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Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck

138 points by dsr12 8y ago

DenseComet 8y ago
This is why science should be led by the government, not for profit companies. Science is for the greater good of humanity, it should not be solely about making money.
- CuriouslyC 8y ago
  I love science (at least in the ideal form). That being said, if knowledge provides a real, tangible benefit to mankind, people should be willing to pay for it. If it doesn't, people shouldn't be forced to pay for it. I agree that some valuable research would go undone if performed by companies because the time window to see a return on investment would be too long. Unfortunately, academia is a huge mess, and we really need a new approach to basic science.
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    What's your definition of basic science? The requirement for Science to produce real, tangible benefits to mankind for it to get funded makes a lot of it unfeasible, because a good bit of it is useless on it's own, but is good to figure out because of potential uses in the future.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      The real problem is we won't know if something is useful until after we get results. Gravity is a perfect example - physics has a lot of open questions on gravity. What if someone closed one of them? It could mean nothing, just a slightly better understanding of why things fall - or it could be a major change that allows us to create "anti-gravity paint" making a self-supporting colony on Jupiter simple (image all the "land" you could own there - whatever "owning land" on gas planet means)
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        Come on, such a thing would allow for reasonable space travel even better than for just making colonies. It is essentially Mass Effect Element Zero - you could create gravity wells for things to "fall into", creating enormous accelerations of space ships while at the same time protecting the crew from the effects. Potentially even a kind of faster than light travel. As a side boon new kinds of materials can be created in extreme artificial gravity conditions some this maps to extreme and impossible to achieve otherwise pressures. Including just creating stars in a controlled environment making for immense energy availability. Instead of magnetic fusion containment you'd have gravitational fusion containment. This is how powerful practically breaking gravity can be.
        bluGill 8y ago
        I just hand wave assumed a slightly different set of rules. With your set of rules (which is at least as likely as mine) you are correct. Since both of us are speculating we are both equally right. Of course it might be that better understanding of gravity proves that artificial gravity is impossible.
      - v_lisivka 8y ago
        Gravity is not a hard thing to understand. If energy is released when two objects are gravitating towards each other, then something must release it. It narrows number of possible options. My current best guess is that we are inside gigantic object (about hundred of order of magnitudes larger than our Visible Universe, made of particles about few dozens order of magnitude smaller than Planck scale) with conditions similar to conditions in neutron star. So gravitation is just Casimir effect at scale.
    - CuriouslyC 8y ago
      The type of basic science I'm talking about here is stuff that is foundational for other science that can be applied. A good example would be esoteric math. Looking back, not all of it had immediate application when it was being worked on, but we wouldn't have things like transistors if people hadn't worked on it. There definitely needs to be a cost sharing scheme in place in science to encourage basic research that benefits everyone. I'm doubtful that the current model is optimal though, and I think we should explore other options.
  - kennyadam 8y ago
    On one hand, I love that people can research things without worrying about generating a profit. However, when I read about someone who has been funded to spend years studying the sports history of central-asian mongols and I look how much I'm struggling, working in an underfunded public-sector school, I feel... well, jealous and hard-done-by.
    - titanix2 8y ago
      Yeap, a lot of para-scientific departments and fields get founding under the umbrella of research and science but what they really do is either politics or almost completely useless studies. In countries where funding is a problem, it is a bit raging to see how much money got wasted this way. These studies have their place too, but their makers should at least have the decency not call what they do science.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  I think you need both, but an alternative albeit for-profit way of going big without government requirements attached is the patronage model, which funded Leonardo Di Vinci for example. Several individuals are pumping a lot of money into moonshot projects, and of course Google X type incubators exists. But I'm excited for projects like Elon Musk sending those artists to the moon, because those are the type of unpredictable upsides that could never achieve government funding.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  The core problem persists in either model. If people don't think they should pay for science, they'll vote either with their wallet or for the politicians who promise to return (or spend elsewhere) their tax dollars. Add in the increasing level of politics in science and the idea of just giving some people a decent life regardless if they produce result or not becomes a very hard sell. The root of the problem with either funding method goes back to people not valuing science that may bring no benefit for to them. What's the solution for fixing that? Especially when talking to someone who care barely make ends meet.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  We've seen a big shift over the last 75 years or so from most science being funded by corporate research to most science being funded by government agencies.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  Politicians come and go and can't be trusted to understand or even appreciate science. Something that will not probably pay benefits before four years is a negative sum game for they.
- LeonB 8y ago
  I’d doubt you’re suggesting that for profit companies should not be allowed to perform science? If science is worth doing, and companies have money, then they’ll probably do a lot of science. If you’re arguing that science should not only be left to private companies then I fully agree and think most would.
a_bonobo 8y ago
I find this article preposterous. >While understandable, the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. The only evidence for this is Nobel Prizes won, split up by decade, and polled!? Biology, arguably one of the most exciting fields right now, doesn't even get considered in the Nobel Prizes! You can get a Nobel Prize in medicine/physiology for biology-related efforts (see GFP), but there's no Nobel Prize for plant-related biology (that's what the Kyoto medal is for, which isn't mentioned here?!?) I can't wait for science-illiterate politicians to take this ('Look at what YCombinator is saying!') and say we should defund science. It has never been as hard to get funding for your science as now - see e.g. https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science-on-the-decline-whats-the-role-of-a-profit-motive-in-research-93322 https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science... - with huge issues (scientists living in precarious circumstances, ridiculously low salaries, attacks and defunding by conservative governments (US, Australia, Harper government in Canada) - writing an article now saying that science is stagnant is foolish at best, dangerous at worst. >Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient. A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts to go for the harder fruits.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  >>Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient. >A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts to go for the harder fruits. Your explanation that we have picked the low-hanging fruits is not mutually exclusive with the increased time and money invested in science. They would even be two sides of the same coin- as the easy pickings disappeared, we chose to invest more to get the harder fruits. As the trend continues, the search space for novel, useful discoveries becomes larger and larger, and the cost increases. How do you prove to the politicians that a particular scientific investment is worth it?
Yaa101 8y ago
In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right. You can see that it takes multi disciplinary teams nowadays to discover the connections between these large systems and how they (how all in the universe) connect. People are curious which is our most precious gift from nature and science will go on as long as people stay curious. But yes, not all science is about returns of value in economic sense, a lot of it is fundamental and also often results of science is laying in a drawer waiting to either getting monitized or used for further discovery. Science moves by spurts and hiccups, not straight forward with an even pace.
- KnightOfWords 8y ago
  > In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. This is certainly part of of the reason in physics, experimental verification takes more and more resources. It took the LHC to find the Higgs boson and LIGO/VIRGO to detect gravitational waves. The Nebel committees also tend to be conservative as a later u-turn would be unfortunate. For example, no prize has been awarded for Inflation theory. While I think the analysis is quite flawed with regards to Physics I do think there is some value in looking at the Chemistry and Medicine prizes. It does torpedo the core assumption of the singularity movement, that of exponentially increasing progress. Articles like this are best considered as a starting point for a conversation rather than firm statement of reality.
  - wnissen 8y ago
