4 ms·
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
by 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 agoIMVHO 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 agoWeelll ... 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 agowhich 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.
- concordDance 4y agoGiven the word "politics" has many different meanings you need to state your definition here if you want people to understand your post
- the_af 4y agoI think the context is pretty clear in both comments. "Politics" in this context means a form of communication, consensus and decision making in a group.
- bee_rider 4y agoThe first comment was clearly talking about the internal, institutional politics of things like professional societies, academic fields, etc, while if we look at the other branch of this particular subthread we have a pretty long post about things like the media and international politics. Perhaps it is impossible to nip talk of the latter type of politics in the bud, though.
- interroboink 4y agoI'm not especially convinced that the two are entirely separate. It feels to me that they sprout from the same source, more or less. I suppose it depends on where you want to draw a line around a very fuzzy word ("politics"). My intent in bringing up the issue originally was that when you have larger groups of people interacting, you get larger-scale patterns of communication. People form groups and sub-groups; people give support to groups based on trust of that group or one of its representatives, rather than getting to know everyone individually; higher-level conglomerations of ideals form because tracking every issue in detail is too much, etc. There's a lot of gunk that comes along with that. But it is not all bad, or destructive. It can even be _con_structive. I think that generally applies to institutional politics as well as national/world politics.
- _jal 4y agoPolitics happens via communication, but what differentiates politics is that it is mostly about resource allocation. People don't (usually) get pissed off about idle chitchat. They do when their project is spiked.
- mikkergp 4y agoBut it seems like if you're making the argument that science is getting harder, then raw numbers should matter more than percentages. From the article: "I’m claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past". So, unless you're arguing that there aren't an equivalent 20 people alive today as prestigious as the 20 people that went to the 1911 Solvay conference. Then the fact that there are greater percentage of less talented people now, shouldn't make it harder for the greater number of talented people to make "discoveries <of> comparable impact". (With some caveats of course.)
- bjornsing 4y agoI think discoveries of equivalent impact are being made, but not in physics laboratories. Looking back at the current century I think it will be clear that the most impactful discoveries / inventions were related to information processing and that they were made in the private sector.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- groffee 4y ago> 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics The Solvay conference was invite only, but I think your point still stands.
- bjornsing 4y agoYea I know. But I figured the point would stand anyway so used the example. Which 20 people in physics would you even invite today? (Rhetorical question.)