation any desire to demote or debunk science. If you're going to make that claim, you'll have to substantiate it. You've failed to do so. Twice.
- chplushsieh 10y agoAlternative explanation: Star scientists are just highly productive scientists. After they die, their not-as-productive collaborators can't keep up with the amount of publication as high as before. Naturally collaborators publication percentage falls while Non-collaborators' rise.
- plg 10y agoCan't believe they didn't cite/discuss the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) written by philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. From the wikipedia article about the book: "Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
- nabla9 10y agosecond reference in the introduction is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- dredmorbius 10y agoIn the paper (see Sci-Hub link comment elsewhere): Philosophers and historians have long debated the extent to which the pragmatic success of a scientific theory determines how quickly it gains adherents, or its longevity (e.g., Kuhn [1970], Laudan [1977], and their many detractors).
- Mz 10y agoThe results suggest that outsiders to a specific scientific field are reluctant to challenge a research star who is viewed as a leader within that field. I don't think this is how it works at all. I think people are unable to challenge stars in their field. When everyone is celebrating some star, good luck getting heard if you disagree with them. It is worse if, like so many people, this star will defend their territory by following the maxim "A good offense is the best defense." My observation of behavior in online forums is that a typical pattern of behavior is that everyone seeks to either align themselves with one of the "stars" of the forum or position themselves as being "against" anything that person says. It is very much about pecking order, not truth, and if you have two or three really popular people, then you get camps that revolve around each person. All conversation tends to default into a polarizing back and forth of "I am for STAR!" and "I am against STAR!" Since all conversation is framed as either for or against STAR, no conversation can occur that genuinely diverges from the framing given. Even if you genuinely try to diverge from this framing of for or against the idea set that this star individual represents, people will actively paint you into a corner as being in either the for or against camp. Good luck with saying "Yeah, no. That isn't what I am saying At All." This only stops when that person exits the picture. Dying is the most final and absolute means to exit the picture.
- emcq 10y agoThis is so true. We can see it very recently too. As a specific example look at evolutionary optimization. It's existed for decades, has a bit of a non mainstream cult following, but now the leaders of the field are finding they can beat the fanciest deep reinforcement learning approaches with it. https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/ https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/
- letitgo12345 10y agoThat paper, while interesting, is not really "evolutionary" optimization
- leereeves 10y agoHow does that fit in this discussion? The stars of deep reinforcement learning haven't exited the picture. Have there been polarized discussions here between the two camps?
- dredmorbius 10y agoI'm trying to access the source paper for this study, and am finding that despite NBER and SSRN, both generally open-access sites, as hosts, the PDF itself is paywalled on SSRN. The backstory here is that SSRN, a site for open dissemination of largely pre-publication papers, was bought by Elsevier in 2013, to the loud dismay of the open-access community. It seems that the predictions of what would transpire are being fully born out. https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying-ssrn/ https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying... The Sci-Hub workaround is to chase the NBER PDF download link: http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf
- Animats 10y agoI saw this happen at Stanford around 2005, as the logic-based and expert systems people were pushed aside as machine learning people moved in.
- annonch 10y agoMaybe it is all about funding, the established scientists will receive the greatest chance of getting a grant because they have their previous work to support their ability and direction. Challenging scientists may not be able to contest the established scientists because of this
- Gatsky 10y agoThis is true in many ways. But as always it doesn't have to be that way, it has arrived at this point due to a combination of sometimes perverse incentives and natural human tendencies. I was thinking for a while that having a mandatory retirement age could be a good idea, but retirement is becoming obsolete for economic reasons, and scientists are now employed in so many different ways by so many different institutions that I don't think it is possible.