7 ms·

I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field. In the past, science was an eccentr

I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field. In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case. The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.

MarkMMullin 7y ago
The 'problem' with modern science is that a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered, and new discoveries are most often built on that stuff. I splash around in the backwaters of machine learning, however I have to pick my targets carefully and maintain a very tight focus - the defined knowledge base has already grown to more than anyone can ingest in detail. Given the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed to achieve mastery in a scientific discipline, and the fact that knowledge base keeps growing, it takes longer and longer to lay a foundation for just understanding what the hell people are talking about. Now, there are opportunities, for example the use of genetic algorithms as part of ML solutions, because for any 'real' researcher, GA's aren't the cool kid in the opinions of reviewers or funding agents. It's easier when you are the PI and the funding authority, even if the budget is quite a bit smaller
- naveen99 7y ago
  The number of unanswered questions grows even faster as more questions are answered.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Good questions are even harder to find than good answers. When you come up with a good question, make sure lots of people hear it.
- Beefin 7y ago
  > a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
- nobodyandproud 7y ago
  The problem with modern science is that there is no room for the unusual. Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout. Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole. Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public. As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah. So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
    From my experiences in the life sciences going through the academic credentialing process (PhD to postdoc), there was room for the unusual but the way it worked was a little convoluted. Basically the grant funding agencies give you money for a project that they can understand and follow your logic on why it will succeed. Then when they fund you, you cut back on the resources required to get to that success and spend the savings on new ideas. The fun part about the "new idea" spending is you can look at most anything that your instrumentation can look for. The idea being all the tools in your lab, your departments lab, even collaborating institutions are available to play around with and probe. You can even build new instrumentation to look at new things with that money. This is how modern life science pushes ahead.
    - nobodyandproud 7y ago
      So what happens if you get caught? Or someone calls you out?
      - analog31 7y ago
        Nobody's checking. The focus is on what you're going to spend next year's money on, not how you spent last year's money. And if you're savvy, you can use tools that were already bought for some other purpose, or that don't cost much. Working a day job in industry isn't categorically different, except that someone is probably watching your spending more closely. You have to figure out a way to set aside some time to work on your own interest, whether you do it at work or at home. As for money, you can get technology made for 1/10 of what it costs your employer, by choosing your battles, cutting out all of the overhead, and using free stuff.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Neural networks are a good example of something that was once ignored as an academic curiosity at best.
  - larnmar 7y ago
    Neural networks followed a typical hype cycle — before they were ignored they were the next big thing. Then they got ignored, and then they finally got useful.
hahla 7y ago
The people driven by curiosity will still be in those unfashionable backwaters of any field. I would think true progress is made by those individuals, not ones that chase ‘hot’ fields.
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  Bingo. I would add that the movers tend to define their own fields, and by action and driven by need/practicality, not marketing. Those seeking to enter a career, generally have a different set of goals and priorities, reguardless of overlap.
notahacker 7y ago
There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then. I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research. I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    800 karma in 73 days. I wonder what the highest karma gain in two months was, in HN’s history. (From comments only, and with the top comment removed from consideration to avoid one-offs.) I guess I’m a bus ticket collector of HN facts.
sjg007 7y ago
Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.
jakobmi 7y ago
The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric company. Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples. I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  You could not "easily" become a billionaire by improving Wikipedia, which is the result of millions of hours of writing and editing. The fact is most low-hanging fruit has already been plucked, thus every scientific discovery relies upon more and more background knowledge. Yes, we do make innovations in explaining/teaching science more quickly to successive generations, but I doubt if we'll ever see a Newton or Darwin who can single-handedly, obsessively write and observe and calculate, by themselves, and then push science forward by leaps and bounds. The best research today is all done by teams, with experts on statistics, study design, clinicians, hardware experts - there are just so many niche fields that we MUST collaborate on extremely advanced work.
- erikerikson 7y ago
  I was actively discouraged from writing readable text in my thesis. That kind of behavior would erode the power of the guild.
  - b_emery 7y ago
    Your advisors were acting in your best interest. There is a time and place for readable science, and your thesis is not it. It has nothing to do with the power of the guild, and everything to do with assessing your knowledge and preparation. The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field. There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.
dr_kiszonka 7y ago
> filled up with careerists I agree but I think it is driven by academia's incentive structure which promotes and rewards such behavior.
dominotw 7y ago
thats why we have bad doctors?
erikerikson 7y ago
It's worse than this. The careerists have taken control and use it to demand you work as they would like. They kill the creativity and passion and will not allow the real work to happen and make progress. There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back. Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. Are you joking? A small child literally has a better chance of growing up to become a professional athlete than a tenured research professor!
- majos 7y ago
  This doesn’t seem true. In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs). I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-q...
- sukilot 7y ago
  Of course very few tenured research professors grow up to be professional athletes, but that hardly seems relevant.
nickysielicki 7y ago
> The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
- nikki93 7y ago
  Isn't the internet the social institution then?
knzhou 7y ago
> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The average tenured professor salary in the US is $141k. Star research directors with a proven record of bringing in grant money can easily earn two or three times that. In engineering, physics, med, and bio there are also lucrative consultancy opportunities. The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside. The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons. Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  The big difference is that currently scientists are paid and their research equipment funded by someone else; contrasting to the earlier times where usually you could be a scientist if and only if had "passive income" (usually, inherited wealth), so that you would not need to work to earn money and could instead study (and pay for studies in a world without student loans) and research instead of that.

