11 ms·

Science Is Getting Harder

187 points by Michelangelo11 4y ago

enviclash 4y ago
The 20 years threshold in the analysis might be just related to the preferences of the Nobel committee.
chestertn 4y ago
I tend to use and cite older works because they tend to be better written and reproducible.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Could this just be selection bias? Clearly the older works that people are still talking about are pretty special. This is sort of addressed in the "top cited papers" section. But I think a better metric would be something like "are papers that we'll still be discussing in 20 years still being published." Hard to say until 20 years goes by.
  - chestertn 4y ago
    I am talking about old papers that might not be widely known (i.e., have few citations) but present some useful results that I can use in my research. In my field, the latest papers are a bit "click-baity". They have interesting titles with many trending words but when you read them it is hard to find either a coherent vision or a single result that one can build on top of. Of course, I am generalizing. There is great research being done today and low-quality papers in the past. But it is completely true that the need to publish has distorted the goal of research communication.
0des 4y ago
> A basket of indicators all seem to document a trend similar to what we see with technology. Even as the number of scientists and publications rises substantially, we do not appear to be seeing a concomitant rise in new discoveries that supplant older ones. Science is getting harder. Nothing worth doing is easy. We have cleared the low hanging fruit and can now do the actual work. This is so exciting :) (also I wonder sometimes if as a society we are teaching people less to be critical thinkers, who are not afraid to disagree with the mainstream)
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > Nothing worth doing is easy. Breathing is pretty easy. But more seriously, I think what you said only applies in iterations of revolutions. A new breakthrough (e.g. new physics, new invention) could create a lot more low hanging fruit.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    > I think what you said only applies in iterations of revolutions I think a major problem is ever since general relativity, all of our (existing and potential) new revolutions are very abstract and hard to relate back to human perception. Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Hmm, I don't think that's something we can predict. Someone could have said the same thing before general relativity... in fact, most people did because they thought we were almost done.
      - RC_ITR 4y ago
        I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
        guerrilla 4y ago
        That would be dumb though because it has nothing to do with the original point. Maybe you just feel like arguing.
        RC_ITR 4y ago
        I mean, I would love for you to expand upon how: >Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did. Is unrelated to: >I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system. Maybe to help you, I was using General relativity as a time marker (i.e. it was the first sea-change scientific discovery that had limited impact on day-to-day human life) You then argued that my premise was incorrect, because before general relativity was formalized, people could have believed that all future discoveries were too abstract to affect day-to-day human life. I then argued that you were correct in that general relativity in fact was too abstract to affect humans' day-to-day life. Then you made a personal attack against me. Now we are here.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
I think we need to figure out how to extend human lifespan to allow for experts to continue to grow their knowledge/skills past the 40 year retirement mark to have a greater chance of making more advanced breakthroughs.
- timkam 4y ago
  I think the (hopefully) more realistic action plan would be to change the academic system so that the average academic does not need to spend what amounts to the full official working hours on non-research tasks, latest after their first Post Doc, i.e., ~2 years after reaching academic maturity...
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    Yeah good point. Also, many major historical scientific breakthroughs have been just a smart (usually rich) dude/dudette with a lot of free time and not a member of the conventional 'academic' system. So somehow figure out a way for public to get in on the research instead of government restrictions on who can purchase supplies which limits research to the .0001% who have PhD's. This opens the door to a lot more mind power going into research.
    - kevinventullo 4y ago
      At this point, I think “a lot of free time” is a more limited resource than supplies and lab equipment. Though I may be biased as I come from an extremely non-capital-intensive field (pure math).
- rscho 4y ago
  I see you've not met my advisors. Please no. Old scientists sometimes contribute to push the younger generation forward. In my experience though, most of the time they're a liability, due to their incredibly overdeveloped ego and their deep involvement into politics. I'm an academic MD, so this phenomenon might be more marked than in other fields. See the book "the structure of scientific revolutions".
girishso 4y ago
I have always thought if I was born some 200-300 years back, I would have made many scientific discoveries by myself. Science has indeed got harder.
- pixl97 4y ago
  One common thing seen when looking back on discoveries is many times the 'same' discovery was made independently by many people. The bottleneck was more in 'publishing', that is getting other people to know about what you figured out.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  What is "you?" If I, with my current education, was sent back 200 years... I could probably do OK with inventing stuff (engineering education, so I have some good answers backed by a nice model, much of which I'd have to work backwards to derive because who remembers 200 level engineering classes?). It took Marconi a while to realize that he had to ground the antennas, so there's a pretty good discovery for free. On the other hand, if I was actually born then... I think I'm a pretty clever guy, but not a genius. Someone like me 200 years ago would probably... I dunno, be trusted to fix mill equipment. Or maybe work on watches, depending on where I was born. Maybe I'd be a town pharmacist or something.
- nradov 4y ago
  Up until about 300 years ago it was possible for a wealthy person with plenty of free time to learn literally all of the scientific knowledge in western civilization.
bjornsing 4y ago
Sorry if this sounds elitist to anyone but (I guess it is): When the R&D workforce expands at the rate it has over the last few decades you will invariably see less talented and less talented people entering the field. Also, various forms of overhead will grow with the size of the workforce. As an example about 20 people attended the 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics. How many attend a conference today? With the growing size of the R&D workforce also comes the most destructive force in any human endeavor: politics.
- kkfx 4y ago
  IMVHO less talents are there because less public research where researchers manage themselves is there. R&D on-purpose for making money, product, in a publish-or-perish aka short-time-to-market move simply do not work. Volumes goes up, quality goes down.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Weelll ... the world population in 1911 was approx. 1,8 billion people, growing fourfold since then. One would expect some extra talents to emerge from the extra population. Also, an average Earthling is now much richer than before. A random Korean or Turk of 1911 had much smaller chance to study physics, much less money to even buy a ticket to travel to the Solvay Conference. Both is now easier and cheaper. On the downside, there is a lot more prestigious and well paying jobs today. Instead of tackling physics, best minds of today may be sitting in Facebook, trying to discover yet more ingenious ways to push ads on the rest of us.
