22 ms·

No, it isn't waning. There are struggles, but that doesn't mean its waning. We're having massive progress in medicine, space, cosmology, environment, biology, f

No, it isn't waning. There are struggles, but that doesn't mean its waning. We're having massive progress in medicine, space, cosmology, environment, biology, food, transportation. Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I think it's obviously waning if you look at any field that deals with physical world: a car from 1940 looks totally different than one from 1980's, but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same. Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear engines, fusion propultion, etc? Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept computers. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7_VrhNEv7nPFCPc20XSQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7...
- walls 5y ago
  Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA
  - f6v 5y ago
    I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
    - supernovae 5y ago
      General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of which were really technology or innovation problems. Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs, Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths, expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack of care of passion from aviation for the past few generations. But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines, electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        NIMBYs, not NIMBAs?
        supernovae 5y ago
        yah, yard/area ;)
        goodcanadian 5y ago
        My brain imagined that "A" stood for "airspace."
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      > I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B. It takes even longer now while you wait in lines to get through the security parade.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
      - dTal 5y ago
        >a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials? This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship." From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement? If we kept up the pace of progress, we would have skyhooks in service, nuclear thermal rockers, nuclear electric propultion, fission fragment rocket and dozens of others. We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
    - lopis 5y ago
      In any field, you will have lower fruit to pick. > We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon. How good were we ever at reaching the moon, though?
    - ativzzz 5y ago
      Turns out we dedicate tons of resources to advanced technology when we are at war (WW2/cold war). Sounds like we need another good war with a power who is actually a threat to rapidly innovate.
    - moffkalast 5y ago
      I think you're making a flawed extrapolation here, because the space race and the cold war overly inflated the pace of progress in space at the time. With the meagre funding that has remained since the end of that there has been pretty good progress so far.
    - supernovae 5y ago
      Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never seen before that uses technology specially designed because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane - something no other manufacturer was able to master because of specific issues with those styles of engines and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane on mars to be able to fly back. The methane can be synthesized on mars from CO2 in atmosphere and Hydrogen in Ice. They had to invent the largest re-usable rocket platform, the first re-usable and working methane engine and the first flight computer that could take off and land... Not only that, but they invented or invested in massive technology for manufacturing all of this such that the engines are often 3d printed and designed with precision only dreamed of before.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    And you could make the same case for other inventions. Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing. In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it, still a hammer. Some things are invented and then perfected to a point where you can't really improve them much in a cost effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      But now we can buy plans to build our own hammer factory factory factories. https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframeworks.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframe...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Powered landing was definitively proved technology in 1969. Applying it to booster reuse on Earth waited a bit longer.
- chrisamiller 5y ago
  Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. The medical and biological sciences are where a lot of innovation has taken place, and the pace of technological advancement in things like DNA sequencing (as one example) is breathtaking.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Nope. Same disease that would've killed my friend 30 years ago would kill him today, with the same treatments being used as had been available another 30 years before that, based on WWI chemical warfare. Healthcare's shining decade was the teens. The 1910s. Largely based on public health measures. Much as today.
  - f6v 5y ago
    > Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics > 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017 Is that the rate you expect?
    - chrisamiller 5y ago
      People are living longer and age is a dominant risk factor for cancer. In a world where cancer care wasn't improving, we'd expect to see massive increases in deaths due to cancer. What's also not captured by that number are the years of life after cancer diagnosis, which for many cancers has gone up dramatically. It's a tough problem, but the curves are bending in the right direction. If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial) vision to the blind. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-partially-restores-sight-blind-man-180977820/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in genomic medicine.
    - bigbillheck 5y ago
