12 ms·

Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

75 points by jeremylevy 4y ago

kickout 4y ago
And yet I've been trying to find $$ for one of the most disruptive agriculture technologies that could propel to sustainable ag to acreage unheard of. Nobody wants to take a chance. shrug
nafeen 4y ago
While there is no doubt that 'CD Index' has been declining over time, it is debatable whether it truly indicates a drop in 'disruption'. Let's take AI for example. Research papers that were published in 2019-20 have become obsolete within a year or less, and consequently get cited less and less, as more recent and derivative papers introduced better models. Does that make the older papers any less 'disruptive'? No!
version_five 4y ago
The first half of the 20th century had a lot of "low hanging fruit" in physics and chemistry that basically came out of the enlightenment. Things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. I wouldn't guess that's always the steady state for research. The war may have had something to do with it too, I know a lot of advances (like radio / microwave engineering) have roots in the war efforts. But I suspect it's more of just a dry spell because we pushed forward in the 18th-20th century and ran out of ideas
- nafeen 4y ago
  Wouldn't we be presented with another bout of "low hanging fruits" in the second half of 21st century when tectonic shifts happen in quantum computing, superconductivity, ai, ar/vr/mr etc.?
morphle 4y ago
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
- feraloink 4y ago
  Good article. Interesting finding at the very end: >Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. So... maybe this is because having more people doing scientific research doesn't yield more breakthroughs. More people doing scientific research DOES yield more incremental achievements, as the study found, i.e. word frequency analysis showing more occurrences of "improve", "expand", "extend".
  - snordgren 4y ago
    The number of highly disruptive studies remaining the same seems impressive enough to me. I expect diminishing returns to be the long-term norm in science. The low hanging fruit get picked first, and every breakthrough means one more concept that the next generation of researchers have to learn and incorporate into their work.
morphle 4y ago
Alan Kay wrote an essay on how large scientific breakthroughs where done [1], further discussed in [2]. The funders and the systems of funding of science are to blame for the deciline, for example they won't fund problem finding anymore. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE
- urthor 4y ago
  Alan Kay's advocacy for funding science is a truly eminent life's work.
asdff 4y ago
I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what is called for by grant funding agencies for their own research initiatives. If you want disruptive science, fund it then. That's all everyone wants to do in science, but the bills need to be payed somehow, so you play the game the funding agencies want you to play.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Topolomancer 4y ago
  Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants, even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas. I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that; sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come back with lessons learned.
- seydor 4y ago
  The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? It almost seems as a new model would take the world by storm, but it doesnt seem to arise. Even private research often falls for the same pitfalls, like how Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
zitstif 4y ago
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midoridensha 4y ago
If you're really smart, enough to make disruptive scientific discoveries, why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more? If you stay in science, you'll earn peanuts and not even have any career stability since the academic track is so bad these days.
- urthor 4y ago
  That's arguably an even greater point than anyone realises. All these geniuses... people are giving them jobs!
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  "why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more?" Because it's boring and depressing. And one thing money can't buy, unless you're solely interested in accumulating money, is satisfaction with your life. Obviously not true for everyone, but we've got 8.8 million "scientists" (I'm not sure what they mean by the word). https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide-reaches-88m-global-research-spending-grows-faster-economy https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide... Most scientists don't work in academia. Some of those who do have stable jobs as staff instead of faculty positions. And this guy did it in his spare time while working at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889
karmakurtisaani 4y ago
From my training as a computer scientist, I am used to the idea that some problems are easy and some are plainly intractable. Perhaps that's also true in science and technology, and we are starting to exhaust all the easy directions. Still, many less techy problems remain, at least climate change and wealth inequality come to mind. Perhaps we'll see the biggest innovations in solving those in the future.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  As a software developer, I’d want to see a rewrite to clean up the legacy bodges before we conclude we can’t add more. Also, wealth inequality isn’t a problem: how wealthy the people at the bottom are is. Wealth inequality is associated with fewer poor people and a higher standard of living because wealth inequality requires a wealthy society. What exactly are you “fixing”?
  - karmakurtisaani 4y ago
    I'm not suggesting we can't add more, rather, that I find it conceivable that there is a barrier of technological progress that we can approach, but never reach. So the pace of progress will slow down. Concerning wealth inequality, I do think it is a fundamental problem of society if a fraction of a percentage controls majority of the available resources even if the lowest half has their immediate needs met, but we can disagree on that all day and arrive nowhere.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      The Pareto principle is incredibly harsh, but such hierarchies seem to form naturally. My concern with your view is that in trying to “squash the gap”, you end up doing so by making everyone poorer — and society worse overall. Happy to agree to disagree; hopefully we can consider each other’s perspectives in crafting policies.
      - karmakurtisaani 4y ago
        It's indeed not an easy issue, which is why I think there could still be lots of innovations to made in that space in terms of economics, politics, social sciences etc.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I wonder if this is to do with major vs minor breakthrough. Take physics. As I read it, modern fundamental physics is mostly some combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are both early 20th century inventions. They weren't necessarily genius in particular in-depth analysis, rather they were genius new concepts that created a whole new blank canvas to fill in. What did the field look like just before them? I always forget the details, but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? I wonder if it looked similarly uninnovative. The canvas they had was full, and they needed a new canvas for true innovation. Now the thing is, I think true disruption, like GR and quantum physics, is not limited by the number of postdocs, but by truly genius insights. Einstein wasn't even working as an academic when he came up with Special Relativity. So the number of papers written isn't a proxy for pace of revolution. Not to mention, since number of published papers has become a target, it has become useless as a measure of progress.
- ablatt89 4y ago
  I agree, I think we're discounting genius insight as the primary driver of innovation and ground breaking science, and we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame or a time frame even within a lifespan. I think perhaps we've also partially lost the meaning of ground breaking research given the constant news articles on "ground breaking science" and the constant overinflation and exaggeration of one's papers and achievements.
  - buran77 4y ago
    A lot of the obvious questions on the table were answered, even without an answer we at least have the question. Today true, groundbreaking innovation needs someone to identify the new questions. It's like doing science in a bubble and you need someone to take a massive new one and merge it into our own. Right now we're not opening wide doors, but just refining and adding almost imperceptibly to an already huge bubble. We're grinding in the game because we can't find the boss on the map or can't beat it yet. Besides the current structure of research and the known weaknesses (misaligned incentives, funding issues, etc.) science in general today ran out of low hanging fruit. The last unexplored or unanswered riddles may need prerequisites that are outside of the current boundaries so someone needs to open the door do a vast new bubble that has more relatively low hanging fruit. Also humans probably (don't quote me on that :) ) can't come up with any new questions or answers unless they are already at the edge of that bubble. And they each see and understand a smaller patch of that surface as it expanded. Stumbling onto new thinks is exponentially harder. This is what those revolutionary discoveries did for us in the past: Opened the door to a new world where the hard answers were suddenly a bit easier, they made sense.
ablatt89 4y ago
I think that the expectation that "ground-breaking" discoveries in science should follow some linear or predictable timetable is not reasonable. Is the time period between "ground-breaking" discoveries supposed to be every 5 years, every 10 years? The volume of papers has increased significantly, and publish or perish kinda stinks, but it's not just an issue of funding, but some (many?) researchers publish and exaggerate about the importance and difficulty of their research to receive an "I am smart" badge on social media. Although, despite this increase in volume of crap tier papers, the article seems to think it's not correlated: "Declines in disruptiveness are also not attributable to changing publication, citation or authorship practices..."
- derbOac 4y ago
  What you're pointing to is far more insidious than I think is usually recognized. People can point to incentive structures like grants etc, and to the implications in terms of the meaning of metrics etc but the real harm is in how it shifts mental focus and attention collectively. It's not ok to let minor things or things you think are obvious go anymore to focus on bigger picture issues, that might be "riskier" but nonobvious. The way that plays out too is incredibly dependent on your institutional social environment etc. So much of this is difficult to easily quantify in ways that can be easily studied. I loved this paper for example, but it's easy for me to think of papers in my own field that would look "disruptive" in terms of citation networks but are really the same content. There's these weird shifts I've seen happen in reading old literature and during my career, where big shifts in who is being cited will happen for quixotic social reasons. Usually it's basically politics or ignorance of big parts of a field, who will get introduced to an idea by a particular author or group. Lots of chaotic citation patterns and feedback loops. Add in shifts in what's motivating grant and paper topics and it really damages authentic scientific discourse. So much is driven by looking like a brilliant scientist and not by scientific progress. People aren't dumb either and they are very very good at looking like brilliant scientists.
