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I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. (To me, the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries

I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. (To me, the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth...) On the subject of incentives in academia - reflecting on my academia run, I've noticed that I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. It was either at the beginning of a several-years position. Or at the very end when I knew that I'm leaving and didn't care anymore. The least productive was the sequence of one-year postdocs - when I was constantly worrying about the next one.

simonsarris 4y ago
> I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. Do you believe the average academic research paper or project written/done today is of the same quality or better as the average in 1980, or 1950?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I can't speak to all science, but I am a CS (cryptography) researcher and routinely read papers from the 1980s. The level of rigor and quality of my field's papers has absolutely improved, by leaps and bounds. The formal definitions in those early papers are often non-existent (and sometimes wrong in retrospect) and the proposed constructions are often much simpler (and sometimes subtly wrong in retrospect.) And the number of papers has increased by at least an order of magnitude. On the flip side, those early papers contain the most fundamental discoveries in our field: you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. It's possible all those researchers were much smarter than we are now. (I grant this!) But there are a lot of absolutely brilliant people I know today. Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much harder.
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much harder. Reminds me of a patent officer who said in 1899 that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
  - dekhn 4y ago
    What's amusing about my field is that while much of the rigor was lost (computational biology in the 90s was very CS-rigorous), what we've learned is that deep networks beat any human features, none of the rigors of chomsky hierarchy really matter to find interesting biology, and you don't even need to know how to differentiate because that's automatic now.
    - ta988 4y ago
      Agreed, all those formally simulated cells and metabolic networks didn't age well.
  - cmontella 4y ago
    > you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. Well, maybe. Sometimes things that are discovered are lost or go completely unnoticed, so progress is not always monotonic. For example, for a long time it was believed that John William Strutt first documented dynamic soaring [1] in birds in the 1800s, but just recently (2018) it was found that actually none other than Leonardo DaVinci documented the phenomena in his notebooks centuries before [2]. People just didn't notice or forgot, despite those documents being some of the most poured over in history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0024 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.002...
    - mmsimanga 4y ago
      Sometimes people just aren't ready for new knowledge or they don't know enough to understand it. I see this when new person enters an industry, healthcare in my case. It takes about a year to understand the nuances between healthcare providers, funders and administrators. I am guessing people read what Leonardo wrote but they just didn't understand the significance.
    - virissimo 4y ago
      Good point. The same thing definitely happens in physics too. For example, people attributed important advances in mathematical physics (such as the mean speed theorem) to Galileo despite them having been already developed extensively in the middle ages.
- quantum_mcts 4y ago
  > quality What do you mean by that? Good writing? Good rigor? Good research work? Have a fundamental discovery? There are not as correlated as one expects.
- seydor 4y ago
  Technically - yes. But it 's just that, a paper. Back then , people were chasing glory, not "the paper" because papers didnt matter, that s why so many of them were too short, unreferenced etc. Science was small and more personal. Now it's an impersonal industry and science is a product. Science gets a lot of underserved respect out of inertia, but it really is a big industry sector now.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  In terms of writing and quality of research methodology, far higher in my experience
- jules 4y ago
  I can only talk about computer science. The research papers in the past would probably not be able to get published in prestigious journals today. They'd need to get expanded from sketchy 8 page papers into very rigorous 25 page papers. I think we've overshot though. With papers in the modern style you need to wade through a lot of cruft to get to the key idea. As for the quality of the ideas...the older papers do win. I think that's because there was more low hanging fruit, but some part of it may be due to an incentive structure that rewards safe bets.
- ta988 4y ago
  This is a trick question. How do you quantify quality of articles? How much new science they created? We can't know that yet. What they provided in term of societal impact? SameThey reproductibility, lot of chemistry and biology from the 50s turned out to be really wrong for example. I would still say that the average quality (in my field), chemistry is lower but just because there is a deluge of really low quality publishers and journals that have no ethics. But if you stay in the major journals of fields, the answer is radically different.
- watwut 4y ago
  1950 did not even had peer review. Peer review as we know it started in 1970.
psi75 4y ago
I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be. Ten papers won't even get you tenure. In terms of metrics, the game is a lot more competitive. I would argue that the bigger problem is that academic science is now consumptive. Think of all those tuitions dollars the universities get because they run a protection racket over (what's left of) the middle class job market. Now consider how terrible the academic job market has been for the past 30 years, and that professors who want even a chance of getting respect basically need to self-fund by getting grants. Lots of money is going in, and how much is coming out? Something, for sure, but is it worth it? Or is it like U.S. healthcare, where we're paying 4x for a not terrible but merely acceptable product? I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. Right, and this kind of opportunity has gone extinct, due to the hypercompetitive culture you get as our society disinvests itself in research and as funding becomes harder to find and more winner-take-all. If the neoliberals have their way, being a professor will just be another next-quarter focused corporate job within ten years.
- wumpus 4y ago
  > If the neoliberals have their way, Not sure where that came from. The NSF provides a lot of 3 or 5 year grants. The science org I work for is mostly funded by 3-5 year grants.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon I feel the same way. I've never been in academia, but everything he said matches the negative incentive structures I've always seen in the corporate world. For the most part, the incentive structures are designed to catch cheaters (or "slackers"), but since actually discovering and creating something is virtually indistinguishable from "slacking", it just doesn't get done.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