      By the miracle of compounding that's a 33% improvement in 16 years.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Relevant recent comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000086.
- kiba 5y ago
  There's only so many ways to arrange a car.
- supernovae 5y ago
  I still beg to differ... The shape of cars is even changing... We have Cyber trucks coming out, we have several EV trucks coming out - battry tech is improving, engine performance is still improving, fuel efficiency is only being attacked for political reasons - It's pretty cool that a Jeep - a brick on Wheels has several options of efficiency and power that are major improvements from just a few years from - from a 4xe hybrid to a turbocharged engine to a diesel option. Airplanes? There is a really good Nova episode on the electric race - we're nearing an electric age with airplanes even in commercial aviation - In the next 5-10 years we'll probably have the short hops covered by quiet electric planes - that innovation isn't necessarily paced by science, but by safety, engineering and certification - things we don't want to shortcut since humans are involved in these systems. Hell.. we've been dabbling with autonomous cars too and driver assist and lane assist... I can go on and on
- taneq 5y ago
  These are examples of technologies maturing, not scientific progress waning.
- rmah 5y ago
  I started driving in 1982... and I can say with 100% certainty that cars of 2020 may not look all that different from cars of 1980, but under that skin of glossy steel and glass, they are very different. The engines are different (electronic fuel injection, timing and compression ratio monitoring), the transmissions are different (dual clutch, torque vectoring differential), the electronics are massively different, safety features are like out of sci fi (parking cameras, adaptive cruise control, anti-lock brakes, in-dash navigation, ). All that and the quality (fit & finish, reliability, durability) is hugely better. A typical mid-market car of today would have been considered absurdly high quality and uber-luxurious in 1980. The difference is night and day.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    I started driving around that time, too... in a 1950 Studebaker. Not only do I agree with everything you say about the difference between cars of today and 30 years ago, the magnitude of advances has accelerated too.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s. That's what I think about with accelerating magnitude of advances. What we have now seems much more like the expected linear progress of 70 years, helped along by the computing revolution, where most of the actual magnitudes of progress has occurred.
      - zardo 5y ago
        > In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s Who is the 'they' in this statement? (I think this may say more about what sort of statements get hyped and remembered, than what reasonable people thought)
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        They predicted flying nuclear cars, but not driving 100,000 miles before the first tune-up.
- aaron695 5y ago
  100% HN Pick any object and they are insanely different to the 80's. With exponential change since the internet. Look at a clothes peg, look at a screwdriver, look at a drill, look at a wheelchair, look at at fridge and look at a car. A clothes peg 1980 - 2000 a linear amount of change, post internet 2000 - 2020 exponential amount of change. Cars are so different it's hard to know where to start. Seat belts, air bags, paints, roof bars, lights, unleaded fuel, glass, cup holders (yes they matter), seat covers, car smells, locks, just keep on listing parts. Electric. GPS. LOMAX. Is this a troll? You'd be here forever. Some general ideas existed in the 80s (like the idea of rockets existed a thousands years ago), some are new ideas, and some are ideas that have finally gained acceptance, some are ideas that are now affordable, some are ideas that need the material science, some are ideas that need the new processes, some are ideas that need the supply chains. A lot of these marvels are not scientists though. It's commerce and internal company inventors that have changed the clothes peg for the better for instance. Maybe some of the material science is from universities, maybe.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  Cars are vastly different than they were in 1980. Fuel injection, aerodynamics, airbags, driver assist, hybrid and electric drivetrains, etc… the difference between a 1980 Honda Civic and a 2020 civic is massive. In 1980 we weren’t landing self piloting rocket stages on drone ships and reusing them a month later. The engines powering our rockets were completely different chemistry and metallurgy. We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner). Even my washing machine is using about half the energy compared to a washing machine in 1989. Composites, manufacturing, and design are all completely different to how things were in the 80s Just because something has a similar form factor doesn’t mean it is the same. There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    > There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things. I still think somewhere between the late 19th century to the middle 20th century had the most impactful change in human history, and things have slowed somewhat in term of overall impact since then, with more gradual improvements. 1881-1951 saw more transformative changes than 1951-2021. As in the world changed more in the previous 70 years. There's still a lot of change going on, and some of it is transformative. But not to the extent of the radical transformations from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, with revolutions in science, technology, economics, trade, transportation, communication and political structures. This might be more true of the developed world than the developing, which probably has seen those transformative changes more in the last 70 years. But in terms of what came to exist, it's hard to beat that period of time.