  - ctchocula 4y ago
    Higgs, who hypothesized the Higgs boson back in the 70s, has only published 2-3 papers in the decades since. Before it was announced that he won the Nobel prize, his University was deciding between forcing him out or gambling on him potentially winning the Nobel prize which would bring more reknown to the department. He has commented recently saying if he were a young, freshly minted PhD today he would not have gotten tenure with his publication record. That seems insane to me and a bitter critique of today's incentive structures created by the funding system we have that rewards incremental work over real breakthroughs.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
- Grant funding - Tenure requirements - Job duties (both requirements and limitations) - Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC - Credentialism - A "Pain point" focus would tend to be more incremental than truly disruptive On the good side there may be some decrease of disruptive inventions and discoveries because we are also focusing on eliminating the externalities of current and previous inventions and discoveries. It's a lot easier to make wildly new things if you aren't worried about their side effects.
- feraloink 4y ago
  >Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC This is a big problem. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Research are the first that come to mind. Same is true for mostly government-funded initiatives like the one where Marc Andreessen invented Mosaic browser, that eventually became Netscape Navigator. I don't recall the project name. Do we even do that anymore?
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    We still have DARPA. We also have ARPA-E, ARPA-H, and HSARPA. A variety of DOE national labs and core facilities (including NCSA where Mosaic was developed) still exist and are funded. We may need more to take up the slack of the corporate research facilities.
- urthor 4y ago
  Remind me, in the history of the physical sciences, how many "groundbreaking breakthroughs," came from academics teaching undergraduates? My mind is genuinely struggling... Certainly not Curie, Einstein, Fleming worked in a hospital. Maybe the problem is... Undergraduates!
ffwacom 4y ago
I blame: the currency and inflationary environment
raverbashing 4y ago
Patents went from real innovation to Legalese BS and market protection in the past decades. Also I suspect most innovation are being done outside of papers, especially when you have "reviewer 2" ready to be nitpicky at every minor detail, so you make it more bland and maybe skip one juicy part or another
vanderZwan 4y ago
I get that in this context "patents" should be seen as the announcement of a new innovation, a surrogate of the innovation itself if you will, but setting that aside for a moment I'm struggling to imagine how patents could ever do anything but slow down disruption. Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give people the freedom to innovate on top versus stopping anyone who does. Shouldn't the former always be more disruptive of the status quo? I can imagine this is an oversimplification though so I'm open to hearing counterintuitive examples where the opposite is true. And to be clear, either way I'm not saying this is good or bad in and of itself - in some cases it might slow down essential improvements, in others it might be good to have speed limits for change so that things don't break.
- this_was_posted 4y ago
  You could argue that there is more economic incentive to invent new things as discoveries are worth more if you alone have the right to use them. This in turn could lead to more investments in research that lead to more inventions that increase disruption.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    I know that that has been one argument in favor of patents since forever. But that ignores the part where competing parties are not freely allowed to build on another person's patent, which is essential for making good improvements. And you can see this play out in the history of invention. For example, Edison stopped other people from doing research on the light bulb. Meanwhile the Netherlands was a country without IP laws at the time so Phillips quickly ended up producing the superior and cheaper product. No patent laws, bigger disruption. Similarly the Wright brothers were notorious for holding back aviation with their patents.
    - mnau 4y ago
      James Watt and his patents on steam engine are also an interesting case. Efficiency gains basically stopped for duration of the main patent patent and exploded later. On the other hand it is also case for more innovation due to necessity, e.g. his patent on beam connection to a shaft (linear-to-rotary movement) required others to come up with a different solutions (e.g. sun and planet gear).
2sk21 4y ago
When I worked at IBM, we were given generous cash incentives for filing patents. I am named as an inventor on about 40 patents. To be honest, only one of them was a genuine invention in my opinion.
drdrek 4y ago
Its just the evolution vs revolution periods... In any field 99% of the time advancements are slow and incremental, than a new idea sparks a revolution and you get a lot of advancements in a short period of time. This is just the nature of scientific progress. In the early 20 century new ideas in physics and mathematics sparked a revolution and we are slowly unraveling the benefits of it ever since. For 40 years we had evolution in the AI research field, now we have a revolution, I do not know when it will die down but after a while we will just start to build over the ideas we discovered and a long period will pass before we do another jump. Same with psychology, economics, biology...
bandrami 4y ago
I know the danger of thinking this, but maybe we're just less wrong than we used to be?
bilsbie 4y ago
A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  More than that though. Modern science research is a highly hierarchal and managed enterprise. It's led, or at least its funding is controlled by, the risk averse managerial class who can only think it terms of returns on investment.
  - sybercecurity 4y ago
    9/11 (believe it or not) had a lot to do with that in IT/computer engineering research (and likely other fields) with government funding. After the attacks, the US Federal government moved to stressing development more than blue sky research. That drew all the funding away from fundamental science to projects that could be made into a product in 3-5 years and focused on addressing some issue of the War on Terror.
- Octabrain 4y ago
  Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the truth over anything else. Naive me, I guess...
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    Good questions. It’s always been a problem but I’d say these factors make it worse: 1. It’s harder for individuals or small groups to make breakthroughs. We need larger groups and more expertise as well as expensive equipment to continue making discoveries. More hands in the pie make more gatekeepers and less risk taking. 2. In general our entire society is “circling the wagons”. I’m not sure why but we’re more tribal than normal. Science isn’t immune from the trend. I could go on. It’s a big topic.
jslakro 4y ago
Another pertinent paper from 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11184
- morphle 4y ago
  This is an earlier publication of the same paper before it was published in Nature.
OJFord 4y ago
Doesn't it just stand to reason that there's less to discover, that what there is mostly isn't the low-hanging fruit (and unlike actual fruit, it's not regrowing), over time?
- spawarotti 4y ago
  That's what I was thinking, too. Perhaps we already know majority of what there is to know, when it comes to fundamental concepts? Probably plenty of work left in improving our tools and engineering solutions, like machine learning-based software, as well as in understanding the intricates of biology. Maybe mathematics, too. Maybe improvements in these will cause another golden age of discovery. Like, understanding biology enough to gain significantly extended lifespan, which means much more expertise can be built by one individual.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Theory of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn. Major breakthrough that disrupts the paradime. Followed by normal science with diminishing returns until the next paradime.
breck 4y ago
On the paper front, I have a number of published scientific papers with citations. My 3 most important papers—that will go down as turning points in the history of computer science—have a combined 0 citations, and 2 of them not only were not in a journal, but they were even flagged and removed from arxiv. On the patent front, well patents are for parasites.
ZooCow 4y ago
> The intuition is that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors This intuition seems to overlook the culture of citations in the patent space. There, the incentive is for applicants to be over inclusive with citations. This is combined with the increasing ease with which references can be found.
Isamu 4y ago
There’s an intuition that recent products and inventions are more incremental and that historical innovations are more revolutionary- in the sense of lacking precedence. But this is an effect of the simplification of history, and when you read the detailed technical histories you can see how remarkably incremental the old innovations were. We can easily see the precedents of recent innovations but not for older ones. This is pointed out in the book I am reading on the development of the turbojet, which only looks more unprecedented than it really was.
mrfox321 4y ago
I've heard another interesting argument, at least for disruptive science/research from industry. Lower corporate taxation incentivizes the hoarding of cash. Prior, corporations were incentivized to allocate more funding towards their industry research (IBM, Bell Labs, etc). Would love some counterarguments, here!
hgsgm 4y ago
Low hanging fruit are picked.
iskander 4y ago
Currently running a research lab and this fits with my anecdotal experience of what ideas and approaches are considered fundable by the NIH and NSF.
paro_nej 4y ago
> Wang and his colleagues have found that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science Interesting observation.
shae 4y ago
You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve. The more things change the more they stay the same.
  - sampo 4y ago
    > So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve. Your income level is probably higher after leaving academia and going to work in industry. So you probably starve more by staying in academia.
- paro_nej 4y ago