  - hamiltonians 4y ago
    which means more competition if the goal is to distinguish onself
- interroboink 4y ago
  > ... the most destructive force in any human endeavor: politics. I imagine you were being tongue-in-cheek, but just to unreasonably latch onto that statement a bit: politics is certainly infuriating, and it's easy to treat it as some unalloyed Bad Thing that we wish would just go away, but politics is essentially communication, and so it can be a good thing, too. The bigger the group, the more communication you need to keep everything (somewhat) together. For instance, on a larger "human endeavor" scale, I am grateful that WW3 has not happened yet — thank you politics (: As with many things, it's a tool that can be used poorly or used well. But the tool itself is not inherently bad or destructive, I don't think. Or maybe it is both inherently good *and* bad, and you can't entirely separate the two.
ajg4 4y ago
So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven research is done in private companies rather than in public academia.
- rscho 4y ago
  And one might be completely wrong about that. Academia and industry research are different in scale, goals and methods. Both have their uses.
- kergonath 4y ago
  Private companies are often quite happy to fund an academic research group for a specific project. They also sometimes use this as a source of pre-vetted, competent future hires for R&D positions. The focus is quite different in private companies and research institutions.
  - hankman86 4y ago
    Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
    - potbelly83 4y ago
      Because aprior it's not really clear what does increase our collective wealth. For example, the whole quantum age (and hence the silicon age), came about from people trying to understand the spectrum of radiation emitted from a heated box. If you spoke to someone at the end of the 19th century they'd probably think this was a waste of time, and tell you that people should be trying to make steam engines more efficient.
    - Fomite 4y ago
      Because this is extremely hard to predict.
    - kergonath 4y ago
growwrkr6 4y ago
When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of effort to bubble up relativity and information theory. When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically easier and “better”? I see complaints about social media brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state populism? I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions on “life is getting harder” seriously or sincerely. It’s just another clickbait trope.
- xwdv 4y ago
  It was definitely easier in the past. I look at a lot of past scientific discoveries and I think I could have easily come up with them if I was in the time period and was educated. Could have made light bulbs, automobiles, telephones, computing machines, etc.
- deleted 4y ago
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- concordDance 4y ago
  Life is getting harder in some fairly concrete and objective ways. Most noticably the number of hours the average person needs to work to be able to buy a house has gone up a lot.
  - growwrkr6 4y ago
    That’s a political problem not a scientific problem. No one wants to tax rich people who are of the age to have benefited from an era of high taxes. We let them pull the ladder up behind them. There is no real reason to follow their orders or coddle their sensibilities. What are they going to do? Instigate a civil war from their Lay Z Boy? 60-70% of the population want to reverse their political policies across the spectrum of contexts. Just do it.
  - xkcd1963 4y ago
    we gotta just build more housing
- 4y ago
hinkley 4y ago
The Scientific Method, as classically defined, is a process of reducing a potential problem space to a single variable and testing it six ways to Sunday to prove to yourself and others that you aren't just imagining things. I don't think it's an accident that physics and chemistry are far ahead of psychology and biology. Both are emergent behaviors and emergent behaviors are notoriously difficult to lock down to a single variable. I've been wondering for a while now if we are just running out of 'simple' problems to test and running out of techniques for simplifying problems. That at some point there is only hard stuff left, even by a contemporary definition of "hard". I just want to state this as context, not as an invitation to tangent into an argument: I think general purpose AI is going to fade from consumer software again, as it has so many times before. But I suspect that some of the tools may find a home in areas where all of the problems are multivariate, and things like advanced techniques in linear algebra can help find signals in the noise when you can't control an environment. I recall years ago someone discovering that chemo works better on an empty stomach, and not just for the obvious reason of not having anything to throw up. Normal cells in "starvation mode" absorb toxins slower, while many tumors ignore this signal. If we can nail down things like "If you have these genes and your serum vitamin D is > 120 and you fast for >8 hours and ingest 20-40 mg of caffeine an hour before infusion, tumor shrinking is increased by 40%" by mining through mountains of telemetry and then working backward from there to find the causal link.
yk 4y ago
Some of these measures are not really convincing, most obvious Nobel prices/paper, the rate of Nobel prices/year is fixed so when the number of papers goes up, the rate of publications that get a Nobel goes down.
- adamc 4y ago
  Yeah, some of the measures were curious, such as unique keywords per 10,000 papers. It isn't clear to me what we should expect if science was doing fine -- more unique keywords total, yes, but per 10,000 papers? Why? In general, I think the paper needs a stronger argument about what a null hypothesis should be and why that is violated.
paulpauper 4y ago
This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like, what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge explosion of research into STEM subjects, from math, to physics, to biology, to computer science, etc.. Tens of billions of people people ever lived since the 1800s, and even just a tiny, tiny fraction of them are doing research, is still a huge amount of output. There just isn't much new ground to break, so this means discoveries will either be much more incremental or require considerably more mental horsepower. Psychology is sorta the opposite: there is no limit to the number of experiments you can run on people or possible associations between causes and effects. It's not like psychology , literature, philosophy, or history has gotten harder over the past century, unlike math, physics, or economics. Sure, there are more advanced statistical methods, but running experiments hasn't gotten harder. This is also why the vast majority of physicists and mathematicians are teachers rather than researchers, and why econ papers have gotten much longer and are full of dense stats methods. There are always going to be new discoveries in biology and medicine, and same for applied math and applied physics, such as engineering or astronomy, but theoretical math and probably also theoretical physics are as saturated as can be.
- btrettel 4y ago
  > This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. This hasn't been my experience in fluid dynamics. There are so many places where one could apply a standard approach that people haven't. It takes some effort and experience to recognize that, but it's still true in my experience. I think what you described is probably true for sexier areas like high-energy physics, but not true for more "boring" areas like turbulent flows. Yes, turbulence is "unsolved", but that doesn't mean that useful information couldn't come from applying standard approaches to particular turbulent flows. The variety of industrially-relevant flows is quite large.