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner)." Sir Joseph Wilson Swan first created carbon fiber in 1860. Carbon nanotubes were discovered in 1950's. If Dreamliner was built out of carbon nanotube, then I would concede. Like this, meh. "There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things." to test this hypothesis, let's stop arguing about somewhat subjective things, like whether fuel injection is more significant than invention of a nuclear reactor, and think about things we can measure objectively. Think about things we can measure, in the developed world, anything all, from wage growth to energy production to production of steel, by every metric that I have seen, their rate of increase was higher in year 1955 than in year 2015. Feel free to take your pick and show any statistics that disagrees with me.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Safety, performance, handling, comfort, ease-of-use, reliability, and efficiency have all significantly improved. The difference in experience of driving a 2020 Tesla Model S vs a 1980 Cadillac Seville is more drastic than that same Cadillac and its 1940s equivalent.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  That ignores an enormous about of vehicle safety improvements (roof crush resistance, various collision detection/drift detection, electronic stability control, crumple zones... ad nauseum). That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced pollution). That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-driving car advances.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    The fact that we are still discussing ICE cars proves my poity. The first electric care was built 120 years ago and London had an Electric Bus company (!) in year 1903.
    - lkbm 5y ago
      Yeah, we still use ICE cars, which unfortunate, but outside of greenhouse gases they're immensely less polluting than they used to be[0]. 1968->2010 reduced NO 99%, CO 95%, and particulate matter 99.92%. (I'm guessing this is looking at engines for PM. Tires/brakes still produce a lot, as I understand it.) The EPA says tailpipe emissions are 98%-99% cleaner, with a 71% overall drop across "six common pollutants" despite miles traveled climbing 114%[1] (They use a few different starting and end points throughout that article.) It's easy to miss how much cleaner modern cars are. [0] https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.html https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.h... [1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate-change/accomplishments-and-success-air-pollution-transportation https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
    - throwaway5752 5y ago
      The first electric car is unrecognizable from a Tesla Model 3. It is not appropriate to compare them. To me, it sounds just like saying SpaceX and Starlink is fundamentally the same as an R7 + Sputnik. It's a narrow view of progress to ignore substantial incremental improvements over time. While you might not see big external differences between a 1980s car and a 2020 car, a number of engineering professionals working in different disciples would be incredibly impressed.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Electric cars.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Car styling being somewhat static does not imply that Scientific Progress is waning. You could say something similar about clothing styles: comparing clothing styles between 1980 and 1990 there was a lot of difference. Comparing between 2010 and 2020 - not much difference. This has a lot more to do with economics and tastes than scientific progress (or lack thereof).
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Car styling being static is because we are likely very close or at some local optima. That is minimising the drag. In past we may have had some idea, but now we can compute the best shape. Plus there is regulatory pressure that makes some solutions illegal.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same. Cars have a whole lot fewer right angles these days.
- chinchilla2020 5y ago
  Cars are massively different. Anyone who works on cars in the garage will know that our modern vehicles are very different than the old carburetor and magneto machines. Drivetrain, running gear, and fuel systems are completely different systems that would be unrecognizable to a 1985 mechanic. This statement sounds like it came from a software engineer who has never washed grease off his hands.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    The claim is not "car of 1980 is same as car of 2020" , the claim is "car of 1980 is much-much closer to the car of 2020 than to the car of 1940's" If the latter is true, then it is evidence thay the statement "we have exponential progress" is false
    - chinchilla2020 5y ago
      There is no way to measure the 'progress' between different types of systems. The manufacturing process is exponentially faster and more efficient between 1980 and 2020. As far as cars go, I would say a 1980 mechanic could work on a 1940 car. A 1980 mechanic could NOT work on a 2020 car. I think alot of non-mechanically-inclined people don't understand that massive revolution that happened in car engines in the 2000s.
epistasis 5y ago
Agreed. I only see my little corner of biology, but I am continually astonished at what is being learned. Often times the pace of learning and the diversification is such that I often don't find out about significant discoveries until a couple years after they happen, and I can still bring the ideas to others years later after that and people will say "holy crap that's amazing, I can't believe I hadn't heard of that." Even scientists can't keep up outside of their area of expertise, and there will be even greater discoveries as different specialties are connected together. Media coverage is terrible, which is just fine because the fields are changing so quickly that who knows where things will be in a few years, ans the invention of understandable lay explanations take a long time to develop. I used to learn about, say, physics from popular media, but I don't get that any more. Presumably some things are going on in those fields. I think there are two effects: the expanse of human knowledge is now so wide that the human mind is having trouble keeping up even compared to a few decades ago, and also the media has changed massively over the last few decades as internet advertising has gutted its funding model.