MarkMMullin 7y ago

The 'problem' with modern science is that a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered, and new discoveries are most often built on that stuff. I splash around in the backwaters of machine learning, however I have to pick my targets carefully and maintain a very tight focus - the defined knowledge base has already grown to more than anyone can ingest in detail. Given the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed to achieve mastery in a scientific discipline, and the fact that knowledge base keeps growing, it takes longer and longer to lay a foundation for just understanding what the hell people are talking about. Now, there are opportunities, for example the use of genetic algorithms as part of ML solutions, because for any 'real' researcher, GA's aren't the cool kid in the opinions of reviewers or funding agents. It's easier when you are the PI and the funding authority, even if the budget is quite a bit smaller

naveen99 7y ago
The number of unanswered questions grows even faster as more questions are answered.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Good questions are even harder to find than good answers. When you come up with a good question, make sure lots of people hear it.
Beefin 7y ago
> a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
nobodyandproud 7y ago
The problem with modern science is that there is no room for the unusual. Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout. Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole. Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public. As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah. So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
- DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
  From my experiences in the life sciences going through the academic credentialing process (PhD to postdoc), there was room for the unusual but the way it worked was a little convoluted. Basically the grant funding agencies give you money for a project that they can understand and follow your logic on why it will succeed. Then when they fund you, you cut back on the resources required to get to that success and spend the savings on new ideas. The fun part about the "new idea" spending is you can look at most anything that your instrumentation can look for. The idea being all the tools in your lab, your departments lab, even collaborating institutions are available to play around with and probe. You can even build new instrumentation to look at new things with that money. This is how modern life science pushes ahead.
  - nobodyandproud 7y ago
    So what happens if you get caught? Or someone calls you out?
    - analog31 7y ago
      Nobody's checking. The focus is on what you're going to spend next year's money on, not how you spent last year's money. And if you're savvy, you can use tools that were already bought for some other purpose, or that don't cost much. Working a day job in industry isn't categorically different, except that someone is probably watching your spending more closely. You have to figure out a way to set aside some time to work on your own interest, whether you do it at work or at home. As for money, you can get technology made for 1/10 of what it costs your employer, by choosing your battles, cutting out all of the overhead, and using free stuff.
sjg007 7y ago
Neural networks are a good example of something that was once ignored as an academic curiosity at best.
- larnmar 7y ago
  Neural networks followed a typical hype cycle — before they were ignored they were the next big thing. Then they got ignored, and then they finally got useful.

hahla 7y ago

The people driven by curiosity will still be in those unfashionable backwaters of any field. I would think true progress is made by those individuals, not ones that chase ‘hot’ fields.

Jamwinner 7y ago
Bingo. I would add that the movers tend to define their own fields, and by action and driven by need/practicality, not marketing. Those seeking to enter a career, generally have a different set of goals and priorities, reguardless of overlap.

notahacker 7y ago

There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then. I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research. I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.

zozbot234 7y ago
> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  800 karma in 73 days. I wonder what the highest karma gain in two months was, in HN’s history. (From comments only, and with the top comment removed from consideration to avoid one-offs.) I guess I’m a bus ticket collector of HN facts.

sjg007 7y ago

Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.

jakobmi 7y ago

The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric company. Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples. I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier

WhompingWindows 7y ago
You could not "easily" become a billionaire by improving Wikipedia, which is the result of millions of hours of writing and editing. The fact is most low-hanging fruit has already been plucked, thus every scientific discovery relies upon more and more background knowledge. Yes, we do make innovations in explaining/teaching science more quickly to successive generations, but I doubt if we'll ever see a Newton or Darwin who can single-handedly, obsessively write and observe and calculate, by themselves, and then push science forward by leaps and bounds. The best research today is all done by teams, with experts on statistics, study design, clinicians, hardware experts - there are just so many niche fields that we MUST collaborate on extremely advanced work.
erikerikson 7y ago
I was actively discouraged from writing readable text in my thesis. That kind of behavior would erode the power of the guild.
- b_emery 7y ago
  Your advisors were acting in your best interest. There is a time and place for readable science, and your thesis is not it. It has nothing to do with the power of the guild, and everything to do with assessing your knowledge and preparation. The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field. There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.

dr_kiszonka 7y ago

> filled up with careerists I agree but I think it is driven by academia's incentive structure which promotes and rewards such behavior.

dominotw 7y ago

thats why we have bad doctors?

erikerikson 7y ago

It's worse than this. The careerists have taken control and use it to demand you work as they would like. They kill the creativity and passion and will not allow the real work to happen and make progress. There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back. Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

>Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. Are you joking? A small child literally has a better chance of growing up to become a professional athlete than a tenured research professor!

majos 7y ago
This doesn’t seem true. In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs). I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-q...
sukilot 7y ago
Of course very few tenured research professors grow up to be professional athletes, but that hardly seems relevant.

nickysielicki 7y ago

> The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.

nikki93 7y ago
Isn't the internet the social institution then?

knzhou 7y ago

> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The average tenured professor salary in the US is $141k. Star research directors with a proven record of bringing in grant money can easily earn two or three times that. In engineering, physics, med, and bio there are also lucrative consultancy opportunities. The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside. The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons. Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
PeterisP 7y ago
The big difference is that currently scientists are paid and their research equipment funded by someone else; contrasting to the earlier times where usually you could be a scientist if and only if had "passive income" (usually, inherited wealth), so that you would not need to work to earn money and could instead study (and pay for studies in a world without student loans) and research instead of that.