  - 4y ago
aborsy 4y ago
Having been long in academia, what has increased is commercialization of all kinds of science, number of science managers (like modern day billionaires, taking credit for the work actually done by the graduate students and postdocs, growing to be huge), number of politicians putting their names in various papers (I see managers co-authoring on average a paper per week), brutal competition for status and citations, excellent writing and formalism with little or no substance, rise of administrators with large incomes, gangs and tribes accepting each other grants and papers, intensified politics on awards/recognitions/invited talks and control of main publications, people constantly chasing the same topical subjects for grants and industry relevance, and similar activities. The science component has actually decreased in my view. The system and practices sometimes remind me of the Wall Street, with the currency being fame. I don’t think this system will last for too long. The environment is increasingly filled with status hungry people. Balaji has a good prediction on that.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  I agree, modern academia seems to be more about meta-skills of gaming the system and playing politics rather than who is the best at actual research. Probably why so many potential academics just go into private industry >I don’t think this system will last for too long. Balaji has a good prediction on that. link?
  - ralphmelish 4y ago
    I believe he is talking about this thread: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1450324226129338369?lang=en-GB https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1450324226129338369?lang=...
  - aborsy 4y ago
    He addressed this topic in a podcast around two years ago (he has too many podcasts to find it). He was asked about his views on academia vs industry, having been in both himself. He said capable people in academia will gradually realize that it’s better to start companies or do the same work in industry, rather than writing these grants.
- 4y ago
spinaltap 4y ago
Off topic but I think movies and TV shows are suffering the same problem. We have exhausted every way of telling good stories. Nowadays if you want to give the audience "something new" or "something they've never seen before", the only way is to increase craziness and intenseness, which is the opposite of good stories.
- dhosek 4y ago
  I think that's less a question of having ways to tell good stories and more one of a creative space being exhausted. There's a desire in a long-running series to keep raising the stakes as the series progresses, but doing so reaches a point where there's nowhere left to raise the stakes. I think that's been a bit of the problem with Doctor Who in the last few years. As they've kept raising the stakes (right up to the existence of the universe), there's nowhere left to go.
hankman86 4y ago
This should worry everyone. Economic progress is intimately tied to scientific discoveries. And if that’s slowing down, we may still see some business model innovation (think: Uber), but less progress that increases humanity’s collective wealth. Making matters worse, population count in highly educated countries is shrinking, inevitably leading up to fewer brains trying to solve hard problems than before. For now, I don’t see the remaining countries with a growing population making up for this loss in collective cognitive capacity devoted to science. Perhaps we shouldn’t fear universal AI as much as we should cheer it on as the future saviour of science.
- xkcd1963 4y ago
  There have been many great scientists from all around the world, from all kind of backgrounds. Your view is biased.
giantg2 4y ago
I feel like life in general is getting harder. There is less chance of escaping past mistakes, or more chance that a mistake will ruin you. There are more things you have to stay on top of benefits and finance wise. There are more options for many things, which leads to more analysis of what's best. The systems we use every day, from cars to computers, are more complex.
- paulkrush 4y ago
  At the same age? Your comment just sounds like someone that is getting wiser with age. I agree to all you said, but I think it's because I am wiser with age. Is life really getting harder at the same age and at the same opportunity? Man, this is hard question to ask because you are looking at the rear view mirror.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    It seems like an objective increase vs prior generations. Just look at stuff like child anxiety, how much different school is for kids today (more complex), and how many more financial instruments exist today (401k, 403b, IRA, Roth vs std, HSA, FSA, tax complexity, etc.
  - Qem 4y ago
    Well, at my age my parents already had their own house and a couple of children. So I think GP has a point.
- maxFlow 4y ago
  Agree with this. There is a lot more information to process, and it's being generated at greater and greater rates. Ideas that used to be an entire paper in the 1970s have now become an extra paragraph in an undergrad textbook from the 2020s. Further and further specialization in every field--e.g. in SWE: SysAdmin branched out into DevOps and SRE, Data Science branched out into Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, ML Engineering, etc. It seems we have built more efficient tools, but the barrier to entry to use them is taller; and once you can use them they seem to require longer and longer hours of tinkering and supervision. Yet if you don't put in the hours your tools/systems start to decay simply by virtue of progress[1]. Tool-integreation costs are also higher: new tools don't exist in a vacuum but rather need to be adapted and vetted by the host system. Somewhat related, but I believe this is the reason why academia will continue to lag behind industry. Academia has a bias for fundamental knowledge, but as information grows, fundamental knowledge represents a smaller proportion of all knowledge[2]. Anecdotally I have observed a 2-5 year gap between innovation in industry vs academia (CS). Academia often far behind looking to monetize the success of industry via newly minted formulaic programs. This was not always the case, e.g. databases came mostly from academia into industry in the 1970s, but nowadays innovation in the field seems industry-driven. To be fair, perhaps academia has already explored much of the relevant concepts, and it's easier to innovate by way of implementing these same ideas in different programming languages and business models. [1] What are we left with then? More efficient but also less robust systems? Being more efficient, i.e. generating more output, seems to be the chosen trade-off today, when you can afford extra human intervention, but will it ever be the case when we reach an inflexion point and economics favor robustness/stability over output? [2] Not to mention the issues with defining something as fundamental. Should fundamental knowledge be frozen in time, or instead act a sliding window? I.e. when, if at all, does something go from fundamental to obsolete? and when does something go from innovation to fundamental? Is it merely popularity driven?
aaron695 4y ago
paul_deerrack 4y ago
lukasb 4y ago
Not exactly the same question, but in terms of worker productivity, growth is (and has remained) linear: https://twitter.com/ThomasPHI2/status/1516079802184343560?s=20&t=t5KZIQCGtWztIArYi4dycQ https://twitter.com/ThomasPHI2/status/1516079802184343560?s=... I've used as a general theory for why change in the world seems to be slowing down, since although it's stayed constant, it has slowed down on a % basis.
jmyeet 4y ago