    But isn't a big part of the conservatism that there is so little that can be tested at a macroscopic level? The existence of the neutron can be demonstrated with some polonium and berylium.
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  I agree with you, but I would like to qualify that. The low hanging fruit analogy is apt in more ways than one; there are likely to be deeper truths out there that we don't know enough to model; take dark matter and dark energy and the expanding universe for one. In that respect I disagree that "the big fundamental structures ... are more or less known" However, these fruits of science are so far out of reach of humanity's experience that they will be very difficult to exploit. Personally, I think that the social sciences have yet to see their renaissance. The social sciences involve complex systems that are difficult to model, so there simply aren't comprehensive quantitative theories in these fields on the order of physics. If we develop efficient, cheap computation, orders of magnitude greater than what we currently have,[1] perhaps the social sciences may see its heyday.
netcan 8y ago
Considering how large the corporate sector is today and how corporate inspired the government sector is today... Science is remarkably unaffected. We have tenure and sociology departments, a teacher-researcher combo tradition... All stuff that does not lend to ROI calculations or the kinds of resource allocation done elsewhere.
protonfish 8y ago
This seems like the obvious result of many of the unhealthy forces against science today: replacing professorship with part-timers, rewarding publishing quantity over quality, pressure to promise a quick monetizable result over in-depth basic research. I don't buy the "low-handing fruit" argument. I think it vastly overstates the fraction of scientific knowledge that we possess. Contemporary scientific research is in a state of crisis: unhealthy and dysfunctional. Until we pay the most talented researchers to spend decades on in-depth study instead of spending pennies on segmented, p-hacked, post-hoc conclusion garbage papers, major discoveries will continue to disappear.
- nonbel 8y ago
  From what I have seen it is quite simple. 1) There is this pseudo-scientific methodology called NHST (null hypothesis significance testing) devised pretty much on accident in the 1940-50s that tricks people into thinking they have discovered something interesting. 2) It is so much easier to generate these "significant" results than to study a phenomenon and come up with a model capable of making a precise prediction, then have multiple people/groups carefully collect data to check that prediction. 3) People willing to do the NHST thing can publish papers orders of magnitude faster than people not willing to. 4) Number of publications is the primary metric of success in academia. 5) People willing to do the NHST thing slowly take over the field as those who want to do real science get pushed out, retire, or leave for greener pastures. 6) Eventually the field is filled with people generating worthless papers that cannot be replicated in principle and often contradict each other. - a) Because all that matters is you got a significant result published in a peer reviewed journal - b) The discovery has already been made, the statistics said so, why would anyone need to replicate it? And to preempt a common confusion. This has nothing to do with bayesian vs frequentist, testing a strawman null hypothesis can be done using bayesian math just as well as frequentist. Some decent intros to this problem (yes, it was pointed out long ago but there is no stopping the need to publish apparently): Meehl 1967: https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theorytestingparadox.pdf https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theoryte... Gigerenzer 2004: https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pd...
ozborn 8y ago
Another problem with this data is the rise of team science and huge author lists for papers - something the Nobel prize isn't really able to deal with. Think of the human genome paper or the Higgs boson paper - both good 21st century science but lacking the easily identifiable "super scientists" the Nobel committee is looking for. Additionally it is hard to fully evaluate the impact of scientific work fully until many years have passed since publication. It's no wonder they prefer to find their winners in the 80s. ..
otikik 8y ago
The graph should be adjusted by inflation, and probably by other factors, in order to accurately back the article's claim. $1M in 1940 would be equivalent to $17M in 2018.
- jblow 8y ago
  The graph states that it is adjusted for inflation.
  - otikik 8y ago
    Ok thanks. I must have missed it.
justaguy1212 8y ago
I actually don't see this from his data. It seems more like he started with a hypothesis, wrote the article as if he was correct, and then gathered data to try to support it. Then after seeing the data wasn't as commensurate with his idea, he wrote around the inconveniences.
- ImaCake 8y ago
  Yep. I don't know what article the other people in this thread read, but it wasn't the same one I did. At best, the graphs can conclude that scientist's opinion of nobel prize winners stays about the same, regardless of time.
jrochkind1 8y ago
An unpopular possibly "devil's advocate" opinion: Considering that our scientific advances have led to us quickly using an enormous developed capacity to make the earth much less hospitable to human life, maybe a slowdown in scientific advances is not a bad thing. On the other hand, yes, we are going to need some science to deal with what we have wrought without maximum misery. But I don't really trust us with it.
AstralStorm 8y ago
I'd personally bet on some sort of major breakthrough in space travel or energy sources or both (perhaps due to new physics) to have comparable results to the decades of the atom. Being that, there is just not enough gain or even potential gain of technologies being surveyed right now, even considering full on genetic engineering and universal nanoconstructors. Well, unless immortality or nigh immortality of some form happens. Or we found a way to expand our intelligence and performance in some huge way. And then it becomes available. Compared to atomic and subatomic physics AI is a joke and genetics is at witch doctoring levels. Self driving cars are like the steam experiments in 1800s at best, with even less of an impact. At least genetics has potential to change everything, more than automated transportation ever can. Nanotechnology is making some progress but not nearly fast, good or cheap enough. Another breakthrough could come from side physics like photonics.
cossatot 8y ago
I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in the exact dates), there were a lot of fundamental questions that could be addressed through the application of relatively systematic, rigorous observation and experimentation, and modeling with the kind of math you can do on a chalkboard. Within this time period, though, a lot of these questions were addressed and the new questions that arose required more data, better instrumentation, and more advanced mathematical modeling techniques to address. In my own field (geology, in particular tectonics and earthquake studies), this was laid out in a very explicit manner: the fundamental mode of observation is geologic mapping, and the terrestrial surface of the earth slowly got mapped. The mapping of the past may be refined or re-interpreted but rarely does it need to be redone from scratch. It is done to a reasonable level of resolution. There is still a lot of unknown under the ocean basins, but we have strong theoretical and empirical arguments for why those areas are not as complex as continents and therefore less interesting. The late 1960s through the mid 1980s saw the development of plate tectonic theory which completely revolutionized the science. Now, 50 years in, we have some second- or third-order questions but most of the first-order questions have been addressed. Today, the major developments of the field come from better instrumentation, for the most part. In the sub-field of tectonics, progress comes from the development and application of new methods for dating rocks or other geologic features (including things like exposure dating or 'how long as this rock been at the surface of the earth'), and from using satellite-based measurements of earth deformation (GPS and radar interferometry) to actually measure the motion of tectonic plates and sub-plates. Additional, continuous refinements in seismic imaging of the subsurface (driven by the oil industry primarily) has also been very helpful. This stuff is really expensive! It's hard to go camp out, hike a bit, make some observations, and write a good paper. The instrumentation to get the age of rocks might cost $100,000 and then when consumables and salary are factored in it might cost $500-$2000 per sample. You might need 10-20 samples to really find out anything new in your 10-km by 10-km area of interest. And I believe that geology is quite cheap relative to high-energy physics or whatever. Major geophysical experiments can cost millions. We piggyback on physics and other tech to a large extent---launching GPS satellites for example, or using obsolete particle accelerators for geochemical measurements. The oil industry spends (tens of?) billions a year acquiring data as well but very little of it becomes public or available to researchers, though the cumulative data release from industry is significant. [NB, I may be 1 order of magnitude short on any of these numbers.] In general there have been very few major theoretical advancements in the past 20-30 years. We have gotten better at recognizing coupling between tectonic process and earth surface processes, and as instrumental datasets slowly increase (as we observe more earthquakes, etc.) some smaller boxes get checked. However, a geologist from the mid-1980s would be able to navigate today's scientific landscape pretty well. The fads are different but like any fashion, many are cyclical and were fads in the 80s too. I personally see advancement coming from better statistical and numerical modeling, and the availability of high-quality global