> the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth. And this is a very real issue, for instance in physics. It means that if you go for research there, it is likely to be meh. I did my PhD in physics, I was thankfully at a moment where simulations and ML were just starting so I could have fun. There was exactly zero interesting discoveries in nuclear/atomic/particle during my time in academia. And the 40 years before. Compare this with 1090-1950. These years were simply incredible (especially the ones around 1900, to ~1920). You had almost every day discoveries that were shaking the world, and everyone was aware of that. This is not the fault of the scientists, this is just that the world is like this. It is indeed like complaining that there are no more continents, but then the reasonable thing to do it to invest more in teaching, or applied science.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > 1090 1900 yeah?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    1890 actually :) (cannot modify the original post)
elashri 4y ago
My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your are tenured. probably less true for PhD if you don't have ambitious PI. The demand for publications and results that is mainly the way to evaluate you starting from postdoc until tenure promotion is very tense. People usually try to do many things and stretch themselves. sometimes this even lead to burnout and many people leave academia for that adding to the very competitive and low gain opportunities available in most academic field. To be honest, I really think that we have wrong metric. Most importantly, if you try to ignore them even if you get some local support within your group. Good luck getting any fund because funding agencies evaluation have the same problems.
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  > My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your are tenured. Academic researchers spend the majority of their career in tenure or in PhD, with untenured/tenure-track status for only 7-9 years out of a career of, say, 40 years. So one would expect that 75% of academic research time would be spent on "breakthrough topics".
  - kmmlng 4y ago
    Academic researchers who make it to a tenure track position and stick with it for the rest of their career spend the majority of their career in tenure or in PhD. Most do not make it this far because there are fewer positions than applicants.
  - elashri 4y ago
    You will be right under the assumption that all or even most academic careers end up with a tenure. Majority of PhD holders don't end up in that position because the positions available are very limited.
naikrovek 4y ago
> To me, the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth... anyone of any era could claim this. and many did. yet here we are, still discovering things, and not discovering new continents. it is folly to assume that we have discovered everything, or even a small fraction of everything. I think you will find that it is difficult to find someone who has been vetted by a system who would be open to admitting that said system is fundamentally flawed, especially when successful passage through that system grants things that those who have been through it want to have, such as academia does.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the "low-hanging fruit" was already done. We definitely haven't discovered everything, and we're actually making way more discoveries much faster than people back then. But the things which are easy or even "not super hard" to discover have already been discovered. Most of the discoveries require background knowledge or are more "niche" things, because discoveries which are really big and affect everyone are easy to find and going to have everyone searching for them. In fact we could maybe discover a new continent. But it would have to be tiny or underwater or camouflaged or otherwise have some reason that despite having a map of the whole Earth and satellites everywhere, we haven't discovered it yet. When Columbus "discovered" America there weren't nearly as many ships floating around as there are boats/planes/satellites today.
  - ta988 4y ago
    That plus the fact that most discoveries require more people and equipment than ever before.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  > We are not discovering new continents on Earth Meanwhile in Earth... oh, man, this tiny rock in Pluto has exactly the shame shape of Mickey Mouse's dog, call the press!
drnonsense42 4y ago
Literally your post, the top comment on the thread, leads with an unabashed claim that humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences. It’s flabbergasting.
- cgrealy 4y ago
  That is completely inaccurate. They didn't say anything like "humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences". They said that the big obvious discoveries have been discovered. There's very little in physics now that doesn't require thousands of person hours, millions in equipment and unbelievable amounts of computing resource. The stuff that could be discovered by someone working alone has pretty much all been done, because we've already thrown millions of person hours at it. That's not to say there aren't major advances to be made, it's just REALLY HARD.
  - drnonsense42 4y ago
    They absolutely did not say anything about “obvious” discoveries. That is even more ridiculous of a claim. Which major breakthroughs in stem were “obvious”? Or are you speaking from hindsight, where in this brave new world we’re smarter than all previous generations? They also did not say there are major advances but they are “really hard” (your words), they said there are no major advances left (by comparing them to continents, which we’ve already all discovered). There is no other way to interpret their words, unless you believe there are additional continents on earth to discover. Maybe atlantis? The OP is not commenting on individual contributors vs large groups but I will comment on that as I disagree. You are describing the current state of physics (and many other stem fields) and the popular consensus about future advancements. While certainly having hundreds of researchers is necessary on many projects, you have no basis to claim an individual will not make a major breakthrough in the distant future. And frankly, as much as they are necessary, giant labs are strongly encouraged by our current culture. Large profits from monetizing research into products, corporate involvement and funding, staggering bloat in universities, fame-chasing, printing off papers like buzzfeed articles, unprecedented levels of organized fraud in academia… very little of the current culture is conducive to modest, brilliant individual contributors in many fields. You have no idea how the culture will change in science, how much more intelligent and capable people will be than we are in the distant future with natural selection and gene modification, and whether there will be any more breakthroughs by individuals or small groups that will seem “obvious” in hundreds of years. To say otherwise is frankly dogmatic caveman thinking.
carschno 4y ago
> I've noticed that I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. Assuming that this is generally the case (which I do), and given that longer planning horizons have become rare in academia over the past decades, the logical implication does seem to be that productivity in science decreases. How to measure and how to value academic productivity is another interesting question.