This should be apparent to anyone who observes fundamental physics. The 20th century saw massive increases in knowledge with relativity and then quantum mechanics (ie QM/QFT/QCD). There have been accomplishments in the 21st century but a lot of then (eg the Higgs boson) were confirming things theorized 50+ years ago. Despites decades of trying we're still to find a crack in the Standard Model. Yes we've eliminated a lot of options and that's important in the process of elimination but we don't really seem to be any closer to resolving the fundamental contradictions of QM and GR. There's a fun list of unsolved problems in physics [1]. My favourite is the so-called vacuum catastrophe [2] where the predicted (from QFT) and actual vacuum energy diverge by roughly 120 orders of magnitude. At the other end of the spectrum is the magnetic moment prediction vs actual [3] that differ by less than 10 parts per billion. I'm actually losing faith we'll see meaningful progres sin a lot of these areas in my lifetime and I never used to think that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED
analog31 4y ago
I'm a scientist, though not a leading researcher by any means. But when I'm tempted to think that science is hard, I think about the science in the past and what primitive tools they had: No computers before 1950. No electronics before 1900 (all dates give or take). No calculus, etc. Al Khwarizmi had no equations! And when algebra and calculus came out, you practically had to be a philosopher just to grasp them. Now they're taught to schoolchildren.
photochemsyn 4y ago
There are some things to think about with respect to the data analysis presented here: 1) On number of papers published, citation value, etc. There may be an inflation in the numbers of PhD's granted for little more than serving as a PI's lab tech for a few years. That requires a few publications. Often the publication count is inflated by splitting a paper that would be more coherent as a single publication into several publications to fluff a CV. Such papers may not get many citations. This is about politics and careers, not about the quality of science being done. 2) Universities are in the market trying to patent discoveries and license them to big corporations. This is very bad for basic scientific discovery in many fields, as funding is directed away from those fields. Basic science underlies later applied science applications. Shutting off basic research is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, but the administrators want those sweet patent license payments more than anything else. 3) People with the potential to do difficult science and math, but who happen to come from a background where they can't afford college without large loans, are much less likely to go into academic research than in prior eras in the USA when college was less expensive. Many would like to do research but the economics of current education systems are incompatible with that goal. 4) Some areas of research are simply not being funded anymore due to pressure from entrenched interests in areas like energy, pharmaceuticals, etc. Renewable energy research is a threat to fossil fuel interests. One-shot cures for diseases like HIV/AIDS are a threat to the profits of pharmaceutical companies selling lifetime maintenance programs. Research into environmental pollution is a threat to a wide variety of interests, as is research into declining biodiversity. The corporatization and financialization of literally everything is really out of control, and these are the side effects.
skellington 4y ago
Although we could try to use science to prove that science is harder, it seems pretty clear just through intuition that it must on the average be harder. Inventing calculus was amazing, but it's pretty simple compared to what people called advanced math today. Imagine trying to make an interesting discovery in math today compared to adding something to number theory 300 years ago. There might be a lot of space for applied math/physics, but perhaps this is closer to engineering than research though the distinction is often blurry.
sortalongo 4y ago
The thesis of the article is plausible, but I think it’s missing the broader perspective. It makes sense that science picks “low hanging fruit” early on. Then, on average, later discoveries require more effort. But the rate of progress depends on both how much effort a discovery takes AND how much effort is available. The progress of society has made it possible to aim exponentially more resources at solving problems. Computers let us automate things. Medicine & farming mean more humans can do higher value work. Better politics means fewer people dying in wars. So I don’t care if each discovery takes more effort than the last. As long as we get exponentially more resources to go along with it, we can keep creating exponentially more knowledge for a looong time.
Helmut10001 4y ago
We are in need for new metrics beyond citation count or quantity of published papers. A century ago, there was more content in each paper than it is today. This is mainly related to the incentives that exist today to publish, e.g. for getting a raise in salary or getting a getting a new academic position. I like to cite older papers because I can reference them multiple times in a single manuscript, reducing the number of references (e.g. below 60). If I would cite new papers, results are spread across 10 or more publication what was once published in a single paper. I haven't found a fair way to assess quality of papers - I think it depends highly on individual author motivations. If we are able to identify the right patterns among authors' motivations, it may be possible to come up with a better rating system for papers published. Current rating systems focus too much on individual papers/journals, and too less on authors.
- kmmlng 4y ago
  I have a feeling whatever metric you define will just create different problems. The high emphasis on metrics itself is the problem, because quantifying someone's research quality is not at all trivial. To your other point: I get what you mean, and I don't even disagree, but I could also make the exact opposite point. Papers today often are these big, overly structured manuscripts that actually cointain a multitude of ideas so that it can become hard to see what exactly the point of the paper is. In the past, papers often were much more atomic. They presented one idea with some relevant context. There was no need to prove you had surveyed the entire field just to present an idea. No useless context, more relevance, more focus.
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    Yes, I don't have a solution - I should have made that more clear in my original post.
- alecco 4y ago
  20 years ago there were discussions about PageRank applied to citations. But as we all know, it can be manipulated, too (SEO).
scscsc 4y ago
When a field is young, it is simpler to make important discoveries, so in that sense, science is (obviously) getting harder. But most of the graphs can be explained by the sheer number of papers being published. Academics have the perverse incentive to publish as many papers as possible, instead of discovering as many interesting things as possible, because items published is way easier to measure than real progress made. Therefore there is a significant paper inflation problem. People might today write 10 papers with LPUs (least publishable unit) with stuff that would have been a single technical report 30 years back. This is much worse than it sounds, because it affects productivity significantly in subtle ways: it takes effort to publish those 10 papers, it takes effort to read up and review the 10x papers of others, and it takes time to think about LPUs instead of concentrating on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, due to the way the research system is set up, it is not likely things will improve.
julienreszka 4y ago
It could also be overcrowded
LeroyRaz 4y ago
The methodology seems very weak. The author looks at stats but none of the statistics clearly have anything to do with whether science is hard or not. The whole piece is, imo, pure speculation masquerading as analysis.