  Disruptive work doesn't necessarily need to disagree with previous results.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Well you get the funding before you do the experiment and thus before you know whether it's going to disagree with existing research. If you have the results before you do the experiment, you're not doing science.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    No, grant proposals normally expect you to provide preliminary results. The more controversial your proposal, the better your preliminaries have to be. Especially you have to convince the funding deciders that you did the appropriate positive and negative controls.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird results because they are bad at conducting research.
dumpsterlid 4y ago
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alexb_ 4y ago
May be relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-d...
- VictorPath 4y ago
  Eugenics research is disruptive? Why not phrenology?
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    Studying the genetic basis for various characteristics is not eugenics, anymore than studying the atom is building a nuclear weapon. Abuse of knowledge should be controlled, but banning the pursuit of knowledge itself? That's just intentionally crippling our own understanding of the world, for fear that we might not like what we discover. That's hardly an unprecedented behavior, to say the least, but the cultures that have gone that direction are probably not the sort we might want to emulate.
  - bendbro 4y ago
    I too am a socialist. But I believe people are different: hereditarily and culturally. I assume only people like me and maybe a few like you will know what this means, but doesn't it upset you that I can freely say it?
fastaguy88 4y ago
To understand the fundamental problem with this paper and the "CD" measure of "disruptiveness", one need only look at Figure 1a, where three Nobel Prize winning papers and three patents are ranked on the "CD5" scale. Apparently, there are more disruptive discoveries than Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-stranded structure of DNA (CD5 0.62 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0), and Baltimore's discovery of reverse transcription is -0.55. One might argue the ranks of these two discoveries should be reversed, since DNA had already been shown to be the genetic material, but no one imagined that RNA could be converted to DNA. Likewise, the Wigler patent for transformation into eukaryotic cells (CD5=0.70) has certainly has had less effect on the world economy than Monsanto's patent on glyphosphate resistant plants (CD= -0.85). It's easy to make up a measure and then develop a story that explains why that measure is useful. Was Newton's theory of gravity disruptive, or consolidating. I'm thinking consolidating, since it allowed a lot of other things to make sense. Likewise, perhaps quantum mechanics was disruptive -- it sounds disruptive -- but it also consolidated a lot of confusing observations. (And lets not even mention the problem that when there are 1,000-times as many papers between 1940 and 2010, we might not expect 1,000-times as many disruptions.) This paper has a measure that sounds useful, and is certainly good for headlines, but it is very unclear that it provides any insight into the progress of science.
- baxtr 4y ago
  Agreed. I think this is fundamentally a sampling rate observation. Pace of publishing and observations have dramatically as you rightly point out.
- dekhn 4y ago
  You misunderstand why W&C was important (although, given your username, I assume you've already sat through the lectures): in elucidating (not discovering) the structure of DNA, they had a biophysical mechanism that explained heredity (specifically, that it was an antiparallel double helix with complementary bases, which immediately suggests a mechanism for replication). That recognition immediately led to a flurry of follow-on work confirming the mechanism and birthing molecular biology as we know it, which opened up vast new areas of science.
wolframhempel 4y ago
I think the same processes that turn nimble and innovative startups into large and heavy enterprises apply to countries and institutions as well. As academia and research institutions develop, they become more complex, valuing process over result and consensus over conflict. Increasingly, disruption of consensus is perceived as disruption of the institution itself and risk-aversion and incrementalism are rewarded. I hate to be a doomsayer, but this seems to be a general trajectory that most of the western world is on.
curiousllama 4y ago
Ok, so the average has declined - has the raw # of disruptive studies increased? The definition of 'disruptive' here is based on the ratio of citations of [study] vs citations of [study's references]. If the number of papers increases, do we want a proportional increase in studies that "send a field in a new direction?" Or do we want incremental studies to be improving rigor, comprehensiveness, and clarity? IMO, it'd be much better to look at the Avg. CD of the top N% of CD scores over time - that'd give me a much better idea of if disruptiveness is changing, as disruptiveness is a "best paper" phenomenon anyway.
photochemsyn 4y ago
That timeline correlates well with the corporatization of academic research timeline, which got started in the late 1970s, boomed in the 1980s and has steadily risen ever since. The emphasis in applied science is now on patents and return-on-investment, aka safe bets. This is certainly the direction that much of NIH fundings, as well as DOE funding, has taken. Part of this is that entrenched industries (natural gas and coal power, say), don't want federal funding going to disruptive competition (monocrystalline silicon PV development, say). This is reflected in how federal funds are distributed as well as what research programs are supported at the university level. For example, count the number of renewable energy departments in the USA academic system: miniscule funding -> no programs. It can't all be blamed on corporatization, however. The control of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests seems to be a major problem, i.e. innovative lines of research that threaten the status quo could threaten those cabals that control fund disbursement, so such efforts don't get funded. The stagnation of Alzheimer's research and the focus on the amyloid hypothesis seems to fall into this category. This kind of bureaucratic ossification is not new; the classic example is how Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of agricultural research for about three decades, much to the detriment of the understanding of plant genetics and crop development research in the USSR over that period. So it can be attributed to the rise of monopolistic corporatization on university campuses on one hand, and the growth of entrenched bureaucracies at the federal funding level on the other. Neither group wants the rug pulled out from under them by 'disruptive innovation'. There are many historical antecedents for this kind of situation, incidentally.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  > The control of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests seems to be a major problem This is a fundamental problem with the nature of science and the nation state in that modern science is constituted by the nation state, not merely imposing into or upon it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvntr0J5eQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvntr0J5eQk
- jasmer 4y ago
  Given that Tech Transfer offices don't make much money at all, and patents are mostly worthless, I doubtful of this theory. There simply is no 'return on investment' on most of the work.
jrumbut 4y ago
I'm left a bit conflicted by what conclusions to draw from this effort. How much of this is due to how much easier it is to publish something these days? Every statistics package spits out publication-ready charts and tables, Latex/Word has automated much of the typesetter's art, drafts can be communicated instantly via email, there are instantly searchable and linked databases of papers, etc, etc. Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into something an editor could read, attaching hand drawn figures, then heading down to the post office to mail the draft in. That draft then had to be copied and mailed to reviewers, who then mailed their opinions back, every step taking at least a few days of communication overhead. It was a different world and it gradually changed with widespread adoption of different technologies. Also how does this interact with another pair of common suggestions for improving science: publishing negative results and doing more replications? Is this a sign that those two good practices are already occurring? Is it possible that the higher rate of disruption was due to shoddier work in the past?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into something an editor could read This was done well into the 1980s, if not longer.
LarryMullins 4y ago
All apparent exponential growth is just an S-curve we haven't found the inflection point of yet.
deleted 4y ago
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scifibestfi 4y ago
"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of science. I think it's pathetic. Gone into universities as bright young people. They come out of them brain dead, not even knowing what science means. They think it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No, that's academia. And if a paper is peer-reviewed it means everybody thought the same therefore they approved it. An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges, new scientific insights, they can never ever be peer-reviewed. So we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances. If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they don't come from the center of that profession, they come from the fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think of electric lights. They don't come from within they often come from outside the bricks. We're going to kill ourselves because of stupidity." — Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist, research biologist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated the Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkXZ3_ZmKzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkXZ3_ZmKzw
- kickout 4y ago
  Yea, sadly I can relate to this quote. Modern science has lost it voice and purpose it seems and it nothing more than a glorified printing press of poor research and glad-handing consortiums.
- dekhn 4y ago
  While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory. "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.
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varelse 4y ago
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perardi 4y ago
So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of “disruptive”. (Also, can we just stop using that word? Such a though-terminating cliche at this point.) But let’s accept that we are seeing less fundamental breakthroughs in science. Is that a failure of the system…or, depressingly, what if we really are hitting the limits of what we can model and describe? In a roughly 200 year timespan, we figured out the at least the rough outlines of…wow, where even to start…electromagnetism, general and special relativity, quantum mechanics as it relates to field theories and chemistry, genetics, and computability. We really picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and what if there just isn’t any fruit left to easily get at? There’s certainly things like dark energy that we don’t have particularly satisfying theories for at all, but, the basics? We seem to have good models.