- xmprt 5y ago
  Biology is one field that seems to be making massive breakthroughs recently. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of theoretical sciences like Physics haven't have similar breakthroughs in decades.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > Physics I believe that the “hard” sciences are much much easier than any soft science, which is one reason they have progressed so far. When you are arguing with a presumably objective reality, one party remains rational. Hard sciences are seen as harder due to university systems, and nothing to do with actual genuine difficulty of the science. Soft sciences are much harder to tease out fact from fiction, and your discoveries often modify reality so even your facts actually change (macro economics). Also for a lot of soft sciences, there are a lot of facts that don’t have to make sense (path dependencies for phenotypes of random mutations).
  - native_samples 5y ago
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack. No doubt there are political attacks on science, but it's also true that science is often politicized and also corporatized, both by forces outside of science and those who practice it.
- germandiago 5y ago
  How come a person that is interested in doing science politizes it? I think the first party interested in doing it is people who live from politics, not from science. At least not people who honestly live from science.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    One reason is money. Government institutions are one of the biggest sources of funding, so if you're a scientist, avoiding anything that could be politically connected can be difficult to do.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Well because they see science as a means to an end (political control), not an end in and of itself. For example, epidemiology has this problem. Epidemiologists routinely publish supposedly scientific papers that are actually policy papers in disguise. Often these papers violate the scientific method in some major way. Nobody seems to care. They get published regardless. Here's an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9#Sec7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9#Sec7 It unashamedly cherry-picks the UK, Denmark and Sweden to try and argue that the UK/Sweden should have adopted Danish policy. Why not study all countries for which data is available? They easily could have done, the data is there. But they don't because if you do that you end up with a null result (no policy makes reliably makes any difference). So they cherry pick in order to be "informative" (as they put it) with respect to policy.
germandiago 5y ago
Agree with your last sentence. Everything is analyzed/used from a political point of view. We need de-polarization. First thing would be to get rid of so much power by these people that rule at their convenience all of us. I really think it would be a better environment for everyone.
derbOac 5y ago
I think "scientific progress is waning" is maybe not the correct phrase. I think it's more like "scientific establishment is waning" or "scientific efficiency" or something like that. The issue isn't so much "is progress being made?" I think that's clearly the case. The question is "are resources being wasted?" or "what are the opportunity costs?" The blog post at the end kind of focuses on turnover of ideas and progress, which I'm not sure is quite the right focus. I think the original question, about how papers are being cited, are good papers being cited enough, are bad papers being cited too much, are papers being cited appropriately, is probably more on-point. I think people have this schema that academic science is a bunch of brilliant people just looking around, and when one of them comes up with a brilliant idea, others recognize it because they're brilliant, and then it floats to the top. What happens in reality is really different: you have a bunch of people who are pretty smart, but not always as brilliant as they are made out to be, and they have their own misunderstandings, blind spots, and biases. Ideas explode in popularity because the field as a whole is ready to understand or accept them, not because of the ideas per se. Re: "political attacks" I think this that's self-inflicted in that the worst part of all of this is the denial of how broken academics is at the moment among the scientific establishment. In any event, the focus of the article isn't really even about typical conservative anti-climate, anti-vaccine research, it's about citation patterns, written by academics, about academics.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Whatever politics touches, it taints. No surprise here. But one of the items you mentioned is food. I sort-of doubt that we have a great progress in food. People seem to be much fatter than ever before. That would suggest a lot of cheap calories, but less quality of food overall. Unless we measure progress in food by raw caloric content, we might actually be regressing. The burden of metabolic diseases is certainly at an all-time high and not a single country in the world managed to reduce it meaningfully again.
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  You'd be wrong there, too. Genetically engineered crops have boosted food yields to an extent not seen since the Haber-Bosch process.
chinchilla2020 5y ago
How much of that progress is coming from academia? If the tech industry is an example, private companies and open source are doing 99% of the lift.
specialist 5y ago
Yup. We live in an Age of Miracles. ~30 years ago I had a bone marrow transplant. I lived in an isolation bubble for a month. 95% mortality rate in the first year. A year of recovery. Today, treating my original disease is practically an outpatient therapy. To say nothing of immunotherapy replacing chemotherapies. My buddy had a late stage solid organ tumor. Cured with immunotherapy. For a condition that was absolutely fatal just a few months prior. I could go on and on.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