enviclash 4y ago

The 20 years threshold in the analysis might be just related to the preferences of the Nobel committee.

chestertn 4y ago

I tend to use and cite older works because they tend to be better written and reproducible.

bee_rider 4y ago
Could this just be selection bias? Clearly the older works that people are still talking about are pretty special. This is sort of addressed in the "top cited papers" section. But I think a better metric would be something like "are papers that we'll still be discussing in 20 years still being published." Hard to say until 20 years goes by.
- chestertn 4y ago
  I am talking about old papers that might not be widely known (i.e., have few citations) but present some useful results that I can use in my research. In my field, the latest papers are a bit "click-baity". They have interesting titles with many trending words but when you read them it is hard to find either a coherent vision or a single result that one can build on top of. Of course, I am generalizing. There is great research being done today and low-quality papers in the past. But it is completely true that the need to publish has distorted the goal of research communication.

0des 4y ago

> A basket of indicators all seem to document a trend similar to what we see with technology. Even as the number of scientists and publications rises substantially, we do not appear to be seeing a concomitant rise in new discoveries that supplant older ones. Science is getting harder. Nothing worth doing is easy. We have cleared the low hanging fruit and can now do the actual work. This is so exciting :) (also I wonder sometimes if as a society we are teaching people less to be critical thinkers, who are not afraid to disagree with the mainstream)

guerrilla 4y ago
> Nothing worth doing is easy. Breathing is pretty easy. But more seriously, I think what you said only applies in iterations of revolutions. A new breakthrough (e.g. new physics, new invention) could create a lot more low hanging fruit.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  > I think what you said only applies in iterations of revolutions I think a major problem is ever since general relativity, all of our (existing and potential) new revolutions are very abstract and hard to relate back to human perception. Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Hmm, I don't think that's something we can predict. Someone could have said the same thing before general relativity... in fact, most people did because they thought we were almost done.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        That would be dumb though because it has nothing to do with the original point. Maybe you just feel like arguing.
        RC_ITR 4y ago
        I mean, I would love for you to expand upon how: >Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did. Is unrelated to: >I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system. Maybe to help you, I was using General relativity as a time marker (i.e. it was the first sea-change scientific discovery that had limited impact on day-to-day human life) You then argued that my premise was incorrect, because before general relativity was formalized, people could have believed that all future discoveries were too abstract to affect day-to-day human life. I then argued that you were correct in that general relativity in fact was too abstract to affect humans' day-to-day life. Then you made a personal attack against me. Now we are here.

edmcnulty101 4y ago

I think we need to figure out how to extend human lifespan to allow for experts to continue to grow their knowledge/skills past the 40 year retirement mark to have a greater chance of making more advanced breakthroughs.

timkam 4y ago
I think the (hopefully) more realistic action plan would be to change the academic system so that the average academic does not need to spend what amounts to the full official working hours on non-research tasks, latest after their first Post Doc, i.e., ~2 years after reaching academic maturity...
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Yeah good point. Also, many major historical scientific breakthroughs have been just a smart (usually rich) dude/dudette with a lot of free time and not a member of the conventional 'academic' system. So somehow figure out a way for public to get in on the research instead of government restrictions on who can purchase supplies which limits research to the .0001% who have PhD's. This opens the door to a lot more mind power going into research.
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    At this point, I think “a lot of free time” is a more limited resource than supplies and lab equipment. Though I may be biased as I come from an extremely non-capital-intensive field (pure math).
rscho 4y ago
I see you've not met my advisors. Please no. Old scientists sometimes contribute to push the younger generation forward. In my experience though, most of the time they're a liability, due to their incredibly overdeveloped ego and their deep involvement into politics. I'm an academic MD, so this phenomenon might be more marked than in other fields. See the book "the structure of scientific revolutions".

girishso 4y ago

I have always thought if I was born some 200-300 years back, I would have made many scientific discoveries by myself. Science has indeed got harder.

pixl97 4y ago
One common thing seen when looking back on discoveries is many times the 'same' discovery was made independently by many people. The bottleneck was more in 'publishing', that is getting other people to know about what you figured out.
bee_rider 4y ago
What is "you?" If I, with my current education, was sent back 200 years... I could probably do OK with inventing stuff (engineering education, so I have some good answers backed by a nice model, much of which I'd have to work backwards to derive because who remembers 200 level engineering classes?). It took Marconi a while to realize that he had to ground the antennas, so there's a pretty good discovery for free. On the other hand, if I was actually born then... I think I'm a pretty clever guy, but not a genius. Someone like me 200 years ago would probably... I dunno, be trusted to fix mill equipment. Or maybe work on watches, depending on where I was born. Maybe I'd be a town pharmacist or something.
nradov 4y ago
Up until about 300 years ago it was possible for a wealthy person with plenty of free time to learn literally all of the scientific knowledge in western civilization.

bjornsing 4y ago

Sorry if this sounds elitist to anyone but (I guess it is): When the R&D workforce expands at the rate it has over the last few decades you will invariably see less talented and less talented people entering the field. Also, various forms of overhead will grow with the size of the workforce. As an example about 20 people attended the 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics. How many attend a conference today? With the growing size of the R&D workforce also comes the most destructive force in any human endeavor: politics.

kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO less talents are there because less public research where researchers manage themselves is there. R&D on-purpose for making money, product, in a publish-or-perish aka short-time-to-market move simply do not work. Volumes goes up, quality goes down.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Weelll ... the world population in 1911 was approx. 1,8 billion people, growing fourfold since then. One would expect some extra talents to emerge from the extra population. Also, an average Earthling is now much richer than before. A random Korean or Turk of 1911 had much smaller chance to study physics, much less money to even buy a ticket to travel to the Solvay Conference. Both is now easier and cheaper. On the downside, there is a lot more prestigious and well paying jobs today. Instead of tackling physics, best minds of today may be sitting in Facebook, trying to discover yet more ingenious ways to push ads on the rest of us.
- hamiltonians 4y ago
  which means more competition if the goal is to distinguish onself
interroboink 4y ago
> ... the most destructive force in any human endeavor: politics. I imagine you were being tongue-in-cheek, but just to unreasonably latch onto that statement a bit: politics is certainly infuriating, and it's easy to treat it as some unalloyed Bad Thing that we wish would just go away, but politics is essentially communication, and so it can be a good thing, too. The bigger the group, the more communication you need to keep everything (somewhat) together. For instance, on a larger "human endeavor" scale, I am grateful that WW3 has not happened yet — thank you politics (: As with many things, it's a tool that can be used poorly or used well. But the tool itself is not inherently bad or destructive, I don't think. Or maybe it is both inherently good *and* bad, and you can't entirely separate the two.

ajg4 4y ago

So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven research is done in private companies rather than in public academia.

rscho 4y ago
And one might be completely wrong about that. Academia and industry research are different in scale, goals and methods. Both have their uses.
kergonath 4y ago
Private companies are often quite happy to fund an academic research group for a specific project. They also sometimes use this as a source of pre-vetted, competent future hires for R&D positions. The focus is quite different in private companies and research institutions.
- hankman86 4y ago
  Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
  - potbelly83 4y ago
    Because aprior it's not really clear what does increase our collective wealth. For example, the whole quantum age (and hence the silicon age), came about from people trying to understand the spectrum of radiation emitted from a heated box. If you spoke to someone at the end of the 19th century they'd probably think this was a waste of time, and tell you that people should be trying to make steam engines more efficient.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    Because this is extremely hard to predict.
  - kergonath 4y ago

growwrkr6 4y ago

When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of effort to bubble up relativity and information theory. When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically easier and “better”? I see complaints about social media brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state populism? I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions on “life is getting harder” seriously or sincerely. It’s just another clickbait trope.

xwdv 4y ago
It was definitely easier in the past. I look at a lot of past scientific discoveries and I think I could have easily come up with them if I was in the time period and was educated. Could have made light bulbs, automobiles, telephones, computing machines, etc.
deleted 4y ago
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concordDance 4y ago
Life is getting harder in some fairly concrete and objective ways. Most noticably the number of hours the average person needs to work to be able to buy a house has gone up a lot.
- growwrkr6 4y ago
  That’s a political problem not a scientific problem. No one wants to tax rich people who are of the age to have benefited from an era of high taxes. We let them pull the ladder up behind them. There is no real reason to follow their orders or coddle their sensibilities. What are they going to do? Instigate a civil war from their Lay Z Boy? 60-70% of the population want to reverse their political policies across the spectrum of contexts. Just do it.
- xkcd1963 4y ago
  we gotta just build more housing
4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

The Scientific Method, as classically defined, is a process of reducing a potential problem space to a single variable and testing it six ways to Sunday to prove to yourself and others that you aren't just imagining things. I don't think it's an accident that physics and chemistry are far ahead of psychology and biology. Both are emergent behaviors and emergent behaviors are notoriously difficult to lock down to a single variable. I've been wondering for a while now if we are just running out of 'simple' problems to test and running out of techniques for simplifying problems. That at some point there is only hard stuff left, even by a contemporary definition of "hard". I just want to state this as context, not as an invitation to tangent into an argument: I think general purpose AI is going to fade from consumer software again, as it has so many times before. But I suspect that some of the tools may find a home in areas where all of the problems are multivariate, and things like advanced techniques in linear algebra can help find signals in the noise when you can't control an environment. I recall years ago someone discovering that chemo works better on an empty stomach, and not just for the obvious reason of not having anything to throw up. Normal cells in "starvation mode" absorb toxins slower, while many tumors ignore this signal. If we can nail down things like "If you have these genes and your serum vitamin D is > 120 and you fast for >8 hours and ingest 20-40 mg of caffeine an hour before infusion, tumor shrinking is increased by 40%" by mining through mountains of telemetry and then working backward from there to find the causal link.

yk 4y ago

Some of these measures are not really convincing, most obvious Nobel prices/paper, the rate of Nobel prices/year is fixed so when the number of papers goes up, the rate of publications that get a Nobel goes down.

adamc 4y ago
Yeah, some of the measures were curious, such as unique keywords per 10,000 papers. It isn't clear to me what we should expect if science was doing fine -- more unique keywords total, yes, but per 10,000 papers? Why? In general, I think the paper needs a stronger argument about what a null hypothesis should be and why that is violated.

paulpauper 4y ago

This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like, what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge explosion of research into STEM subjects, from math, to physics, to biology, to computer science, etc.. Tens of billions of people people ever lived since the 1800s, and even just a tiny, tiny fraction of them are doing research, is still a huge amount of output. There just isn't much new ground to break, so this means discoveries will either be much more incremental or require considerably more mental horsepower. Psychology is sorta the opposite: there is no limit to the number of experiments you can run on people or possible associations between causes and effects. It's not like psychology , literature, philosophy, or history has gotten harder over the past century, unlike math, physics, or economics. Sure, there are more advanced statistical methods, but running experiments hasn't gotten harder. This is also why the vast majority of physicists and mathematicians are teachers rather than researchers, and why econ papers have gotten much longer and are full of dense stats methods. There are always going to be new discoveries in biology and medicine, and same for applied math and applied physics, such as engineering or astronomy, but theoretical math and probably also theoretical physics are as saturated as can be.