datasets (primarily created through large international collaborations, which is a post-cold war thing). I also see a lot of room for improvement in our understanding of the coupling of mechanisms spanning vastly different timescales--for example earthquakes occur in seconds, post-earthquake phenomena last weeks to decades, the earthquake cycle lasts hundreds to thousands of years, and the cumulative deformation from earthquakes and related processes is what we call 'tectonics' over millions of year timescales. It's really hard to make a single numerical (i.e., finite element) model that works over all of these timescales and is driven by basic physics (i.e. an earthquake results from forces applied rather than being imposed). Nonetheless there are almost certainly a lot of really important coupling processes that occur on these different timescales but they are really hard to analyze (and a lot of interesting stuff happens at 20 km depth and at mm/yr rates, which is pretty damn hard to observe). So I guess I see a lot of 21st century science as bridge building rather than outright discovery. This is fine. An analogy would be moving to a new country. The first bit is the discovery of the place, then you learn what language they speak. The learning doesn't stop there. As you learn the language, a lot of daily stuff makes sense. As you gain an understanding of the culture and the history, and can interact in a meaningful way, the value of that learning continues to increase, but it doesn't feel like 'discovery' like it did in the first year.
rjkennedy98 8y ago
A huge part of this is the general perversion of science. It starts at the bottom with the abuse of p-hacking by lowly grad students. It goes all the way to the top with fraudulent for-profit science by Big Pharma to get drugs and medical devices approved that don't work. All of it is part of the academic-medical industrial complex that views science not as process for discovering truth, but as a tool that can be used to generate profit. There are enormous breakthroughs that I know are very close, but simply inconceivable due to the academic-medical establishment that has stranglehold on science.
kuanbutts 8y ago
Quickly scanning comments I do not think anyone else has brought up: administrative bloat. More money is being spent on science, but is more money actually making it through the administrative bloat encumbering most institutions to the actual performance of research? Anecdotally, I have a colleague who has received funding from the NSF and the amount of regulations and paperwork and various travel and meeting-related obligations related to the funding soak up so much of the actual dollar amount supplied. (You have to use your funding dollars to satisfy the various required meetings, travel, and paperwork-filling.) The constraints are so ridiculous that satisfying them consumes nearly all the resources the NSF provided, and the little that remains is actually not sufficient to perform the research with. Worse, he has now wasted months of his time satisfying various oversight requirements administrated by both the NSF and the research institution he works in, leaving him an unreasonably small amount of time to actually achieve any significant progress on his work. Once this round of funding dries up, he will be left with no choice but to repeat the process in order to secure some more funding to continue to barely make progress on his stated research goal. If I had to make up a number to describe the dollar efficiency of research funding, in some cases I might assert it is negative: Not only is it just being soaked up by self-serving, efficiency-draining administrative requirements, it literally destroys the most valuable resource (time!), leaving the researcher with none to actually engage in their subject matter of expertise.
- buboard 8y ago
  it's huge. Similar in an european ERC-funded lab: the PI is constantly traveling, there is little oversight of the work let alone actual scientific output. It feels like a large portion of the funding is designed to keep a lot of people people busy doing nothing.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    At least the US government treats it like a "jobs program", just like everything else.
- kiliantics 8y ago
  Not to mention the fact that the academic institution usually takes a hefty "tax" on any grants awarded. Where I work, they take around 30-40% I believe.
agumonkey 8y ago
science having its own logistic curve ?
buboard 8y ago
I don't understand their methodology at all. Considering that the frequency of awarding nobel prizes remains the same , there is nothing that can be infered from their survey. That said i agree with the premise of their article that science is not living up to expectations, and i believe this started somewhere in the 90s. For example consider the recent "Burden of disease" survey which was linked here a few days ago: > GBD 2017 is disturbing. Not only do the amalgamated global figures show a worrying slowdown in progress but the more granular data unearths exactly how patchy progress has been. GBD 2017 is a reminder that, without vigilance and constant effort, progress can easily be reversed. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32858-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... This effect was probably many years in the making , and is only now becoming apparent. One possible explanation for the "sluggishness" in scientific output is that nowadays it is lacking new grand ambitious projects, in other words centralization and Big Science. The proliferation of PhDs has changed the way funding is allocated in recent decades for purely political reasons. It favors thousands of small grants that go to individual independent researchers who are all studying minute effects, are looking for results that barely pass the significance threshold and are publishing in order to build publication records to advance their career. The total number of researchers has doubled since the 80s , therefore this model may be actually detrimental to the process of scientific knowledge discovery at this time. For example, in my field of computational neuroscience, there is currently no equivalent of the "large hadron collider" project for the brain. Some years ago one such project, the 'Human brain project' was proposed and funded, which had a specific and ambitious goal: to simulate the entire brain. Academic politics however fundamentally altered the project and it is now a funding source for various kinds of ordinary research. To be clear, the project was probably ill-conceived from the start (imho), given that we don't have enough info to simulate the brain correctly, but regardless it was one of the few such efforts towards a singular ambitious goal. Subsequent funding schemes such as the US Brain initiative do not have such a focus. The ones who do undertake big science are private institutes like the Allen institute in their attempt to accurately map the entire brain. In any case i think public policy has to focus less on academia and more on science, in order to make progress otherwise we are bound to see detrimental effects a few years down the road.
fastaguy88 8y ago
What a joke. There are hundreds of thousands of papers published each year, and some very small faction of those (but certainly hundreds to thousands) make a bit impact on their field. But we summarize science based on three yearly prizes? Clearly science is not having enough impact on science policy writers.
seizethecheese 8y ago
This could also be titled: “the foundational truths in a field are more consequential than subsequent findings”.
Animats 8y ago
That observation is decades too late. Big companies set up sizable research labs in the 20th century. After WWII, it was expected that a big industrial company would have a sizable R&D operation. Then, in the 1980s, those big R&D operations stopped paying off. Gradually, the big corporate labs closed - Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Labs, Xerox PARC, Westinghouse Labs - gone. IBM's labs are far smaller than they once were. The payoff wasn't there. The easy hits from research were gone.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Hum... My reading is that R&D facilities couldn't compete with the sheer amount of small improvements that came from the uneducated labor force. Japan grew out empowering the employees to do development, and the entire world copied it. What leaded us on a path where people are making the Uber-for-X apps and some actually getting rich that way. And that is exactly the opposite of a sarcity of low hanging fruit.
madhadron 8y ago
I'm not sure where to begin on this, so I'll resort to a brain dump. The Nobel prize has become steadily more political. More senior researchers in the field have had more time to accrue political power, so expect the awards to reach further back in time. Research productivity has dropped, though. Today a professor in biology has a more than full time job just to get money for their lab. So you go through gradschool, go through postdoc, and when you've got all this training, you stop doing science and become a grant writer. If you don't bring in money, you don't have a lab. For the postdocs and grad students, they live very insecurely. Their pay is poor, they live knowing they will probably relocate somewhere entirely different in three or four years, so there's no point having links into the local community. They work for someone has no training in management and has no time to deal with them if the money is going to flow. And there are still lots of places where the postdocs aren't considered full time employees of the university and don't have, say, health insurance. These are hardly the conditions that you can expect to produce good work. Fields are mined down to the last details rather than looking at unexplored areas nearby. There are many reasons for this. As a grad student you work on what your advisor works on. As a postdoc, you work on what your lab works on. As a professor, you work on what you worked on as a postdoc and it requires multiple years and lots of luck to reorient a lab. You need a community to provide evidence of your competence in order to advance at each stage and get tenure, which you can't easily get if you wander out of an established field. Nor is there any training on how to look effectively find things to work on.