- mistermann 4y ago
  The physical realm seems largely picked clean, but there is bountiful fruits available in the metaphysical realm - shame that ~no one can see it, despite complaining about it constantly.
  - worik 4y ago
    > The physical realm seems largely picked clean, Famous Last Words
    - mistermann 4y ago
      It's a great meme, but memes are only good for estimating the future, and while the future can indeed be strongly influenced by the fact that much of human cognition is meme-based, there are also many other influences on it. This and many other pieces of very useful knowledge are there for the taking in the metaphysical realm, just as was the case hundreds of years ago in the physical realm, prior to the rise of science (a metaphysical phenomenon itself).
felipelalli 4y ago
Maybe it's wrong. At least in the chart, they are missing the Bitcoin invention in 2009 (technology). There was the last "disruptive" science in the area.
jschveibinz 4y ago
Every time I read one of these editorials on the topic of lack of available research, I just look at the huge list of significant problems that still exist for life on earth and wonder: “what are they thinking?”
jjk166 4y ago
Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming an ever more complete and accurate view of reality. Disruption really just means stumbling upon something unexpected. Once you know there is something there, it opens up a whole world of new avenues for studying in that space, but it doesn't really make it any easier to find something unexpected again. Consider for example deep sea archaeology. When you find a shipwreck, there's going to be a flurry of activity as people study the shipwreck, and the more they answer the questions they started with, the more new questions they are going to want to ask, so even long after the initial discovery there's going to be a continuous string of studies refining knowledge about that wreck. And this is true of every wreck. But finding one shipwreck doesn't generally make it easier to find the next, assuming the same resources, new wrecks are going to be discovered at a pretty steady rate. So the number of discovered wrecks grows linearly, but with each being revisited regularly, the cumulative amount of research done on all wrecks grows geometrically. Similarly discovering a new chemical opens up many possibilities for studying that chemical, likewise for a new phylum of bacteria, a new type of star, you can only see something for the first time once, but you can take closer looks forever. We should expect the ratio of new things to look like a graph of 1/x. Perhaps it's weird that the absolute number of disruptive papers is holding steady. While there are competing forces at work - on the one hand we have more scientists with better instruments, but on the other hand the low hanging fruit is gone and they must go ever further to find something new - there's no fundamental reason these two forces should perfectly counterbalance. I might posit our society has a certain appetite for discovery and we adjust our allocation of resources to science and innovation to maintain this continuous stream of disruptions, but I at least feel that scientific breakthroughs tend to excite people about science and desire to double down on science, not pull back. Perhaps more realistically we just move the goal posts as to what we consider disruptive such that the top X discoveries of the year are always "groundbreaking." Regardless of the why, this definitely the more interesting part of the story.
miguelazo 4y ago
>and no one knows why Really? Too much talent going into trivial tech ventures. The shift towards rentier capitalism in the US, especially in terms of cheap money/QE being used for share buybacks instead of R&D. The colossal cost of higher education in the US, with grad stipends barely budging until literally this month. Fewer people willing to tolerate the (mostly) toxic culture of academic advisors overseeing Phds and post-grads. Google Scholar skewing papers to exist more for popularity/citation prevalence. The Internet as the biggest distraction in the history of humanity. etc. etc.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
There are just too many gatekeepers and too many people who are used to doing things a certain way. The world is just more populous now. We also need to make sure that people can speak their minds freely and write freely without worrying about getting cancelled.
raziel2701 4y ago
When I was in grad school I had done measurements of the magnetic anisotropy of amorphous compounds. I had found an interesting link between the structure and the magnetic properties which is surprising since the material is amorphous, the material properties should be isotropic yet these had a preferred magnetization axis. During the discussions of these results with my advisor I was told in very clear terms that he would not let me publish results that contradicted a paper of his from the 1980s. I didn't push back, because I had no power and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there and start making money after being scammed out of 5 years of my life where I poured a lot of effort and got shit pay. I lost respect for my advisor and I was stunned by how un-scientific his response was when it came to correcting his 1980s results. My measurements were more accurate and were strongly supported by structural measurements he never did and couldn't do back then. But he was more interested in protecting his "legacy" of his paper with 13 citations. So petty and small. I dropped those efforts and was able to get out completely obviating those results, never mentioned them in my thesis even. Anyway, my point is that I'm not surprised that scientific results are lame, vanilla, uninspired. When the committees that decide on what gets funded are all 65+ dinosaurs stuck in their ways, very few disruptive ideas will be founded because you're disrupting the very research that got the committee members clout and recognition. As they say, change comes a funeral at a time.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  It used to come a funeral at a time, but now that the next generation is forced to build their careers on the mistakes of their advisors, mistakes can easily outlive their creators.
- dkqmduems 4y ago
  Did you push at all? From experience, this is not an uncommon story. Perhaps this was your advisor's way of saying 'convince me'.
- jasmer 4y ago
  I see this kind of stuff all the time and I'm convinced that Academia is corrupt. While working against a Grad Student doesn't seem particularly evil, rather just a bit backstabby/political, I suggest that it is 'really bad' because it contravenes the basic organizing principle of science itself. Kind of like a Judge ruling one way or another for personal reasons, or ruling with a heavy conflict of interest. There needs to be much stronger ethical principles around this and an advisor hinting at obfuscating work for such reasons should be up for review.
stainablesteel 4y ago
"all metrics seem to decline as we keep adding more metrics" it's called bureaucracy
chrisbrandow 4y ago
Nice to see numbers put to this. I remember thinking through a bunch of tech/science that I was familiar with, and realizing that most (not all) of the fundamentals in every case were known by the early 60's, and we've been working out the (very important) details ever since. Nuclear, electronics, chemistry, biology, etc. plenty of counter-examples, I'm sure, but like once you know the structure of DNA and it's fundamental operations, the remaining discoveries will have a smaller impact.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 - Jan 2023 (20 comments)
college_physics 4y ago
The science knowledge base grows monotonically but not necessarily at a steady rate. Actually far from it. There was a time in the 19th century when people thought physics discoveries were complete. A few decades later all hell broke lose. The problem we have right now is that we are stymied on the complexity front (materials, chemistry, biology, medicine etc) Our mental / mathematical models that we use to understand the world and even enable us to ask original scientific questions are losing their edge when things get complex. These tools are 19th century stuff (including all the AI junk) and we have milked them for all they are worth I would hypothesise that a new period of discovery will correlate with some breakthrough in the mathematics of complexity. We had a few false dawns but not the real thing
- feoren 4y ago
  > These tools are 19th century stuff (including all the AI junk) I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. I mean, you could claim that modern cryptography is based on ideas from the ancient Greeks (factoring numbers), and is therefore old and busted. Is every idea just derivative unless it uses a completely new kind of math? Software developers (maybe not you, but a large percentage of the users of this site) tend to automatically think older ideas are worse. But that's not true in math. Mathematical ideas don't expire. The idea of the number 7 is aeons old; the number 0 over a thousand years; the complex number i 450 years. But the numbers 7 and 0 and i are still extremely useful, in infinite combinations. If you think we have milked those numbers for all they're worth, you have an extremely limited imagination. Sure, most of the "AI junk" is a combination of old ideas like linear algebra and gradient descent, but used at a scale orders of magnitude larger than their creators ever imagined. (And quantity has a quality all its own.) It's that combination of ideas that is so powerful. Besides, backpropagation is a pretty damned novel idea. If you're looking for the one truly new idea from AI, it's backpropagation. You are vastly underestimating the volume of the idea space available to explore simply by combining the ideas and materials we already have. Crossover is a better source of variety than mutation is. You may be right that truly new concepts are the "raw materials" of invention, but we never run out of the raw ideas we have, and they prove to be useful in their combination up to the limits of our imaginations. It's actually surprising how likely you are to come up with a reasonably good idea by simply considering a few randomly-selected ideas together. > we are stymied on the complexity front (materials, chemistry, biology, medicine etc) Again you seem like your standard is: if it's not an entirely new thing where nothing like it has ever existed before, then it's boring!. If you think the volume of the idea-space from combining the materials, chemistry, biology, and medicine we already have/understand is X, it's almost certainly at least 2^X, or even X! (factorial). Besides, we are coming up with brand new materials all the time! Materials science is one of the most exciting frontiers of human technology.
signaru 4y ago
I had worked in academe long enough to see many papers submitted simply out of pressure to finish the degree.
deafpolygon 4y ago
I know this is OT, but I keep reading this as "paupers and parents"...