btrettel 4y ago
> This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. This hasn't been my experience in fluid dynamics. There are so many places where one could apply a standard approach that people haven't. It takes some effort and experience to recognize that, but it's still true in my experience. I think what you described is probably true for sexier areas like high-energy physics, but not true for more "boring" areas like turbulent flows. Yes, turbulence is "unsolved", but that doesn't mean that useful information couldn't come from applying standard approaches to particular turbulent flows. The variety of industrially-relevant flows is quite large.
- 4y ago

aborsy 4y ago

Having been long in academia, what has increased is commercialization of all kinds of science, number of science managers (like modern day billionaires, taking credit for the work actually done by the graduate students and postdocs, growing to be huge), number of politicians putting their names in various papers (I see managers co-authoring on average a paper per week), brutal competition for status and citations, excellent writing and formalism with little or no substance, rise of administrators with large incomes, gangs and tribes accepting each other grants and papers, intensified politics on awards/recognitions/invited talks and control of main publications, people constantly chasing the same topical subjects for grants and industry relevance, and similar activities. The science component has actually decreased in my view. The system and practices sometimes remind me of the Wall Street, with the currency being fame. I don’t think this system will last for too long. The environment is increasingly filled with status hungry people. Balaji has a good prediction on that.

ren_engineer 4y ago
I agree, modern academia seems to be more about meta-skills of gaming the system and playing politics rather than who is the best at actual research. Probably why so many potential academics just go into private industry >I don’t think this system will last for too long. Balaji has a good prediction on that. link?
- ralphmelish 4y ago
  I believe he is talking about this thread: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1450324226129338369?lang=en-GB https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1450324226129338369?lang=...
- aborsy 4y ago
  He addressed this topic in a podcast around two years ago (he has too many podcasts to find it). He was asked about his views on academia vs industry, having been in both himself. He said capable people in academia will gradually realize that it’s better to start companies or do the same work in industry, rather than writing these grants.
4y ago

spinaltap 4y ago

Off topic but I think movies and TV shows are suffering the same problem. We have exhausted every way of telling good stories. Nowadays if you want to give the audience "something new" or "something they've never seen before", the only way is to increase craziness and intenseness, which is the opposite of good stories.

dhosek 4y ago
I think that's less a question of having ways to tell good stories and more one of a creative space being exhausted. There's a desire in a long-running series to keep raising the stakes as the series progresses, but doing so reaches a point where there's nowhere left to raise the stakes. I think that's been a bit of the problem with Doctor Who in the last few years. As they've kept raising the stakes (right up to the existence of the universe), there's nowhere left to go.

hankman86 4y ago

This should worry everyone. Economic progress is intimately tied to scientific discoveries. And if that’s slowing down, we may still see some business model innovation (think: Uber), but less progress that increases humanity’s collective wealth. Making matters worse, population count in highly educated countries is shrinking, inevitably leading up to fewer brains trying to solve hard problems than before. For now, I don’t see the remaining countries with a growing population making up for this loss in collective cognitive capacity devoted to science. Perhaps we shouldn’t fear universal AI as much as we should cheer it on as the future saviour of science.

xkcd1963 4y ago
There have been many great scientists from all around the world, from all kind of backgrounds. Your view is biased.

giantg2 4y ago

I feel like life in general is getting harder. There is less chance of escaping past mistakes, or more chance that a mistake will ruin you. There are more things you have to stay on top of benefits and finance wise. There are more options for many things, which leads to more analysis of what's best. The systems we use every day, from cars to computers, are more complex.

paulkrush 4y ago
At the same age? Your comment just sounds like someone that is getting wiser with age. I agree to all you said, but I think it's because I am wiser with age. Is life really getting harder at the same age and at the same opportunity? Man, this is hard question to ask because you are looking at the rear view mirror.
- giantg2 4y ago
  It seems like an objective increase vs prior generations. Just look at stuff like child anxiety, how much different school is for kids today (more complex), and how many more financial instruments exist today (401k, 403b, IRA, Roth vs std, HSA, FSA, tax complexity, etc.
- Qem 4y ago
  Well, at my age my parents already had their own house and a couple of children. So I think GP has a point.
maxFlow 4y ago
Agree with this. There is a lot more information to process, and it's being generated at greater and greater rates. Ideas that used to be an entire paper in the 1970s have now become an extra paragraph in an undergrad textbook from the 2020s. Further and further specialization in every field--e.g. in SWE: SysAdmin branched out into DevOps and SRE, Data Science branched out into Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, ML Engineering, etc. It seems we have built more efficient tools, but the barrier to entry to use them is taller; and once you can use them they seem to require longer and longer hours of tinkering and supervision. Yet if you don't put in the hours your tools/systems start to decay simply by virtue of progress[1]. Tool-integreation costs are also higher: new tools don't exist in a vacuum but rather need to be adapted and vetted by the host system. Somewhat related, but I believe this is the reason why academia will continue to lag behind industry. Academia has a bias for fundamental knowledge, but as information grows, fundamental knowledge represents a smaller proportion of all knowledge[2]. Anecdotally I have observed a 2-5 year gap between innovation in industry vs academia (CS). Academia often far behind looking to monetize the success of industry via newly minted formulaic programs. This was not always the case, e.g. databases came mostly from academia into industry in the 1970s, but nowadays innovation in the field seems industry-driven. To be fair, perhaps academia has already explored much of the relevant concepts, and it's easier to innovate by way of implementing these same ideas in different programming languages and business models. [1] What are we left with then? More efficient but also less robust systems? Being more efficient, i.e. generating more output, seems to be the chosen trade-off today, when you can afford extra human intervention, but will it ever be the case when we reach an inflexion point and economics favor robustness/stability over output? [2] Not to mention the issues with defining something as fundamental. Should fundamental knowledge be frozen in time, or instead act a sliding window? I.e. when, if at all, does something go from fundamental to obsolete? and when does something go from innovation to fundamental? Is it merely popularity driven?

aaron695 4y ago

paul_deerrack 4y ago

lukasb 4y ago

Not exactly the same question, but in terms of worker productivity, growth is (and has remained) linear: https://twitter.com/ThomasPHI2/status/1516079802184343560?s=20&t=t5KZIQCGtWztIArYi4dycQ https://twitter.com/ThomasPHI2/status/1516079802184343560?s=... I've used as a general theory for why change in the world seems to be slowing down, since although it's stayed constant, it has slowed down on a % basis.