- lumost 8y ago
  Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    Keep in mind by small grant we mean 100-200k towards a million.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
Human have succeeded most of the applicable rules of our physical world. What left to be discovered requires much more time and effort.
pascalxus 8y ago
Why do they assume something went wrong? At some point, we ill reach a point where there is far less left to discover or invent. (other than AI -> as long as anyone has a job, there's always room for automation, yikes!) We assume that technological progress can continue forever and ever. I think this is an incorrect presumption.
socalnate1 8y ago
Does anyone else find it fascinating the Patrick Collison (the co-founder and current CEO of Stripe) co-wrote this article? The dude makes me feel inadequate like no other.
pvaldes 8y ago
A lot of 'money spent in science' has not really been spent. Just offered with lots of requisites that nobody can reach and then recycled for other projects. If granted, the money can be blocked for months (instead to pay an entire year to scientists, you pay 7 months... for one year of work), and can be partially siphoned off again using bureaucracy. Some politicians are very fond of this 'miracle of bread and fishes' trick. "In the last ten years we spent '10 millions' in science projects". Looks great. "In the last ten years we flashed the same million 10 times before to put it again in our pocket". Not so great, often the real thing.
jgalt212 8y ago
Excellent book on this topic. Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-Military-Industrial/dp/1451675763 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-Milita...
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Probably impossible to find out, but seeing a comparison - however loose - to other countries would be ideal. Annecdotally, it seems there's at least one significant leap per week listed on HN that can be attributed to China. Reaching 100 million degrees from a fusion reaction (from earlier this week) comes to mind. But of course the general public isn't enlightened by the mainstream media about such things.
- pas 8y ago
  The Chinese fusion reactor was not a leap. Already achieved in JET (Joint European Torus). That said, if China decides to pour a lot more into R&D, it'll be doing leaps in no time, simply due to brute force.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Link to JET achievement? Please?? Chinese? European? Any comparison would be better than none. Brute force? Does it matter? Results are results, yes? The arc of my point is, the USA so often as a very self-serving, often myth-based view of itself. It's as if no one else in the world might have a better approach. That's a mistake.
    - pas 8y ago
      JET achieved 0.7 Q, 24MW in 16MW out. It operates somewhere around 100-200M Kelvin. https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion > Brute force? Does it matter? No, I doesn't mean to say it as a negative thing. Fusion research funding is very low compared to what is needed to build big enough devices. Because when it comes to fusion, size matters, as efficiency goes up with size. And that's what I meant by brute force. China can simply build a bigger one and reap the benefits of size. > Results are results, yes? Yes, and more data is always better in plasma science.
lostmsu 8y ago
Yet we directly observed gravitational waves, and compute power continues to grow.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
A lot of the comments are listing their personal suspicion of causes, without attempting to illustrate or provide evidence. Some of those suspicions are probably true, and some false. Obviously it is also an outlet for all our personal gripes with the system. Irrespective of the veracity of a proposed cause, I would like to see more discussion of actual examples of current progress, and trying to identify what caused or enabled the progress to be made by comparing with the average paper in the back of our mind: what was different, why did they achieve the progress today and did nobody achieve the insight say five years ago? Ideally, since we are discussing on HN, it should be an example that would be understood by most participants here. It is in this spirit that I will give exactly such an example of recent progress (with which I am entirely unaffiliated). First some minimal background which I assume you are not familiar with: quantum chemistry and solid state physics software. Just take a quick look at this list on wikipedia, you may recognize the names of some pieces of software like ABINIT... make sure you pay attention to the DFT column, and that virtually all packages support DFT calculations, which has been pretty much state of the art for the last decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_solid_state_physics_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_... In physics gradients often arise naturally for example forces as gradients of potential energy... But in general even outside physics gradients are useful in nearly all field for optimization... Now the part you probably already understand: AD, Automatic Differentiation or Algorithmic Differentiation, and in the often occuring case of a single scalar function in N variables, reverse-mode AD... And that it takes on the order of 5 times a single function evaluation to calculate a gradient. Now specific subfields of physics have been using AD and adjoint sensitivities for a long time (nuclear engineering, oceanography) but it is not a standard part of physics curricula. Outside of these specific subfields, Automatic Differentiation has been gaining momenta over the last decades (books, comprehensive reviews, ...) Physics students of course learn differentiation symbolically on paper for short formulas, or in software packages like MACSYMA, Maple, ... but even then you keep the number of variables low for tractability. These students will also understand you can emulate differentiation numerically by using a finite delta: d f(x1, x2, ..., xN) / dx2 = ~ [f(x1, x2 +delta, ..., xN) - f(x1, x2, ..., xN)]/delta fully understanding that for a complete gradient you need (N+1) evaluations of f, that delta too large will be inaccurate due to functional nonlinearity, and delta too small will be inaccurate due to numerical rounding of floats... Nobody thinks of showing reverse mode automatic differentiation to physics students as part of their curricula! If you crash into a physics course and ask the students how to calculate the gradient of a big function of 1000 variables, they won't be able to help you, but then you can explain that such a thing is in fact possible! You see where this is going... What if some of the numerical computations, say molecular modeling, could benefit from this insight? That's exactly what happened recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat Now look at the authors' institutions of this paper: SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, 2 DEMOCRITOS National Simulation Center, Quantitative Strategies, Investment Banking Division, Credit Suisse Group That's people with an interdisciplinary background. Could it be that we are over-specialized? Or perhaps mis-specialized? Imagine an alternate world where there is so much math that mathematics has decided to specialize thus: after a common course of Fundamental Math, you can specialize in Definitions, or perhaps in Theorems, or perhaps in Proofs, or perhaps in Conjectures... clearly their progress in math is going to suffer!! Could it be that experts and professionals have become "too polite" to the point of circle j* ? A kind of "politeness omerta"? Imagine a mathematician and a physicist talking: as long as we're discussing math, the physicist nods with interest, and doesn't make suggestions how he would do it differently and vice versa. The "don't criticize a professional in his domain" attitude? Wouldn't it have been better if someone who understood AD say 20 years ago, who ends up in a conversation of molecular chemistry software physicist to say something like "I don't have the domain knowledge, but first thing I would do is find out if the calculation could be viewed as the computation of a gradient, or else as an optimization of an explicit goal" "how dare you make a suggestion outside of math?! and thats thousands of variables, its intractable" ? We might have had this 20 years ago! Mansplain it if necessary. it's this upside down world where we are polite and stoic in our papers, but elbow working back stabbers undermining the workgroup next door, all the while feigning this "politeness professional omerta"
vharuck 8y ago
What if the survey respondents value earlier discoveries more because they understand them better? I remember my mathematics professors saying, once they chose a specialty within a field, there wee only a dozen or so people in the world who could discuss it on the same level. So concurrent appreciation is rare within a single field, let alone across fields. But, as a high schooler, I was taught the basics of Einstein's general theory of relativity. I couldn't do the math, but I appreciated its value. Maybe the respondents undervalue recent discoveries in different fields.
- LeonB 8y ago
  Effects like that could only be measured if they repeated the same survey many times over decades before publishing. Even then it would be confounded by a lot of other factors. Instead they’ve marched forward using junk science to discredit science. I found it a really weird and off key article. They might be right but I wouldn’t use this article to demonstrate it. (And I otherwise have a lot of respect for the authors.)
alpineidyll3 8y ago
Ex-professor here. Reason for this is trivially obvious to any outsider observing the day of an academic: A dazzling torrent of time-wasting grant applications, awards and other such nonsense. The system is basically designed to take productive scientists, and waste them as quickly as possible. After all, how better to protect your mediocrity? Never been happier than after leaving...