I think it's obviously waning if you look at any field that deals with physical world: a car from 1940 looks totally different than one from 1980's, but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same. Space rockets are same as they were in 80's, where are nuclear engines, fusion propultion, etc? Its the same for airplanes, appliances, and everything execept computers. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7_VrhNEv7nPFCPc20XSQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1451342274667876353?t=RO7...

walls 5y ago
Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA
- f6v 5y ago
  I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of which were really technology or innovation problems. Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs, Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths, expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack of care of passion from aviation for the past few generations. But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines, electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      NIMBYs, not NIMBAs?
      - supernovae 5y ago
        yah, yard/area ;)
        goodcanadian 5y ago
        My brain imagined that "A" stood for "airspace."
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    > I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B. It takes even longer now while you wait in lines to get through the security parade.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
    - dTal 5y ago
      >a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials? This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship." From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement? If we kept up the pace of progress, we would have skyhooks in service, nuclear thermal rockers, nuclear electric propultion, fission fragment rocket and dozens of others. We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
  - lopis 5y ago
    In any field, you will have lower fruit to pick. > We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon. How good were we ever at reaching the moon, though?
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    Turns out we dedicate tons of resources to advanced technology when we are at war (WW2/cold war). Sounds like we need another good war with a power who is actually a threat to rapidly innovate.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    I think you're making a flawed extrapolation here, because the space race and the cold war overly inflated the pace of progress in space at the time. With the meagre funding that has remained since the end of that there has been pretty good progress so far.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never seen before that uses technology specially designed because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane - something no other manufacturer was able to master because of specific issues with those styles of engines and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane on mars to be able to fly back. The methane can be synthesized on mars from CO2 in atmosphere and Hydrogen in Ice. They had to invent the largest re-usable rocket platform, the first re-usable and working methane engine and the first flight computer that could take off and land... Not only that, but they invented or invested in massive technology for manufacturing all of this such that the engines are often 3d printed and designed with precision only dreamed of before.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  And you could make the same case for other inventions. Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing. In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it, still a hammer. Some things are invented and then perfected to a point where you can't really improve them much in a cost effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    But now we can buy plans to build our own hammer factory factory factories. https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframeworks.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframe...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Powered landing was definitively proved technology in 1969. Applying it to booster reuse on Earth waited a bit longer.
chrisamiller 5y ago
Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. The medical and biological sciences are where a lot of innovation has taken place, and the pace of technological advancement in things like DNA sequencing (as one example) is breathtaking.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Nope. Same disease that would've killed my friend 30 years ago would kill him today, with the same treatments being used as had been available another 30 years before that, based on WWI chemical warfare. Healthcare's shining decade was the teens. The 1910s. Largely based on public health measures. Much as today.
- f6v 5y ago
  > Maybe your car hasn't changed, but your cancer care sure as hell has. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics > 1.8% per year among men from 2001 to 2017 Is that the rate you expect?
  - chrisamiller 5y ago
    People are living longer and age is a dominant risk factor for cancer. In a world where cancer care wasn't improving, we'd expect to see massive increases in deaths due to cancer. What's also not captured by that number are the years of life after cancer diagnosis, which for many cancers has gone up dramatically. It's a tough problem, but the curves are bending in the right direction. If you want a more punctuated example, how about gene therapy, which is doing things like restoring (partial) vision to the blind. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-partially-restores-sight-blind-man-180977820/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-gene-therapy-p... Early days still, but we've laid the foundation for a really exciting next decade or so in genomic medicine.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    By the miracle of compounding that's a 33% improvement in 16 years.