simonsarris 4y ago

> I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. Do you believe the average academic research paper or project written/done today is of the same quality or better as the average in 1980, or 1950?

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I can't speak to all science, but I am a CS (cryptography) researcher and routinely read papers from the 1980s. The level of rigor and quality of my field's papers has absolutely improved, by leaps and bounds. The formal definitions in those early papers are often non-existent (and sometimes wrong in retrospect) and the proposed constructions are often much simpler (and sometimes subtly wrong in retrospect.) And the number of papers has increased by at least an order of magnitude. On the flip side, those early papers contain the most fundamental discoveries in our field: you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. It's possible all those researchers were much smarter than we are now. (I grant this!) But there are a lot of absolutely brilliant people I know today. Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much harder.
- amelius 4y ago
  > Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much harder. Reminds me of a patent officer who said in 1899 that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
- dekhn 4y ago
  What's amusing about my field is that while much of the rigor was lost (computational biology in the 90s was very CS-rigorous), what we've learned is that deep networks beat any human features, none of the rigors of chomsky hierarchy really matter to find interesting biology, and you don't even need to know how to differentiate because that's automatic now.
  - ta988 4y ago
    Agreed, all those formally simulated cells and metabolic networks didn't age well.
- cmontella 4y ago
  > you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. Well, maybe. Sometimes things that are discovered are lost or go completely unnoticed, so progress is not always monotonic. For example, for a long time it was believed that John William Strutt first documented dynamic soaring [1] in birds in the 1800s, but just recently (2018) it was found that actually none other than Leonardo DaVinci documented the phenomena in his notebooks centuries before [2]. People just didn't notice or forgot, despite those documents being some of the most poured over in history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0024 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.002...
  - mmsimanga 4y ago
    Sometimes people just aren't ready for new knowledge or they don't know enough to understand it. I see this when new person enters an industry, healthcare in my case. It takes about a year to understand the nuances between healthcare providers, funders and administrators. I am guessing people read what Leonardo wrote but they just didn't understand the significance.
  - virissimo 4y ago
    Good point. The same thing definitely happens in physics too. For example, people attributed important advances in mathematical physics (such as the mean speed theorem) to Galileo despite them having been already developed extensively in the middle ages.
quantum_mcts 4y ago
> quality What do you mean by that? Good writing? Good rigor? Good research work? Have a fundamental discovery? There are not as correlated as one expects.
seydor 4y ago
Technically - yes. But it 's just that, a paper. Back then , people were chasing glory, not "the paper" because papers didnt matter, that s why so many of them were too short, unreferenced etc. Science was small and more personal. Now it's an impersonal industry and science is a product. Science gets a lot of underserved respect out of inertia, but it really is a big industry sector now.
bowsamic 4y ago
In terms of writing and quality of research methodology, far higher in my experience
jules 4y ago
I can only talk about computer science. The research papers in the past would probably not be able to get published in prestigious journals today. They'd need to get expanded from sketchy 8 page papers into very rigorous 25 page papers. I think we've overshot though. With papers in the modern style you need to wade through a lot of cruft to get to the key idea. As for the quality of the ideas...the older papers do win. I think that's because there was more low hanging fruit, but some part of it may be due to an incentive structure that rewards safe bets.
ta988 4y ago
This is a trick question. How do you quantify quality of articles? How much new science they created? We can't know that yet. What they provided in term of societal impact? SameThey reproductibility, lot of chemistry and biology from the 50s turned out to be really wrong for example. I would still say that the average quality (in my field), chemistry is lower but just because there is a deluge of really low quality publishers and journals that have no ethics. But if you stay in the major journals of fields, the answer is radically different.
watwut 4y ago
1950 did not even had peer review. Peer review as we know it started in 1970.