138 points by dsr12 8y ago

This is why science should be led by the government, not for profit companies. Science is for the greater good of humanity, it should not be solely about making money.

CuriouslyC 8y ago
I love science (at least in the ideal form). That being said, if knowledge provides a real, tangible benefit to mankind, people should be willing to pay for it. If it doesn't, people shouldn't be forced to pay for it. I agree that some valuable research would go undone if performed by companies because the time window to see a return on investment would be too long. Unfortunately, academia is a huge mess, and we really need a new approach to basic science.
- Konnstann 8y ago
  What's your definition of basic science? The requirement for Science to produce real, tangible benefits to mankind for it to get funded makes a lot of it unfeasible, because a good bit of it is useless on it's own, but is good to figure out because of potential uses in the future.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    The real problem is we won't know if something is useful until after we get results. Gravity is a perfect example - physics has a lot of open questions on gravity. What if someone closed one of them? It could mean nothing, just a slightly better understanding of why things fall - or it could be a major change that allows us to create "anti-gravity paint" making a self-supporting colony on Jupiter simple (image all the "land" you could own there - whatever "owning land" on gas planet means)
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Come on, such a thing would allow for reasonable space travel even better than for just making colonies. It is essentially Mass Effect Element Zero - you could create gravity wells for things to "fall into", creating enormous accelerations of space ships while at the same time protecting the crew from the effects. Potentially even a kind of faster than light travel. As a side boon new kinds of materials can be created in extreme artificial gravity conditions some this maps to extreme and impossible to achieve otherwise pressures. Including just creating stars in a controlled environment making for immense energy availability. Instead of magnetic fusion containment you'd have gravitational fusion containment. This is how powerful practically breaking gravity can be.
      - bluGill 8y ago
        I just hand wave assumed a slightly different set of rules. With your set of rules (which is at least as likely as mine) you are correct. Since both of us are speculating we are both equally right. Of course it might be that better understanding of gravity proves that artificial gravity is impossible.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      Gravity is not a hard thing to understand. If energy is released when two objects are gravitating towards each other, then something must release it. It narrows number of possible options. My current best guess is that we are inside gigantic object (about hundred of order of magnitudes larger than our Visible Universe, made of particles about few dozens order of magnitude smaller than Planck scale) with conditions similar to conditions in neutron star. So gravitation is just Casimir effect at scale.
  - CuriouslyC 8y ago
    The type of basic science I'm talking about here is stuff that is foundational for other science that can be applied. A good example would be esoteric math. Looking back, not all of it had immediate application when it was being worked on, but we wouldn't have things like transistors if people hadn't worked on it. There definitely needs to be a cost sharing scheme in place in science to encourage basic research that benefits everyone. I'm doubtful that the current model is optimal though, and I think we should explore other options.
- kennyadam 8y ago
  On one hand, I love that people can research things without worrying about generating a profit. However, when I read about someone who has been funded to spend years studying the sports history of central-asian mongols and I look how much I'm struggling, working in an underfunded public-sector school, I feel... well, jealous and hard-done-by.
  - titanix2 8y ago
    Yeap, a lot of para-scientific departments and fields get founding under the umbrella of research and science but what they really do is either politics or almost completely useless studies. In countries where funding is a problem, it is a bit raging to see how much money got wasted this way. These studies have their place too, but their makers should at least have the decency not call what they do science.
creaghpatr 8y ago
I think you need both, but an alternative albeit for-profit way of going big without government requirements attached is the patronage model, which funded Leonardo Di Vinci for example. Several individuals are pumping a lot of money into moonshot projects, and of course Google X type incubators exists. But I'm excited for projects like Elon Musk sending those artists to the moon, because those are the type of unpredictable upsides that could never achieve government funding.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
The core problem persists in either model. If people don't think they should pay for science, they'll vote either with their wallet or for the politicians who promise to return (or spend elsewhere) their tax dollars. Add in the increasing level of politics in science and the idea of just giving some people a decent life regardless if they produce result or not becomes a very hard sell. The root of the problem with either funding method goes back to people not valuing science that may bring no benefit for to them. What's the solution for fixing that? Especially when talking to someone who care barely make ends meet.
Symmetry 8y ago
We've seen a big shift over the last 75 years or so from most science being funded by corporate research to most science being funded by government agencies.
pvaldes 8y ago
Politicians come and go and can't be trusted to understand or even appreciate science. Something that will not probably pay benefits before four years is a negative sum game for they.
LeonB 8y ago
I’d doubt you’re suggesting that for profit companies should not be allowed to perform science? If science is worth doing, and companies have money, then they’ll probably do a lot of science. If you’re arguing that science should not only be left to private companies then I fully agree and think most would.

a_bonobo 8y ago

I find this article preposterous. >While understandable, the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. The only evidence for this is Nobel Prizes won, split up by decade, and polled!? Biology, arguably one of the most exciting fields right now, doesn't even get considered in the Nobel Prizes! You can get a Nobel Prize in medicine/physiology for biology-related efforts (see GFP), but there's no Nobel Prize for plant-related biology (that's what the Kyoto medal is for, which isn't mentioned here?!?) I can't wait for science-illiterate politicians to take this ('Look at what YCombinator is saying!') and say we should defund science. It has never been as hard to get funding for your science as now - see e.g. https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science-on-the-decline-whats-the-role-of-a-profit-motive-in-research-93322 https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science... - with huge issues (scientists living in precarious circumstances, ridiculously low salaries, attacks and defunding by conservative governments (US, Australia, Harper government in Canada) - writing an article now saying that science is stagnant is foolish at best, dangerous at worst. >Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient. A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts to go for the harder fruits.

CompelTechnic 8y ago
>>Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient. >A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts to go for the harder fruits. Your explanation that we have picked the low-hanging fruits is not mutually exclusive with the increased time and money invested in science. They would even be two sides of the same coin- as the easy pickings disappeared, we chose to invest more to get the harder fruits. As the trend continues, the search space for novel, useful discoveries becomes larger and larger, and the cost increases. How do you prove to the politicians that a particular scientific investment is worth it?

Yaa101 8y ago

In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to get the details right. You can see that it takes multi disciplinary teams nowadays to discover the connections between these large systems and how they (how all in the universe) connect. People are curious which is our most precious gift from nature and science will go on as long as people stay curious. But yes, not all science is about returns of value in economic sense, a lot of it is fundamental and also often results of science is laying in a drawer waiting to either getting monitized or used for further discovery. Science moves by spurts and hiccups, not straight forward with an even pace.

KnightOfWords 8y ago
> In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging fruit has been picked by now. This is certainly part of of the reason in physics, experimental verification takes more and more resources. It took the LHC to find the Higgs boson and LIGO/VIRGO to detect gravitational waves. The Nebel committees also tend to be conservative as a later u-turn would be unfortunate. For example, no prize has been awarded for Inflation theory. While I think the analysis is quite flawed with regards to Physics I do think there is some value in looking at the Chemistry and Medicine prizes. It does torpedo the core assumption of the singularity movement, that of exponentially increasing progress. Articles like this are best considered as a starting point for a conversation rather than firm statement of reality.
- wnissen 8y ago
  But isn't a big part of the conservatism that there is so little that can be tested at a macroscopic level? The existence of the neutron can be demonstrated with some polonium and berylium.
jhanschoo 8y ago
I agree with you, but I would like to qualify that. The low hanging fruit analogy is apt in more ways than one; there are likely to be deeper truths out there that we don't know enough to model; take dark matter and dark energy and the expanding universe for one. In that respect I disagree that "the big fundamental structures ... are more or less known" However, these fruits of science are so far out of reach of humanity's experience that they will be very difficult to exploit. Personally, I think that the social sciences have yet to see their renaissance. The social sciences involve complex systems that are difficult to model, so there simply aren't comprehensive quantitative theories in these fields on the order of physics. If we develop efficient, cheap computation, orders of magnitude greater than what we currently have,[1] perhaps the social sciences may see its heyday.