75 points by jeremylevy 4y ago

And yet I've been trying to find $$ for one of the most disruptive agriculture technologies that could propel to sustainable ag to acreage unheard of. Nobody wants to take a chance. shrug

nafeen 4y ago

While there is no doubt that 'CD Index' has been declining over time, it is debatable whether it truly indicates a drop in 'disruption'. Let's take AI for example. Research papers that were published in 2019-20 have become obsolete within a year or less, and consequently get cited less and less, as more recent and derivative papers introduced better models. Does that make the older papers any less 'disruptive'? No!

version_five 4y ago

The first half of the 20th century had a lot of "low hanging fruit" in physics and chemistry that basically came out of the enlightenment. Things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. I wouldn't guess that's always the steady state for research. The war may have had something to do with it too, I know a lot of advances (like radio / microwave engineering) have roots in the war efforts. But I suspect it's more of just a dry spell because we pushed forward in the 18th-20th century and ran out of ideas

nafeen 4y ago
Wouldn't we be presented with another bout of "low hanging fruits" in the second half of 21st century when tectonic shifts happen in quantum computing, superconductivity, ai, ar/vr/mr etc.?

morphle 4y ago

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

feraloink 4y ago
Good article. Interesting finding at the very end: >Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. So... maybe this is because having more people doing scientific research doesn't yield more breakthroughs. More people doing scientific research DOES yield more incremental achievements, as the study found, i.e. word frequency analysis showing more occurrences of "improve", "expand", "extend".
- snordgren 4y ago
  The number of highly disruptive studies remaining the same seems impressive enough to me. I expect diminishing returns to be the long-term norm in science. The low hanging fruit get picked first, and every breakthrough means one more concept that the next generation of researchers have to learn and incorporate into their work.

morphle 4y ago

Alan Kay wrote an essay on how large scientific breakthroughs where done [1], further discussed in [2]. The funders and the systems of funding of science are to blame for the deciline, for example they won't fund problem finding anymore. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE

urthor 4y ago
Alan Kay's advocacy for funding science is a truly eminent life's work.