fsflover 5y ago
Relevant recent comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29000086.
kiba 5y ago
There's only so many ways to arrange a car.
supernovae 5y ago
I still beg to differ... The shape of cars is even changing... We have Cyber trucks coming out, we have several EV trucks coming out - battry tech is improving, engine performance is still improving, fuel efficiency is only being attacked for political reasons - It's pretty cool that a Jeep - a brick on Wheels has several options of efficiency and power that are major improvements from just a few years from - from a 4xe hybrid to a turbocharged engine to a diesel option. Airplanes? There is a really good Nova episode on the electric race - we're nearing an electric age with airplanes even in commercial aviation - In the next 5-10 years we'll probably have the short hops covered by quiet electric planes - that innovation isn't necessarily paced by science, but by safety, engineering and certification - things we don't want to shortcut since humans are involved in these systems. Hell.. we've been dabbling with autonomous cars too and driver assist and lane assist... I can go on and on
taneq 5y ago
These are examples of technologies maturing, not scientific progress waning.
rmah 5y ago
I started driving in 1982... and I can say with 100% certainty that cars of 2020 may not look all that different from cars of 1980, but under that skin of glossy steel and glass, they are very different. The engines are different (electronic fuel injection, timing and compression ratio monitoring), the transmissions are different (dual clutch, torque vectoring differential), the electronics are massively different, safety features are like out of sci fi (parking cameras, adaptive cruise control, anti-lock brakes, in-dash navigation, ). All that and the quality (fit & finish, reliability, durability) is hugely better. A typical mid-market car of today would have been considered absurdly high quality and uber-luxurious in 1980. The difference is night and day.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I started driving around that time, too... in a 1950 Studebaker. Not only do I agree with everything you say about the difference between cars of today and 30 years ago, the magnitude of advances has accelerated too.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s. That's what I think about with accelerating magnitude of advances. What we have now seems much more like the expected linear progress of 70 years, helped along by the computing revolution, where most of the actual magnitudes of progress has occurred.
    - zardo 5y ago
      > In the 50s, they were predicting that cars would be flying and nuclear powered by the 80s Who is the 'they' in this statement? (I think this may say more about what sort of statements get hyped and remembered, than what reasonable people thought)
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      They predicted flying nuclear cars, but not driving 100,000 miles before the first tune-up.
aaron695 5y ago
100% HN Pick any object and they are insanely different to the 80's. With exponential change since the internet. Look at a clothes peg, look at a screwdriver, look at a drill, look at a wheelchair, look at at fridge and look at a car. A clothes peg 1980 - 2000 a linear amount of change, post internet 2000 - 2020 exponential amount of change. Cars are so different it's hard to know where to start. Seat belts, air bags, paints, roof bars, lights, unleaded fuel, glass, cup holders (yes they matter), seat covers, car smells, locks, just keep on listing parts. Electric. GPS. LOMAX. Is this a troll? You'd be here forever. Some general ideas existed in the 80s (like the idea of rockets existed a thousands years ago), some are new ideas, and some are ideas that have finally gained acceptance, some are ideas that are now affordable, some are ideas that need the material science, some are ideas that need the new processes, some are ideas that need the supply chains. A lot of these marvels are not scientists though. It's commerce and internal company inventors that have changed the clothes peg for the better for instance. Maybe some of the material science is from universities, maybe.
dghlsakjg 5y ago
Cars are vastly different than they were in 1980. Fuel injection, aerodynamics, airbags, driver assist, hybrid and electric drivetrains, etc… the difference between a 1980 Honda Civic and a 2020 civic is massive. In 1980 we weren’t landing self piloting rocket stages on drone ships and reusing them a month later. The engines powering our rockets were completely different chemistry and metallurgy. We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner). Even my washing machine is using about half the energy compared to a washing machine in 1989. Composites, manufacturing, and design are all completely different to how things were in the 80s Just because something has a similar form factor doesn’t mean it is the same. There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things.
- goatlover 5y ago