psi75 4y ago

I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be. Ten papers won't even get you tenure. In terms of metrics, the game is a lot more competitive. I would argue that the bigger problem is that academic science is now consumptive. Think of all those tuitions dollars the universities get because they run a protection racket over (what's left of) the middle class job market. Now consider how terrible the academic job market has been for the past 30 years, and that professors who want even a chance of getting respect basically need to self-fund by getting grants. Lots of money is going in, and how much is coming out? Something, for sure, but is it worth it? Or is it like U.S. healthcare, where we're paying 4x for a not terrible but merely acceptable product? I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. Right, and this kind of opportunity has gone extinct, due to the hypercompetitive culture you get as our society disinvests itself in research and as funding becomes harder to find and more winner-take-all. If the neoliberals have their way, being a professor will just be another next-quarter focused corporate job within ten years.

wumpus 4y ago
> If the neoliberals have their way, Not sure where that came from. The NSF provides a lot of 3 or 5 year grants. The science org I work for is mostly funded by 3-5 year grants.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon I feel the same way. I've never been in academia, but everything he said matches the negative incentive structures I've always seen in the corporate world. For the most part, the incentive structures are designed to catch cheaters (or "slackers"), but since actually discovering and creating something is virtually indistinguishable from "slacking", it just doesn't get done.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

> the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth. And this is a very real issue, for instance in physics. It means that if you go for research there, it is likely to be meh. I did my PhD in physics, I was thankfully at a moment where simulations and ML were just starting so I could have fun. There was exactly zero interesting discoveries in nuclear/atomic/particle during my time in academia. And the 40 years before. Compare this with 1090-1950. These years were simply incredible (especially the ones around 1900, to ~1920). You had almost every day discoveries that were shaking the world, and everyone was aware of that. This is not the fault of the scientists, this is just that the world is like this. It is indeed like complaining that there are no more continents, but then the reasonable thing to do it to invest more in teaching, or applied science.

justinclift 4y ago
> 1090 1900 yeah?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  1890 actually :) (cannot modify the original post)

elashri 4y ago

My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your are tenured. probably less true for PhD if you don't have ambitious PI. The demand for publications and results that is mainly the way to evaluate you starting from postdoc until tenure promotion is very tense. People usually try to do many things and stretch themselves. sometimes this even lead to burnout and many people leave academia for that adding to the very competitive and low gain opportunities available in most academic field. To be honest, I really think that we have wrong metric. Most importantly, if you try to ignore them even if you get some local support within your group. Good luck getting any fund because funding agencies evaluation have the same problems.