netcan 8y ago

Considering how large the corporate sector is today and how corporate inspired the government sector is today... Science is remarkably unaffected. We have tenure and sociology departments, a teacher-researcher combo tradition... All stuff that does not lend to ROI calculations or the kinds of resource allocation done elsewhere.

protonfish 8y ago

This seems like the obvious result of many of the unhealthy forces against science today: replacing professorship with part-timers, rewarding publishing quantity over quality, pressure to promise a quick monetizable result over in-depth basic research. I don't buy the "low-handing fruit" argument. I think it vastly overstates the fraction of scientific knowledge that we possess. Contemporary scientific research is in a state of crisis: unhealthy and dysfunctional. Until we pay the most talented researchers to spend decades on in-depth study instead of spending pennies on segmented, p-hacked, post-hoc conclusion garbage papers, major discoveries will continue to disappear.

nonbel 8y ago
From what I have seen it is quite simple. 1) There is this pseudo-scientific methodology called NHST (null hypothesis significance testing) devised pretty much on accident in the 1940-50s that tricks people into thinking they have discovered something interesting. 2) It is so much easier to generate these "significant" results than to study a phenomenon and come up with a model capable of making a precise prediction, then have multiple people/groups carefully collect data to check that prediction. 3) People willing to do the NHST thing can publish papers orders of magnitude faster than people not willing to. 4) Number of publications is the primary metric of success in academia. 5) People willing to do the NHST thing slowly take over the field as those who want to do real science get pushed out, retire, or leave for greener pastures. 6) Eventually the field is filled with people generating worthless papers that cannot be replicated in principle and often contradict each other. - a) Because all that matters is you got a significant result published in a peer reviewed journal - b) The discovery has already been made, the statistics said so, why would anyone need to replicate it? And to preempt a common confusion. This has nothing to do with bayesian vs frequentist, testing a strawman null hypothesis can be done using bayesian math just as well as frequentist. Some decent intros to this problem (yes, it was pointed out long ago but there is no stopping the need to publish apparently): Meehl 1967: https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theorytestingparadox.pdf https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theoryte... Gigerenzer 2004: https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pd...

ozborn 8y ago

Another problem with this data is the rise of team science and huge author lists for papers - something the Nobel prize isn't really able to deal with. Think of the human genome paper or the Higgs boson paper - both good 21st century science but lacking the easily identifiable "super scientists" the Nobel committee is looking for. Additionally it is hard to fully evaluate the impact of scientific work fully until many years have passed since publication. It's no wonder they prefer to find their winners in the 80s. ..

otikik 8y ago

The graph should be adjusted by inflation, and probably by other factors, in order to accurately back the article's claim. $1M in 1940 would be equivalent to $17M in 2018.

jblow 8y ago
The graph states that it is adjusted for inflation.
- otikik 8y ago
  Ok thanks. I must have missed it.

justaguy1212 8y ago

I actually don't see this from his data. It seems more like he started with a hypothesis, wrote the article as if he was correct, and then gathered data to try to support it. Then after seeing the data wasn't as commensurate with his idea, he wrote around the inconveniences.

ImaCake 8y ago
Yep. I don't know what article the other people in this thread read, but it wasn't the same one I did. At best, the graphs can conclude that scientist's opinion of nobel prize winners stays about the same, regardless of time.

jrochkind1 8y ago

An unpopular possibly "devil's advocate" opinion: Considering that our scientific advances have led to us quickly using an enormous developed capacity to make the earth much less hospitable to human life, maybe a slowdown in scientific advances is not a bad thing. On the other hand, yes, we are going to need some science to deal with what we have wrought without maximum misery. But I don't really trust us with it.

AstralStorm 8y ago

I'd personally bet on some sort of major breakthrough in space travel or energy sources or both (perhaps due to new physics) to have comparable results to the decades of the atom. Being that, there is just not enough gain or even potential gain of technologies being surveyed right now, even considering full on genetic engineering and universal nanoconstructors. Well, unless immortality or nigh immortality of some form happens. Or we found a way to expand our intelligence and performance in some huge way. And then it becomes available. Compared to atomic and subatomic physics AI is a joke and genetics is at witch doctoring levels. Self driving cars are like the steam experiments in 1800s at best, with even less of an impact. At least genetics has potential to change everything, more than automated transportation ever can. Nanotechnology is making some progress but not nearly fast, good or cheap enough. Another breakthrough could come from side physics like photonics.

cossatot 8y ago

I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in the exact dates), there were a lot of fundamental questions that could be addressed through the application of relatively systematic, rigorous observation and experimentation, and modeling with the kind of math you can do on a chalkboard. Within this time period, though, a lot of these questions were addressed and the new questions that arose required more data, better instrumentation, and more advanced mathematical modeling techniques to address. In my own field (geology, in particular tectonics and earthquake studies), this was laid out in a very explicit manner: the fundamental mode of observation is geologic mapping, and the terrestrial surface of the earth slowly got mapped. The mapping of the past may be refined or re-interpreted but rarely does it need to be redone from scratch. It is done to a reasonable level of resolution. There is still a lot of unknown under the ocean basins, but we have strong theoretical and empirical arguments for why those areas are not as complex as continents and therefore less interesting. The late 1960s through the mid 1980s saw the development of plate tectonic theory which completely revolutionized the science. Now, 50 years in, we have some second- or third-order questions but most of the first-order questions have been addressed. Today, the major developments of the field come from better instrumentation, for the most part. In the sub-field of tectonics, progress comes from the development and application of new methods for dating rocks or other geologic features (including things like exposure dating or 'how long as this rock been at the surface of the earth'), and from using satellite-based measurements of earth deformation (GPS and radar interferometry) to actually measure the motion of tectonic plates and sub-plates. Additional, continuous refinements in seismic imaging of the subsurface (driven by the oil industry primarily) has also been very helpful. This stuff is really expensive! It's hard to go camp out, hike a bit, make some observations, and write a good paper. The instrumentation to get the age of rocks might cost $100,000 and then when consumables and salary are factored in it might cost $500-$2000 per sample. You might need 10-20 samples to really find out anything new in your 10-km by 10-km area of interest. And I believe that geology is quite cheap relative to high-energy physics or whatever. Major geophysical experiments can cost millions. We piggyback on physics and other tech to a large extent---launching GPS satellites for example, or using obsolete particle accelerators for geochemical measurements. The oil industry spends (tens of?) billions a year acquiring data as well but very little of it becomes public or available to researchers, though the cumulative data release from industry is significant. [NB, I may be 1 order of magnitude short on any of these numbers.] In general there have been very few major theoretical advancements in the past 20-30 years. We have gotten better at recognizing coupling between tectonic process and earth surface processes, and as instrumental datasets slowly increase (as we observe more earthquakes, etc.) some smaller boxes get checked. However, a geologist from the mid-1980s would be able to navigate today's scientific landscape pretty well. The fads are different but like any fashion, many are cyclical and were fads in the 80s too. I personally see advancement coming from better statistical and numerical modeling, and the availability of high-quality global datasets (primarily created through large international collaborations, which is a post-cold war thing). I also see a lot of room for improvement in our understanding of the coupling of mechanisms spanning vastly different timescales--for example earthquakes occur in seconds, post-earthquake phenomena last weeks to decades, the earthquake cycle lasts hundreds to thousands of years, and the cumulative deformation from earthquakes and related processes is what we call 'tectonics' over millions of year timescales. It's really hard to make a single numerical (i.e., finite element) model that works over all of these timescales and is driven by basic physics (i.e. an earthquake results from forces applied rather than being imposed). Nonetheless there are almost certainly a lot of really important coupling processes that occur on these different timescales but they are really hard to analyze (and a lot of interesting stuff happens at 20 km depth and at mm/yr rates, which is pretty damn hard to observe). So I guess I see a lot of 21st century science as bridge building rather than outright discovery. This is fine. An analogy would be moving to a new country. The first bit is the discovery of the place, then you learn what language they speak. The learning doesn't stop there. As you learn the language, a lot of daily stuff makes sense. As you gain an understanding of the culture and the history, and can interact in a meaningful way, the value of that learning continues to increase, but it doesn't feel like 'discovery' like it did in the first year.