asdff 4y ago

I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what is called for by grant funding agencies for their own research initiatives. If you want disruptive science, fund it then. That's all everyone wants to do in science, but the bills need to be payed somehow, so you play the game the funding agencies want you to play.

deleted 4y ago
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Topolomancer 4y ago
Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants, even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas. I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that; sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come back with lessons learned.
seydor 4y ago
The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? It almost seems as a new model would take the world by storm, but it doesnt seem to arise. Even private research often falls for the same pitfalls, like how Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward.
- zmgsabst 4y ago

zitstif 4y ago

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midoridensha 4y ago

If you're really smart, enough to make disruptive scientific discoveries, why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more? If you stay in science, you'll earn peanuts and not even have any career stability since the academic track is so bad these days.

urthor 4y ago
That's arguably an even greater point than anyone realises. All these geniuses... people are giving them jobs!
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
"why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more?" Because it's boring and depressing. And one thing money can't buy, unless you're solely interested in accumulating money, is satisfaction with your life. Obviously not true for everyone, but we've got 8.8 million "scientists" (I'm not sure what they mean by the word). https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide-reaches-88m-global-research-spending-grows-faster-economy https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide... Most scientists don't work in academia. Some of those who do have stable jobs as staff instead of faculty positions. And this guy did it in his spare time while working at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34236889

karmakurtisaani 4y ago

From my training as a computer scientist, I am used to the idea that some problems are easy and some are plainly intractable. Perhaps that's also true in science and technology, and we are starting to exhaust all the easy directions. Still, many less techy problems remain, at least climate change and wealth inequality come to mind. Perhaps we'll see the biggest innovations in solving those in the future.

zmgsabst 4y ago
As a software developer, I’d want to see a rewrite to clean up the legacy bodges before we conclude we can’t add more. Also, wealth inequality isn’t a problem: how wealthy the people at the bottom are is. Wealth inequality is associated with fewer poor people and a higher standard of living because wealth inequality requires a wealthy society. What exactly are you “fixing”?
- karmakurtisaani 4y ago
  I'm not suggesting we can't add more, rather, that I find it conceivable that there is a barrier of technological progress that we can approach, but never reach. So the pace of progress will slow down. Concerning wealth inequality, I do think it is a fundamental problem of society if a fraction of a percentage controls majority of the available resources even if the lowest half has their immediate needs met, but we can disagree on that all day and arrive nowhere.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    The Pareto principle is incredibly harsh, but such hierarchies seem to form naturally. My concern with your view is that in trying to “squash the gap”, you end up doing so by making everyone poorer — and society worse overall. Happy to agree to disagree; hopefully we can consider each other’s perspectives in crafting policies.
    - karmakurtisaani 4y ago
      It's indeed not an easy issue, which is why I think there could still be lots of innovations to made in that space in terms of economics, politics, social sciences etc.

rich_sasha 4y ago

I wonder if this is to do with major vs minor breakthrough. Take physics. As I read it, modern fundamental physics is mostly some combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which are both early 20th century inventions. They weren't necessarily genius in particular in-depth analysis, rather they were genius new concepts that created a whole new blank canvas to fill in. What did the field look like just before them? I always forget the details, but was it lord Kelvin who said, physics just needs to figure out the ultraviolet catastrophe and it's done? I wonder if it looked similarly uninnovative. The canvas they had was full, and they needed a new canvas for true innovation. Now the thing is, I think true disruption, like GR and quantum physics, is not limited by the number of postdocs, but by truly genius insights. Einstein wasn't even working as an academic when he came up with Special Relativity. So the number of papers written isn't a proxy for pace of revolution. Not to mention, since number of published papers has become a target, it has become useless as a measure of progress.

ablatt89 4y ago
I agree, I think we're discounting genius insight as the primary driver of innovation and ground breaking science, and we can't expect genius insight to occur in some predictable time frame or a time frame even within a lifespan. I think perhaps we've also partially lost the meaning of ground breaking research given the constant news articles on "ground breaking science" and the constant overinflation and exaggeration of one's papers and achievements.
- buran77 4y ago
  A lot of the obvious questions on the table were answered, even without an answer we at least have the question. Today true, groundbreaking innovation needs someone to identify the new questions. It's like doing science in a bubble and you need someone to take a massive new one and merge it into our own. Right now we're not opening wide doors, but just refining and adding almost imperceptibly to an already huge bubble. We're grinding in the game because we can't find the boss on the map or can't beat it yet. Besides the current structure of research and the known weaknesses (misaligned incentives, funding issues, etc.) science in general today ran out of low hanging fruit. The last unexplored or unanswered riddles may need prerequisites that are outside of the current boundaries so someone needs to open the door do a vast new bubble that has more relatively low hanging fruit. Also humans probably (don't quote me on that :) ) can't come up with any new questions or answers unless they are already at the edge of that bubble. And they each see and understand a smaller patch of that surface as it expanded. Stumbling onto new thinks is exponentially harder. This is what those revolutionary discoveries did for us in the past: Opened the door to a new world where the hard answers were suddenly a bit easier, they made sense.

ablatt89 4y ago

I think that the expectation that "ground-breaking" discoveries in science should follow some linear or predictable timetable is not reasonable. Is the time period between "ground-breaking" discoveries supposed to be every 5 years, every 10 years? The volume of papers has increased significantly, and publish or perish kinda stinks, but it's not just an issue of funding, but some (many?) researchers publish and exaggerate about the importance and difficulty of their research to receive an "I am smart" badge on social media. Although, despite this increase in volume of crap tier papers, the article seems to think it's not correlated: "Declines in disruptiveness are also not attributable to changing publication, citation or authorship practices..."

derbOac 4y ago
What you're pointing to is far more insidious than I think is usually recognized. People can point to incentive structures like grants etc, and to the implications in terms of the meaning of metrics etc but the real harm is in how it shifts mental focus and attention collectively. It's not ok to let minor things or things you think are obvious go anymore to focus on bigger picture issues, that might be "riskier" but nonobvious. The way that plays out too is incredibly dependent on your institutional social environment etc. So much of this is difficult to easily quantify in ways that can be easily studied. I loved this paper for example, but it's easy for me to think of papers in my own field that would look "disruptive" in terms of citation networks but are really the same content. There's these weird shifts I've seen happen in reading old literature and during my career, where big shifts in who is being cited will happen for quixotic social reasons. Usually it's basically politics or ignorance of big parts of a field, who will get introduced to an idea by a particular author or group. Lots of chaotic citation patterns and feedback loops. Add in shifts in what's motivating grant and paper topics and it really damages authentic scientific discourse. So much is driven by looking like a brilliant scientist and not by scientific progress. People aren't dumb either and they are very very good at looking like brilliant scientists.
- ctchocula 4y ago
  Higgs, who hypothesized the Higgs boson back in the 70s, has only published 2-3 papers in the decades since. Before it was announced that he won the Nobel prize, his University was deciding between forcing him out or gambling on him potentially winning the Nobel prize which would bring more reknown to the department. He has commented recently saying if he were a young, freshly minted PhD today he would not have gotten tenure with his publication record. That seems insane to me and a bitter critique of today's incentive structures created by the funding system we have that rewards incremental work over real breakthroughs.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

