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The elephant in the room, IMO, is that there is only so much ground to be broken. The physical world is fundamentally limited and limiting. There's a limit to h

The elephant in the room, IMO, is that there is only so much ground to be broken. The physical world is fundamentally limited and limiting. There's a limit to how much there is to know about it, and as we come to know more of the big things, it becomes more and more difficult to learn the smaller and smaller things. This outcome -- that the rate of groundbreaking research is slowing -- is what we should expect, even under a consistent policy.

bonoboTP 6y ago
My biggest transformative learning experience regarding this has been how much of even technical (in particular CS, AI, ML) research is about recombination of existing ideas and that the most successful researchers aren't doing strictly technical contributions and "breaking ground", "discovering new terrain", but of selling new stories and narratives involving known concepts and shifting the emphasis from known aspect to another known aspect. Relatedly, in this lecture [0] he expresses it by contrasting the "positivist" model where knowledge is piled on, linearly expanding vs the model of discourse, where research is a conversation, where participants must know what the others take for granted, assume, doubt etc and new contributions argue that there are better ways to do or conceptualize things. Works are forgotten, left behind, ignored etc. A work can be valuable in one context at one stage in the discourse, while worthless at another time. It's not like a neutral map of some terrain that we can just file and store forever. He's in the social sciences, where this may be more obvious, but it's also true of sufficiently developed technical sciences too. When the low hanging fruit has been picked, the game becomes closer to zero sum. I mean new value can still be created, but not mainly through bringing in "new characters into the story" but by letting the story unfold using the same characters (main ideas). Only a true paradigm shift may break this equilibrium. [0] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM
- HPsquared 6y ago
  Kind of like how sales and marketing people search for and find new customers and applications for an existing product or service.

bonoboTP 6y ago

My biggest transformative learning experience regarding this has been how much of even technical (in particular CS, AI, ML) research is about recombination of existing ideas and that the most successful researchers aren't doing strictly technical contributions and "breaking ground", "discovering new terrain", but of selling new stories and narratives involving known concepts and shifting the emphasis from known aspect to another known aspect. Relatedly, in this lecture [0] he expresses it by contrasting the "positivist" model where knowledge is piled on, linearly expanding vs the model of discourse, where research is a conversation, where participants must know what the others take for granted, assume, doubt etc and new contributions argue that there are better ways to do or conceptualize things. Works are forgotten, left behind, ignored etc. A work can be valuable in one context at one stage in the discourse, while worthless at another time. It's not like a neutral map of some terrain that we can just file and store forever. He's in the social sciences, where this may be more obvious, but it's also true of sufficiently developed technical sciences too. When the low hanging fruit has been picked, the game becomes closer to zero sum. I mean new value can still be created, but not mainly through bringing in "new characters into the story" but by letting the story unfold using the same characters (main ideas). Only a true paradigm shift may break this equilibrium. [0] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM

HPsquared 6y ago
Kind of like how sales and marketing people search for and find new customers and applications for an existing product or service.