  > There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things. I still think somewhere between the late 19th century to the middle 20th century had the most impactful change in human history, and things have slowed somewhat in term of overall impact since then, with more gradual improvements. 1881-1951 saw more transformative changes than 1951-2021. As in the world changed more in the previous 70 years. There's still a lot of change going on, and some of it is transformative. But not to the extent of the radical transformations from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, with revolutions in science, technology, economics, trade, transportation, communication and political structures. This might be more true of the developed world than the developing, which probably has seen those transformative changes more in the last 70 years. But in terms of what came to exist, it's hard to beat that period of time.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "We weren’t building hyper efficient carbon fiber airframes with high bypass turbofans (Dreamliner)." Sir Joseph Wilson Swan first created carbon fiber in 1860. Carbon nanotubes were discovered in 1950's. If Dreamliner was built out of carbon nanotube, then I would concede. Like this, meh. "There is a strong argument that the past 40 years has seen some of the fastest progress in the history of the human race when it comes to making things." to test this hypothesis, let's stop arguing about somewhat subjective things, like whether fuel injection is more significant than invention of a nuclear reactor, and think about things we can measure objectively. Think about things we can measure, in the developed world, anything all, from wage growth to energy production to production of steel, by every metric that I have seen, their rate of increase was higher in year 1955 than in year 2015. Feel free to take your pick and show any statistics that disagrees with me.
dntrkv 5y ago
Safety, performance, handling, comfort, ease-of-use, reliability, and efficiency have all significantly improved. The difference in experience of driving a 2020 Tesla Model S vs a 1980 Cadillac Seville is more drastic than that same Cadillac and its 1940s equivalent.
throwaway5752 5y ago
That ignores an enormous about of vehicle safety improvements (roof crush resistance, various collision detection/drift detection, electronic stability control, crumple zones... ad nauseum). That also ignores really impressive improvements in ICE based cars (idle shutdown, cylinder deactivation, reduced pollution). That's not even touching on electric vehicles and self-driving car advances.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  The fact that we are still discussing ICE cars proves my poity. The first electric care was built 120 years ago and London had an Electric Bus company (!) in year 1903.
  - lkbm 5y ago
    Yeah, we still use ICE cars, which unfortunate, but outside of greenhouse gases they're immensely less polluting than they used to be[0]. 1968->2010 reduced NO 99%, CO 95%, and particulate matter 99.92%. (I'm guessing this is looking at engines for PM. Tires/brakes still produce a lot, as I understand it.) The EPA says tailpipe emissions are 98%-99% cleaner, with a 71% overall drop across "six common pollutants" despite miles traveled climbing 114%[1] (They use a few different starting and end points throughout that article.) It's easy to miss how much cleaner modern cars are. [0] https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.html https://andyarthur.org/how-much-cleaner-our-cars-are-today.h... [1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate-change/accomplishments-and-success-air-pollution-transportation https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    The first electric car is unrecognizable from a Tesla Model 3. It is not appropriate to compare them. To me, it sounds just like saying SpaceX and Starlink is fundamentally the same as an R7 + Sputnik. It's a narrow view of progress to ignore substantial incremental improvements over time. While you might not see big external differences between a 1980s car and a 2020 car, a number of engineering professionals working in different disciples would be incredibly impressed.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Electric cars.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Car styling being somewhat static does not imply that Scientific Progress is waning. You could say something similar about clothing styles: comparing clothing styles between 1980 and 1990 there was a lot of difference. Comparing between 2010 and 2020 - not much difference. This has a lot more to do with economics and tastes than scientific progress (or lack thereof).
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Car styling being static is because we are likely very close or at some local optima. That is minimising the drag. In past we may have had some idea, but now we can compute the best shape. Plus there is regulatory pressure that makes some solutions illegal.
bigbillheck 5y ago
> but the one from 2020 and 1980 looks almost the same. Cars have a whole lot fewer right angles these days.
chinchilla2020 5y ago
Cars are massively different. Anyone who works on cars in the garage will know that our modern vehicles are very different than the old carburetor and magneto machines. Drivetrain, running gear, and fuel systems are completely different systems that would be unrecognizable to a 1985 mechanic. This statement sounds like it came from a software engineer who has never washed grease off his hands.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  The claim is not "car of 1980 is same as car of 2020" , the claim is "car of 1980 is much-much closer to the car of 2020 than to the car of 1940's" If the latter is true, then it is evidence thay the statement "we have exponential progress" is false
  - chinchilla2020 5y ago
    There is no way to measure the 'progress' between different types of systems. The manufacturing process is exponentially faster and more efficient between 1980 and 2020. As far as cars go, I would say a 1980 mechanic could work on a 1940 car. A 1980 mechanic could NOT work on a 2020 car. I think alot of non-mechanically-inclined people don't understand that massive revolution that happened in car engines in the 2000s.

