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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 pap

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.

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.