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> Is it a bureaucratic problem No, in my opinion the problem is that all the low hanging fruits in science have been collected and our old way of doing science

> Is it a bureaucratic problem No, in my opinion the problem is that all the low hanging fruits in science have been collected and our old way of doing science does not work anymore. 20 or 30 years ago it was "easy" for a single PhD student to discover something completely new and groundbreaking. Of course it still happens today, but 20-30 years ago it was way easier to get truly new results as a small group of researcher with a low budget. In the very beginning of science you did not even need anything. Just looking art the stars and thinking about it was enough. But nowadays? We have to build a LHC with several 1000 people to do basic science! As a PhD student you have to spend 3 years just reading and learning "old science" in order to reach the current boundaries of scientific area. The current system of "we give this topic to a PhD student and he will figure out a solution in exactly 3 years" just does not work anymore. In order to advance science we need much larger and much more connected groups who grind away on a single problem together for 5-10 years to make truly groundbraking scientific advancements.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Thanks for this succinct explanation. It bears many similarities to problems of politics and governance that I wrestle with. I wonder to what extent crowd work can be effective for making real progress; I've been impressed by things like FoldIt and astronomical classifiers (as opposed to the BOINC distributed processing approach) but I don't know to what extent those result in real progress vs useful-but-limited stamp collection. I am very interested in the possibilities for gamification but it seems like there's a big gap between the empirical data collection/space mapping aspect and actual theoretical development of the kind done at the Santa Fe institute or the IAS.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Thanks for this succinct explanation. It bears many similarities to problems of politics and governance that I wrestle with. I wonder to what extent crowd work can be effective for making real progress; I've been impressed by things like FoldIt and astronomical classifiers (as opposed to the BOINC distributed processing approach) but I don't know to what extent those result in real progress vs useful-but-limited stamp collection. I am very interested in the possibilities for gamification but it seems like there's a big gap between the empirical data collection/space mapping aspect and actual theoretical development of the kind done at the Santa Fe institute or the IAS.