- Grant funding - Tenure requirements - Job duties (both requirements and limitations) - Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC - Credentialism - A "Pain point" focus would tend to be more incremental than truly disruptive On the good side there may be some decrease of disruptive inventions and discoveries because we are also focusing on eliminating the externalities of current and previous inventions and discoveries. It's a lot easier to make wildly new things if you aren't worried about their side effects.

feraloink 4y ago
>Elimination of corporate skunk works like PARC This is a big problem. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Research are the first that come to mind. Same is true for mostly government-funded initiatives like the one where Marc Andreessen invented Mosaic browser, that eventually became Netscape Navigator. I don't recall the project name. Do we even do that anymore?
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  We still have DARPA. We also have ARPA-E, ARPA-H, and HSARPA. A variety of DOE national labs and core facilities (including NCSA where Mosaic was developed) still exist and are funded. We may need more to take up the slack of the corporate research facilities.
urthor 4y ago
Remind me, in the history of the physical sciences, how many "groundbreaking breakthroughs," came from academics teaching undergraduates? My mind is genuinely struggling... Certainly not Curie, Einstein, Fleming worked in a hospital. Maybe the problem is... Undergraduates!

ffwacom 4y ago

I blame: the currency and inflationary environment

raverbashing 4y ago

Patents went from real innovation to Legalese BS and market protection in the past decades. Also I suspect most innovation are being done outside of papers, especially when you have "reviewer 2" ready to be nitpicky at every minor detail, so you make it more bland and maybe skip one juicy part or another

vanderZwan 4y ago

I get that in this context "patents" should be seen as the announcement of a new innovation, a surrogate of the innovation itself if you will, but setting that aside for a moment I'm struggling to imagine how patents could ever do anything but slow down disruption. Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. EDIT: And perhaps more importantly give people the freedom to innovate on top versus stopping anyone who does. Shouldn't the former always be more disruptive of the status quo? I can imagine this is an oversimplification though so I'm open to hearing counterintuitive examples where the opposite is true. And to be clear, either way I'm not saying this is good or bad in and of itself - in some cases it might slow down essential improvements, in others it might be good to have speed limits for change so that things don't break.

this_was_posted 4y ago
You could argue that there is more economic incentive to invent new things as discoveries are worth more if you alone have the right to use them. This in turn could lead to more investments in research that lead to more inventions that increase disruption.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I know that that has been one argument in favor of patents since forever. But that ignores the part where competing parties are not freely allowed to build on another person's patent, which is essential for making good improvements. And you can see this play out in the history of invention. For example, Edison stopped other people from doing research on the light bulb. Meanwhile the Netherlands was a country without IP laws at the time so Phillips quickly ended up producing the superior and cheaper product. No patent laws, bigger disruption. Similarly the Wright brothers were notorious for holding back aviation with their patents.
  - mnau 4y ago
    James Watt and his patents on steam engine are also an interesting case. Efficiency gains basically stopped for duration of the main patent patent and exploded later. On the other hand it is also case for more innovation due to necessity, e.g. his patent on beam connection to a shaft (linear-to-rotary movement) required others to come up with a different solutions (e.g. sun and planet gear).

2sk21 4y ago

When I worked at IBM, we were given generous cash incentives for filing patents. I am named as an inventor on about 40 patents. To be honest, only one of them was a genuine invention in my opinion.

drdrek 4y ago

Its just the evolution vs revolution periods... In any field 99% of the time advancements are slow and incremental, than a new idea sparks a revolution and you get a lot of advancements in a short period of time. This is just the nature of scientific progress. In the early 20 century new ideas in physics and mathematics sparked a revolution and we are slowly unraveling the benefits of it ever since. For 40 years we had evolution in the AI research field, now we have a revolution, I do not know when it will die down but after a while we will just start to build over the ideas we discovered and a long period will pass before we do another jump. Same with psychology, economics, biology...

bandrami 4y ago

I know the danger of thinking this, but maybe we're just less wrong than we used to be?

bilsbie 4y ago

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career. It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
More than that though. Modern science research is a highly hierarchal and managed enterprise. It's led, or at least its funding is controlled by, the risk averse managerial class who can only think it terms of returns on investment.
- sybercecurity 4y ago
  9/11 (believe it or not) had a lot to do with that in IT/computer engineering research (and likely other fields) with government funding. After the attacks, the US Federal government moved to stressing development more than blue sky research. That drew all the funding away from fundamental science to projects that could be made into a product in 3-5 years and focused on addressing some issue of the War on Terror.
Octabrain 4y ago
Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the truth over anything else. Naive me, I guess...
- bilsbie 4y ago
  Good questions. It’s always been a problem but I’d say these factors make it worse: 1. It’s harder for individuals or small groups to make breakthroughs. We need larger groups and more expertise as well as expensive equipment to continue making discoveries. More hands in the pie make more gatekeepers and less risk taking. 2. In general our entire society is “circling the wagons”. I’m not sure why but we’re more tribal than normal. Science isn’t immune from the trend. I could go on. It’s a big topic.

jslakro 4y ago

Another pertinent paper from 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11184

morphle 4y ago
This is an earlier publication of the same paper before it was published in Nature.

OJFord 4y ago

Doesn't it just stand to reason that there's less to discover, that what there is mostly isn't the low-hanging fruit (and unlike actual fruit, it's not regrowing), over time?

spawarotti 4y ago
That's what I was thinking, too. Perhaps we already know majority of what there is to know, when it comes to fundamental concepts? Probably plenty of work left in improving our tools and engineering solutions, like machine learning-based software, as well as in understanding the intricates of biology. Maybe mathematics, too. Maybe improvements in these will cause another golden age of discovery. Like, understanding biology enough to gain significantly extended lifespan, which means much more expertise can be built by one individual.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Theory of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn. Major breakthrough that disrupts the paradime. Followed by normal science with diminishing returns until the next paradime.

breck 4y ago

On the paper front, I have a number of published scientific papers with citations. My 3 most important papers—that will go down as turning points in the history of computer science—have a combined 0 citations, and 2 of them not only were not in a journal, but they were even flagged and removed from arxiv. On the patent front, well patents are for parasites.

ZooCow 4y ago

> The intuition is that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors This intuition seems to overlook the culture of citations in the patent space. There, the incentive is for applicants to be over inclusive with citations. This is combined with the increasing ease with which references can be found.