rjkennedy98 8y ago

A huge part of this is the general perversion of science. It starts at the bottom with the abuse of p-hacking by lowly grad students. It goes all the way to the top with fraudulent for-profit science by Big Pharma to get drugs and medical devices approved that don't work. All of it is part of the academic-medical industrial complex that views science not as process for discovering truth, but as a tool that can be used to generate profit. There are enormous breakthroughs that I know are very close, but simply inconceivable due to the academic-medical establishment that has stranglehold on science.

kuanbutts 8y ago

Quickly scanning comments I do not think anyone else has brought up: administrative bloat. More money is being spent on science, but is more money actually making it through the administrative bloat encumbering most institutions to the actual performance of research? Anecdotally, I have a colleague who has received funding from the NSF and the amount of regulations and paperwork and various travel and meeting-related obligations related to the funding soak up so much of the actual dollar amount supplied. (You have to use your funding dollars to satisfy the various required meetings, travel, and paperwork-filling.) The constraints are so ridiculous that satisfying them consumes nearly all the resources the NSF provided, and the little that remains is actually not sufficient to perform the research with. Worse, he has now wasted months of his time satisfying various oversight requirements administrated by both the NSF and the research institution he works in, leaving him an unreasonably small amount of time to actually achieve any significant progress on his work. Once this round of funding dries up, he will be left with no choice but to repeat the process in order to secure some more funding to continue to barely make progress on his stated research goal. If I had to make up a number to describe the dollar efficiency of research funding, in some cases I might assert it is negative: Not only is it just being soaked up by self-serving, efficiency-draining administrative requirements, it literally destroys the most valuable resource (time!), leaving the researcher with none to actually engage in their subject matter of expertise.

buboard 8y ago
it's huge. Similar in an european ERC-funded lab: the PI is constantly traveling, there is little oversight of the work let alone actual scientific output. It feels like a large portion of the funding is designed to keep a lot of people people busy doing nothing.
- nonbel 8y ago
  At least the US government treats it like a "jobs program", just like everything else.
kiliantics 8y ago
Not to mention the fact that the academic institution usually takes a hefty "tax" on any grants awarded. Where I work, they take around 30-40% I believe.

agumonkey 8y ago

science having its own logistic curve ?

buboard 8y ago

I don't understand their methodology at all. Considering that the frequency of awarding nobel prizes remains the same , there is nothing that can be infered from their survey. That said i agree with the premise of their article that science is not living up to expectations, and i believe this started somewhere in the 90s. For example consider the recent "Burden of disease" survey which was linked here a few days ago: > GBD 2017 is disturbing. Not only do the amalgamated global figures show a worrying slowdown in progress but the more granular data unearths exactly how patchy progress has been. GBD 2017 is a reminder that, without vigilance and constant effort, progress can easily be reversed. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32858-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... This effect was probably many years in the making , and is only now becoming apparent. One possible explanation for the "sluggishness" in scientific output is that nowadays it is lacking new grand ambitious projects, in other words centralization and Big Science. The proliferation of PhDs has changed the way funding is allocated in recent decades for purely political reasons. It favors thousands of small grants that go to individual independent researchers who are all studying minute effects, are looking for results that barely pass the significance threshold and are publishing in order to build publication records to advance their career. The total number of researchers has doubled since the 80s , therefore this model may be actually detrimental to the process of scientific knowledge discovery at this time. For example, in my field of computational neuroscience, there is currently no equivalent of the "large hadron collider" project for the brain. Some years ago one such project, the 'Human brain project' was proposed and funded, which had a specific and ambitious goal: to simulate the entire brain. Academic politics however fundamentally altered the project and it is now a funding source for various kinds of ordinary research. To be clear, the project was probably ill-conceived from the start (imho), given that we don't have enough info to simulate the brain correctly, but regardless it was one of the few such efforts towards a singular ambitious goal. Subsequent funding schemes such as the US Brain initiative do not have such a focus. The ones who do undertake big science are private institutes like the Allen institute in their attempt to accurately map the entire brain. In any case i think public policy has to focus less on academia and more on science, in order to make progress otherwise we are bound to see detrimental effects a few years down the road.

fastaguy88 8y ago

What a joke. There are hundreds of thousands of papers published each year, and some very small faction of those (but certainly hundreds to thousands) make a bit impact on their field. But we summarize science based on three yearly prizes? Clearly science is not having enough impact on science policy writers.

seizethecheese 8y ago

This could also be titled: “the foundational truths in a field are more consequential than subsequent findings”.

Animats 8y ago

That observation is decades too late. Big companies set up sizable research labs in the 20th century. After WWII, it was expected that a big industrial company would have a sizable R&D operation. Then, in the 1980s, those big R&D operations stopped paying off. Gradually, the big corporate labs closed - Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Labs, Xerox PARC, Westinghouse Labs - gone. IBM's labs are far smaller than they once were. The payoff wasn't there. The easy hits from research were gone.

marcosdumay 8y ago
Hum... My reading is that R&D facilities couldn't compete with the sheer amount of small improvements that came from the uneducated labor force. Japan grew out empowering the employees to do development, and the entire world copied it. What leaded us on a path where people are making the Uber-for-X apps and some actually getting rich that way. And that is exactly the opposite of a sarcity of low hanging fruit.

madhadron 8y ago

I'm not sure where to begin on this, so I'll resort to a brain dump. The Nobel prize has become steadily more political. More senior researchers in the field have had more time to accrue political power, so expect the awards to reach further back in time. Research productivity has dropped, though. Today a professor in biology has a more than full time job just to get money for their lab. So you go through gradschool, go through postdoc, and when you've got all this training, you stop doing science and become a grant writer. If you don't bring in money, you don't have a lab. For the postdocs and grad students, they live very insecurely. Their pay is poor, they live knowing they will probably relocate somewhere entirely different in three or four years, so there's no point having links into the local community. They work for someone has no training in management and has no time to deal with them if the money is going to flow. And there are still lots of places where the postdocs aren't considered full time employees of the university and don't have, say, health insurance. These are hardly the conditions that you can expect to produce good work. Fields are mined down to the last details rather than looking at unexplored areas nearby. There are many reasons for this. As a grad student you work on what your advisor works on. As a postdoc, you work on what your lab works on. As a professor, you work on what you worked on as a postdoc and it requires multiple years and lots of luck to reorient a lab. You need a community to provide evidence of your competence in order to advance at each stage and get tenure, which you can't easily get if you wander out of an established field. Nor is there any training on how to look effectively find things to work on.

lumost 8y ago
Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Keep in mind by small grant we mean 100-200k towards a million.