epistasis 5y ago

Agreed. I only see my little corner of biology, but I am continually astonished at what is being learned. Often times the pace of learning and the diversification is such that I often don't find out about significant discoveries until a couple years after they happen, and I can still bring the ideas to others years later after that and people will say "holy crap that's amazing, I can't believe I hadn't heard of that." Even scientists can't keep up outside of their area of expertise, and there will be even greater discoveries as different specialties are connected together. Media coverage is terrible, which is just fine because the fields are changing so quickly that who knows where things will be in a few years, ans the invention of understandable lay explanations take a long time to develop. I used to learn about, say, physics from popular media, but I don't get that any more. Presumably some things are going on in those fields. I think there are two effects: the expanse of human knowledge is now so wide that the human mind is having trouble keeping up even compared to a few decades ago, and also the media has changed massively over the last few decades as internet advertising has gutted its funding model.

xmprt 5y ago
Biology is one field that seems to be making massive breakthroughs recently. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of theoretical sciences like Physics haven't have similar breakthroughs in decades.
- robocat 5y ago
  > Physics I believe that the “hard” sciences are much much easier than any soft science, which is one reason they have progressed so far. When you are arguing with a presumably objective reality, one party remains rational. Hard sciences are seen as harder due to university systems, and nothing to do with actual genuine difficulty of the science. Soft sciences are much harder to tease out fact from fiction, and your discoveries often modify reality so even your facts actually change (macro economics). Also for a lot of soft sciences, there are a lot of facts that don’t have to make sense (path dependencies for phenotypes of random mutations).
- native_samples 5y ago

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

> Hell, the only thing that's waning is public perception of science and that seems to be a deliberate political attack. No doubt there are political attacks on science, but it's also true that science is often politicized and also corporatized, both by forces outside of science and those who practice it.

germandiago 5y ago
How come a person that is interested in doing science politizes it? I think the first party interested in doing it is people who live from politics, not from science. At least not people who honestly live from science.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  One reason is money. Government institutions are one of the biggest sources of funding, so if you're a scientist, avoiding anything that could be politically connected can be difficult to do.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Well because they see science as a means to an end (political control), not an end in and of itself. For example, epidemiology has this problem. Epidemiologists routinely publish supposedly scientific papers that are actually policy papers in disguise. Often these papers violate the scientific method in some major way. Nobody seems to care. They get published regardless. Here's an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9#Sec7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9#Sec7 It unashamedly cherry-picks the UK, Denmark and Sweden to try and argue that the UK/Sweden should have adopted Danish policy. Why not study all countries for which data is available? They easily could have done, the data is there. But they don't because if you do that you end up with a null result (no policy makes reliably makes any difference). So they cherry pick in order to be "informative" (as they put it) with respect to policy.

germandiago 5y ago

Agree with your last sentence. Everything is analyzed/used from a political point of view. We need de-polarization. First thing would be to get rid of so much power by these people that rule at their convenience all of us. I really think it would be a better environment for everyone.

derbOac 5y ago

I think "scientific progress is waning" is maybe not the correct phrase. I think it's more like "scientific establishment is waning" or "scientific efficiency" or something like that. The issue isn't so much "is progress being made?" I think that's clearly the case. The question is "are resources being wasted?" or "what are the opportunity costs?" The blog post at the end kind of focuses on turnover of ideas and progress, which I'm not sure is quite the right focus. I think the original question, about how papers are being cited, are good papers being cited enough, are bad papers being cited too much, are papers being cited appropriately, is probably more on-point. I think people have this schema that academic science is a bunch of brilliant people just looking around, and when one of them comes up with a brilliant idea, others recognize it because they're brilliant, and then it floats to the top. What happens in reality is really different: you have a bunch of people who are pretty smart, but not always as brilliant as they are made out to be, and they have their own misunderstandings, blind spots, and biases. Ideas explode in popularity because the field as a whole is ready to understand or accept them, not because of the ideas per se. Re: "political attacks" I think this that's self-inflicted in that the worst part of all of this is the denial of how broken academics is at the moment among the scientific establishment. In any event, the focus of the article isn't really even about typical conservative anti-climate, anti-vaccine research, it's about citation patterns, written by academics, about academics.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Whatever politics touches, it taints. No surprise here. But one of the items you mentioned is food. I sort-of doubt that we have a great progress in food. People seem to be much fatter than ever before. That would suggest a lot of cheap calories, but less quality of food overall. Unless we measure progress in food by raw caloric content, we might actually be regressing. The burden of metabolic diseases is certainly at an all-time high and not a single country in the world managed to reduce it meaningfully again.

brandmeyer 5y ago
You'd be wrong there, too. Genetically engineered crops have boosted food yields to an extent not seen since the Haber-Bosch process.

chinchilla2020 5y ago

How much of that progress is coming from academia? If the tech industry is an example, private companies and open source are doing 99% of the lift.

specialist 5y ago

Yup. We live in an Age of Miracles. ~30 years ago I had a bone marrow transplant. I lived in an isolation bubble for a month. 95% mortality rate in the first year. A year of recovery. Today, treating my original disease is practically an outpatient therapy. To say nothing of immunotherapy replacing chemotherapies. My buddy had a late stage solid organ tumor. Cured with immunotherapy. For a condition that was absolutely fatal just a few months prior. I could go on and on.