I agree that scientists are discovering less, but I don't think it's mostly about their incentives. Instead, I think it's that there is much less low-hanging fr

I agree that scientists are discovering less, but I don't think it's mostly about their incentives. Instead, I think it's that there is much less low-hanging fruit than there used to be, and a lot more people trying to pick what fruit there is. You can see the difference by looking at new fields that have recently stumbled upon something very different, like all the progress recently in deep learning. More in this general direction: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-...