oh-kumudo 8y ago

Human have succeeded most of the applicable rules of our physical world. What left to be discovered requires much more time and effort.

pascalxus 8y ago

Why do they assume something went wrong? At some point, we ill reach a point where there is far less left to discover or invent. (other than AI -> as long as anyone has a job, there's always room for automation, yikes!) We assume that technological progress can continue forever and ever. I think this is an incorrect presumption.

socalnate1 8y ago

Does anyone else find it fascinating the Patrick Collison (the co-founder and current CEO of Stripe) co-wrote this article? The dude makes me feel inadequate like no other.

pvaldes 8y ago

A lot of 'money spent in science' has not really been spent. Just offered with lots of requisites that nobody can reach and then recycled for other projects. If granted, the money can be blocked for months (instead to pay an entire year to scientists, you pay 7 months... for one year of work), and can be partially siphoned off again using bureaucracy. Some politicians are very fond of this 'miracle of bread and fishes' trick. "In the last ten years we spent '10 millions' in science projects". Looks great. "In the last ten years we flashed the same million 10 times before to put it again in our pocket". Not so great, often the real thing.

jgalt212 8y ago

Excellent book on this topic. Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-Military-Industrial/dp/1451675763 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-Milita...

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Probably impossible to find out, but seeing a comparison - however loose - to other countries would be ideal. Annecdotally, it seems there's at least one significant leap per week listed on HN that can be attributed to China. Reaching 100 million degrees from a fusion reaction (from earlier this week) comes to mind. But of course the general public isn't enlightened by the mainstream media about such things.

pas 8y ago
The Chinese fusion reactor was not a leap. Already achieved in JET (Joint European Torus). That said, if China decides to pour a lot more into R&D, it'll be doing leaps in no time, simply due to brute force.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Link to JET achievement? Please?? Chinese? European? Any comparison would be better than none. Brute force? Does it matter? Results are results, yes? The arc of my point is, the USA so often as a very self-serving, often myth-based view of itself. It's as if no one else in the world might have a better approach. That's a mistake.
  - pas 8y ago
    JET achieved 0.7 Q, 24MW in 16MW out. It operates somewhere around 100-200M Kelvin. https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion > Brute force? Does it matter? No, I doesn't mean to say it as a negative thing. Fusion research funding is very low compared to what is needed to build big enough devices. Because when it comes to fusion, size matters, as efficiency goes up with size. And that's what I meant by brute force. China can simply build a bigger one and reap the benefits of size. > Results are results, yes? Yes, and more data is always better in plasma science.

lostmsu 8y ago

Yet we directly observed gravitational waves, and compute power continues to grow.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

A lot of the comments are listing their personal suspicion of causes, without attempting to illustrate or provide evidence. Some of those suspicions are probably true, and some false. Obviously it is also an outlet for all our personal gripes with the system. Irrespective of the veracity of a proposed cause, I would like to see more discussion of actual examples of current progress, and trying to identify what caused or enabled the progress to be made by comparing with the average paper in the back of our mind: what was different, why did they achieve the progress today and did nobody achieve the insight say five years ago? Ideally, since we are discussing on HN, it should be an example that would be understood by most participants here. It is in this spirit that I will give exactly such an example of recent progress (with which I am entirely unaffiliated). First some minimal background which I assume you are not familiar with: quantum chemistry and solid state physics software. Just take a quick look at this list on wikipedia, you may recognize the names of some pieces of software like ABINIT... make sure you pay attention to the DFT column, and that virtually all packages support DFT calculations, which has been pretty much state of the art for the last decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_solid_state_physics_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_... In physics gradients often arise naturally for example forces as gradients of potential energy... But in general even outside physics gradients are useful in nearly all field for optimization... Now the part you probably already understand: AD, Automatic Differentiation or Algorithmic Differentiation, and in the often occuring case of a single scalar function in N variables, reverse-mode AD... And that it takes on the order of 5 times a single function evaluation to calculate a gradient. Now specific subfields of physics have been using AD and adjoint sensitivities for a long time (nuclear engineering, oceanography) but it is not a standard part of physics curricula. Outside of these specific subfields, Automatic Differentiation has been gaining momenta over the last decades (books, comprehensive reviews, ...) Physics students of course learn differentiation symbolically on paper for short formulas, or in software packages like MACSYMA, Maple, ... but even then you keep the number of variables low for tractability. These students will also understand you can emulate differentiation numerically by using a finite delta: d f(x1, x2, ..., xN) / dx2 = ~ [f(x1, x2 +delta, ..., xN) - f(x1, x2, ..., xN)]/delta fully understanding that for a complete gradient you need (N+1) evaluations of f, that delta too large will be inaccurate due to functional nonlinearity, and delta too small will be inaccurate due to numerical rounding of floats... Nobody thinks of showing reverse mode automatic differentiation to physics students as part of their curricula! If you crash into a physics course and ask the students how to calculate the gradient of a big function of 1000 variables, they won't be able to help you, but then you can explain that such a thing is in fact possible! You see where this is going... What if some of the numerical computations, say molecular modeling, could benefit from this insight? That's exactly what happened recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat Now look at the authors' institutions of this paper: SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, 2 DEMOCRITOS National Simulation Center, Quantitative Strategies, Investment Banking Division, Credit Suisse Group That's people with an interdisciplinary background. Could it be that we are over-specialized? Or perhaps mis-specialized? Imagine an alternate world where there is so much math that mathematics has decided to specialize thus: after a common course of Fundamental Math, you can specialize in Definitions, or perhaps in Theorems, or perhaps in Proofs, or perhaps in Conjectures... clearly their progress in math is going to suffer!! Could it be that experts and professionals have become "too polite" to the point of circle j* ? A kind of "politeness omerta"? Imagine a mathematician and a physicist talking: as long as we're discussing math, the physicist nods with interest, and doesn't make suggestions how he would do it differently and vice versa. The "don't criticize a professional in his domain" attitude? Wouldn't it have been better if someone who understood AD say 20 years ago, who ends up in a conversation of molecular chemistry software physicist to say something like "I don't have the domain knowledge, but first thing I would do is find out if the calculation could be viewed as the computation of a gradient, or else as an optimization of an explicit goal" "how dare you make a suggestion outside of math?! and thats thousands of variables, its intractable" ? We might have had this 20 years ago! Mansplain it if necessary. it's this upside down world where we are polite and stoic in our papers, but elbow working back stabbers undermining the workgroup next door, all the while feigning this "politeness professional omerta"

vharuck 8y ago

What if the survey respondents value earlier discoveries more because they understand them better? I remember my mathematics professors saying, once they chose a specialty within a field, there wee only a dozen or so people in the world who could discuss it on the same level. So concurrent appreciation is rare within a single field, let alone across fields. But, as a high schooler, I was taught the basics of Einstein's general theory of relativity. I couldn't do the math, but I appreciated its value. Maybe the respondents undervalue recent discoveries in different fields.

LeonB 8y ago
Effects like that could only be measured if they repeated the same survey many times over decades before publishing. Even then it would be confounded by a lot of other factors. Instead they’ve marched forward using junk science to discredit science. I found it a really weird and off key article. They might be right but I wouldn’t use this article to demonstrate it. (And I otherwise have a lot of respect for the authors.)

alpineidyll3 8y ago

Ex-professor here. Reason for this is trivially obvious to any outsider observing the day of an academic: A dazzling torrent of time-wasting grant applications, awards and other such nonsense. The system is basically designed to take productive scientists, and waste them as quickly as possible. After all, how better to protect your mediocrity? Never been happier than after leaving...