warkdarrior 4y ago
> My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your are tenured. Academic researchers spend the majority of their career in tenure or in PhD, with untenured/tenure-track status for only 7-9 years out of a career of, say, 40 years. So one would expect that 75% of academic research time would be spent on "breakthrough topics".
- kmmlng 4y ago
  Academic researchers who make it to a tenure track position and stick with it for the rest of their career spend the majority of their career in tenure or in PhD. Most do not make it this far because there are fewer positions than applicants.
- elashri 4y ago
  You will be right under the assumption that all or even most academic careers end up with a tenure. Majority of PhD holders don't end up in that position because the positions available are very limited.

naikrovek 4y ago

> To me, the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth... anyone of any era could claim this. and many did. yet here we are, still discovering things, and not discovering new continents. it is folly to assume that we have discovered everything, or even a small fraction of everything. I think you will find that it is difficult to find someone who has been vetted by a system who would be open to admitting that said system is fundamentally flawed, especially when successful passage through that system grants things that those who have been through it want to have, such as academia does.

armchairhacker 4y ago
I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the "low-hanging fruit" was already done. We definitely haven't discovered everything, and we're actually making way more discoveries much faster than people back then. But the things which are easy or even "not super hard" to discover have already been discovered. Most of the discoveries require background knowledge or are more "niche" things, because discoveries which are really big and affect everyone are easy to find and going to have everyone searching for them. In fact we could maybe discover a new continent. But it would have to be tiny or underwater or camouflaged or otherwise have some reason that despite having a map of the whole Earth and satellites everywhere, we haven't discovered it yet. When Columbus "discovered" America there weren't nearly as many ships floating around as there are boats/planes/satellites today.
- ta988 4y ago
  That plus the fact that most discoveries require more people and equipment than ever before.
pvaldes 4y ago
> We are not discovering new continents on Earth Meanwhile in Earth... oh, man, this tiny rock in Pluto has exactly the shame shape of Mickey Mouse's dog, call the press!

drnonsense42 4y ago

Literally your post, the top comment on the thread, leads with an unabashed claim that humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences. It’s flabbergasting.

cgrealy 4y ago
That is completely inaccurate. They didn't say anything like "humans have already discovered all of the “major advances” in the sciences". They said that the big obvious discoveries have been discovered. There's very little in physics now that doesn't require thousands of person hours, millions in equipment and unbelievable amounts of computing resource. The stuff that could be discovered by someone working alone has pretty much all been done, because we've already thrown millions of person hours at it. That's not to say there aren't major advances to be made, it's just REALLY HARD.
- drnonsense42 4y ago
  They absolutely did not say anything about “obvious” discoveries. That is even more ridiculous of a claim. Which major breakthroughs in stem were “obvious”? Or are you speaking from hindsight, where in this brave new world we’re smarter than all previous generations? They also did not say there are major advances but they are “really hard” (your words), they said there are no major advances left (by comparing them to continents, which we’ve already all discovered). There is no other way to interpret their words, unless you believe there are additional continents on earth to discover. Maybe atlantis? The OP is not commenting on individual contributors vs large groups but I will comment on that as I disagree. You are describing the current state of physics (and many other stem fields) and the popular consensus about future advancements. While certainly having hundreds of researchers is necessary on many projects, you have no basis to claim an individual will not make a major breakthrough in the distant future. And frankly, as much as they are necessary, giant labs are strongly encouraged by our current culture. Large profits from monetizing research into products, corporate involvement and funding, staggering bloat in universities, fame-chasing, printing off papers like buzzfeed articles, unprecedented levels of organized fraud in academia… very little of the current culture is conducive to modest, brilliant individual contributors in many fields. You have no idea how the culture will change in science, how much more intelligent and capable people will be than we are in the distant future with natural selection and gene modification, and whether there will be any more breakthroughs by individuals or small groups that will seem “obvious” in hundreds of years. To say otherwise is frankly dogmatic caveman thinking.

carschno 4y ago

> I've noticed that I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. Assuming that this is generally the case (which I do), and given that longer planning horizons have become rare in academia over the past decades, the logical implication does seem to be that productivity in science decreases. How to measure and how to value academic productivity is another interesting question.