jmyeet 4y ago

This should be apparent to anyone who observes fundamental physics. The 20th century saw massive increases in knowledge with relativity and then quantum mechanics (ie QM/QFT/QCD). There have been accomplishments in the 21st century but a lot of then (eg the Higgs boson) were confirming things theorized 50+ years ago. Despites decades of trying we're still to find a crack in the Standard Model. Yes we've eliminated a lot of options and that's important in the process of elimination but we don't really seem to be any closer to resolving the fundamental contradictions of QM and GR. There's a fun list of unsolved problems in physics [1]. My favourite is the so-called vacuum catastrophe [2] where the predicted (from QFT) and actual vacuum energy diverge by roughly 120 orders of magnitude. At the other end of the spectrum is the magnetic moment prediction vs actual [3] that differ by less than 10 parts per billion. I'm actually losing faith we'll see meaningful progres sin a lot of these areas in my lifetime and I never used to think that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED

analog31 4y ago

I'm a scientist, though not a leading researcher by any means. But when I'm tempted to think that science is hard, I think about the science in the past and what primitive tools they had: No computers before 1950. No electronics before 1900 (all dates give or take). No calculus, etc. Al Khwarizmi had no equations! And when algebra and calculus came out, you practically had to be a philosopher just to grasp them. Now they're taught to schoolchildren.

photochemsyn 4y ago

There are some things to think about with respect to the data analysis presented here: 1) On number of papers published, citation value, etc. There may be an inflation in the numbers of PhD's granted for little more than serving as a PI's lab tech for a few years. That requires a few publications. Often the publication count is inflated by splitting a paper that would be more coherent as a single publication into several publications to fluff a CV. Such papers may not get many citations. This is about politics and careers, not about the quality of science being done. 2) Universities are in the market trying to patent discoveries and license them to big corporations. This is very bad for basic scientific discovery in many fields, as funding is directed away from those fields. Basic science underlies later applied science applications. Shutting off basic research is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, but the administrators want those sweet patent license payments more than anything else. 3) People with the potential to do difficult science and math, but who happen to come from a background where they can't afford college without large loans, are much less likely to go into academic research than in prior eras in the USA when college was less expensive. Many would like to do research but the economics of current education systems are incompatible with that goal. 4) Some areas of research are simply not being funded anymore due to pressure from entrenched interests in areas like energy, pharmaceuticals, etc. Renewable energy research is a threat to fossil fuel interests. One-shot cures for diseases like HIV/AIDS are a threat to the profits of pharmaceutical companies selling lifetime maintenance programs. Research into environmental pollution is a threat to a wide variety of interests, as is research into declining biodiversity. The corporatization and financialization of literally everything is really out of control, and these are the side effects.

skellington 4y ago

Although we could try to use science to prove that science is harder, it seems pretty clear just through intuition that it must on the average be harder. Inventing calculus was amazing, but it's pretty simple compared to what people called advanced math today. Imagine trying to make an interesting discovery in math today compared to adding something to number theory 300 years ago. There might be a lot of space for applied math/physics, but perhaps this is closer to engineering than research though the distinction is often blurry.

sortalongo 4y ago

The thesis of the article is plausible, but I think it’s missing the broader perspective. It makes sense that science picks “low hanging fruit” early on. Then, on average, later discoveries require more effort. But the rate of progress depends on both how much effort a discovery takes AND how much effort is available. The progress of society has made it possible to aim exponentially more resources at solving problems. Computers let us automate things. Medicine & farming mean more humans can do higher value work. Better politics means fewer people dying in wars. So I don’t care if each discovery takes more effort than the last. As long as we get exponentially more resources to go along with it, we can keep creating exponentially more knowledge for a looong time.

Helmut10001 4y ago

We are in need for new metrics beyond citation count or quantity of published papers. A century ago, there was more content in each paper than it is today. This is mainly related to the incentives that exist today to publish, e.g. for getting a raise in salary or getting a getting a new academic position. I like to cite older papers because I can reference them multiple times in a single manuscript, reducing the number of references (e.g. below 60). If I would cite new papers, results are spread across 10 or more publication what was once published in a single paper. I haven't found a fair way to assess quality of papers - I think it depends highly on individual author motivations. If we are able to identify the right patterns among authors' motivations, it may be possible to come up with a better rating system for papers published. Current rating systems focus too much on individual papers/journals, and too less on authors.

kmmlng 4y ago
I have a feeling whatever metric you define will just create different problems. The high emphasis on metrics itself is the problem, because quantifying someone's research quality is not at all trivial. To your other point: I get what you mean, and I don't even disagree, but I could also make the exact opposite point. Papers today often are these big, overly structured manuscripts that actually cointain a multitude of ideas so that it can become hard to see what exactly the point of the paper is. In the past, papers often were much more atomic. They presented one idea with some relevant context. There was no need to prove you had surveyed the entire field just to present an idea. No useless context, more relevance, more focus.
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  Yes, I don't have a solution - I should have made that more clear in my original post.
alecco 4y ago
20 years ago there were discussions about PageRank applied to citations. But as we all know, it can be manipulated, too (SEO).

scscsc 4y ago

When a field is young, it is simpler to make important discoveries, so in that sense, science is (obviously) getting harder. But most of the graphs can be explained by the sheer number of papers being published. Academics have the perverse incentive to publish as many papers as possible, instead of discovering as many interesting things as possible, because items published is way easier to measure than real progress made. Therefore there is a significant paper inflation problem. People might today write 10 papers with LPUs (least publishable unit) with stuff that would have been a single technical report 30 years back. This is much worse than it sounds, because it affects productivity significantly in subtle ways: it takes effort to publish those 10 papers, it takes effort to read up and review the 10x papers of others, and it takes time to think about LPUs instead of concentrating on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, due to the way the research system is set up, it is not likely things will improve.

julienreszka 4y ago

It could also be overcrowded

LeroyRaz 4y ago

The methodology seems very weak. The author looks at stats but none of the statistics clearly have anything to do with whether science is hard or not. The whole piece is, imo, pure speculation masquerading as analysis.