Isamu 4y ago

There’s an intuition that recent products and inventions are more incremental and that historical innovations are more revolutionary- in the sense of lacking precedence. But this is an effect of the simplification of history, and when you read the detailed technical histories you can see how remarkably incremental the old innovations were. We can easily see the precedents of recent innovations but not for older ones. This is pointed out in the book I am reading on the development of the turbojet, which only looks more unprecedented than it really was.

mrfox321 4y ago

I've heard another interesting argument, at least for disruptive science/research from industry. Lower corporate taxation incentivizes the hoarding of cash. Prior, corporations were incentivized to allocate more funding towards their industry research (IBM, Bell Labs, etc). Would love some counterarguments, here!

hgsgm 4y ago

Low hanging fruit are picked.

iskander 4y ago

Currently running a research lab and this fits with my anecdotal experience of what ideas and approaches are considered fundable by the NIH and NSF.

paro_nej 4y ago

> Wang and his colleagues have found that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science Interesting observation.

shae 4y ago

You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.

bobsmooth 4y ago
So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve. The more things change the more they stay the same.
- sampo 4y ago
  > So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve. Your income level is probably higher after leaving academia and going to work in industry. So you probably starve more by staying in academia.
paro_nej 4y ago
Disruptive work doesn't necessarily need to disagree with previous results.
jjk166 4y ago
Well you get the funding before you do the experiment and thus before you know whether it's going to disagree with existing research. If you have the results before you do the experiment, you're not doing science.
- dekhn 4y ago
  No, grant proposals normally expect you to provide preliminary results. The more controversial your proposal, the better your preliminaries have to be. Especially you have to convince the funding deciders that you did the appropriate positive and negative controls.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird results because they are bad at conducting research.

dumpsterlid 4y ago

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alexb_ 4y ago

May be relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-d...

VictorPath 4y ago
Eugenics research is disruptive? Why not phrenology?
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Studying the genetic basis for various characteristics is not eugenics, anymore than studying the atom is building a nuclear weapon. Abuse of knowledge should be controlled, but banning the pursuit of knowledge itself? That's just intentionally crippling our own understanding of the world, for fear that we might not like what we discover. That's hardly an unprecedented behavior, to say the least, but the cultures that have gone that direction are probably not the sort we might want to emulate.
- bendbro 4y ago
  I too am a socialist. But I believe people are different: hereditarily and culturally. I assume only people like me and maybe a few like you will know what this means, but doesn't it upset you that I can freely say it?

fastaguy88 4y ago

To understand the fundamental problem with this paper and the "CD" measure of "disruptiveness", one need only look at Figure 1a, where three Nobel Prize winning papers and three patents are ranked on the "CD5" scale. Apparently, there are more disruptive discoveries than Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-stranded structure of DNA (CD5 0.62 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0), and Baltimore's discovery of reverse transcription is -0.55. One might argue the ranks of these two discoveries should be reversed, since DNA had already been shown to be the genetic material, but no one imagined that RNA could be converted to DNA. Likewise, the Wigler patent for transformation into eukaryotic cells (CD5=0.70) has certainly has had less effect on the world economy than Monsanto's patent on glyphosphate resistant plants (CD= -0.85). It's easy to make up a measure and then develop a story that explains why that measure is useful. Was Newton's theory of gravity disruptive, or consolidating. I'm thinking consolidating, since it allowed a lot of other things to make sense. Likewise, perhaps quantum mechanics was disruptive -- it sounds disruptive -- but it also consolidated a lot of confusing observations. (And lets not even mention the problem that when there are 1,000-times as many papers between 1940 and 2010, we might not expect 1,000-times as many disruptions.) This paper has a measure that sounds useful, and is certainly good for headlines, but it is very unclear that it provides any insight into the progress of science.

baxtr 4y ago
Agreed. I think this is fundamentally a sampling rate observation. Pace of publishing and observations have dramatically as you rightly point out.
dekhn 4y ago
You misunderstand why W&C was important (although, given your username, I assume you've already sat through the lectures): in elucidating (not discovering) the structure of DNA, they had a biophysical mechanism that explained heredity (specifically, that it was an antiparallel double helix with complementary bases, which immediately suggests a mechanism for replication). That recognition immediately led to a flurry of follow-on work confirming the mechanism and birthing molecular biology as we know it, which opened up vast new areas of science.

wolframhempel 4y ago

I think the same processes that turn nimble and innovative startups into large and heavy enterprises apply to countries and institutions as well. As academia and research institutions develop, they become more complex, valuing process over result and consensus over conflict. Increasingly, disruption of consensus is perceived as disruption of the institution itself and risk-aversion and incrementalism are rewarded. I hate to be a doomsayer, but this seems to be a general trajectory that most of the western world is on.

curiousllama 4y ago

Ok, so the average has declined - has the raw # of disruptive studies increased? The definition of 'disruptive' here is based on the ratio of citations of [study] vs citations of [study's references]. If the number of papers increases, do we want a proportional increase in studies that "send a field in a new direction?" Or do we want incremental studies to be improving rigor, comprehensiveness, and clarity? IMO, it'd be much better to look at the Avg. CD of the top N% of CD scores over time - that'd give me a much better idea of if disruptiveness is changing, as disruptiveness is a "best paper" phenomenon anyway.

photochemsyn 4y ago

That timeline correlates well with the corporatization of academic research timeline, which got started in the late 1970s, boomed in the 1980s and has steadily risen ever since. The emphasis in applied science is now on patents and return-on-investment, aka safe bets. This is certainly the direction that much of NIH fundings, as well as DOE funding, has taken. Part of this is that entrenched industries (natural gas and coal power, say), don't want federal funding going to disruptive competition (monocrystalline silicon PV development, say). This is reflected in how federal funds are distributed as well as what research programs are supported at the university level. For example, count the number of renewable energy departments in the USA academic system: miniscule funding -> no programs. It can't all be blamed on corporatization, however. The control of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests seems to be a major problem, i.e. innovative lines of research that threaten the status quo could threaten those cabals that control fund disbursement, so such efforts don't get funded. The stagnation of Alzheimer's research and the focus on the amyloid hypothesis seems to fall into this category. This kind of bureaucratic ossification is not new; the classic example is how Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of agricultural research for about three decades, much to the detriment of the understanding of plant genetics and crop development research in the USSR over that period. So it can be attributed to the rise of monopolistic corporatization on university campuses on one hand, and the growth of entrenched bureaucracies at the federal funding level on the other. Neither group wants the rug pulled out from under them by 'disruptive innovation'. There are many historical antecedents for this kind of situation, incidentally.

apocalypstyx 4y ago
> The control of funding agencies at the federal level by vested interests seems to be a major problem This is a fundamental problem with the nature of science and the nation state in that modern science is constituted by the nation state, not merely imposing into or upon it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvntr0J5eQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvntr0J5eQk
jasmer 4y ago
Given that Tech Transfer offices don't make much money at all, and patents are mostly worthless, I doubtful of this theory. There simply is no 'return on investment' on most of the work.

jrumbut 4y ago

I'm left a bit conflicted by what conclusions to draw from this effort. How much of this is due to how much easier it is to publish something these days? Every statistics package spits out publication-ready charts and tables, Latex/Word has automated much of the typesetter's art, drafts can be communicated instantly via email, there are instantly searchable and linked databases of papers, etc, etc. Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into something an editor could read, attaching hand drawn figures, then heading down to the post office to mail the draft in. That draft then had to be copied and mailed to reviewers, who then mailed their opinions back, every step taking at least a few days of communication overhead. It was a different world and it gradually changed with widespread adoption of different technologies. Also how does this interact with another pair of common suggestions for improving science: publishing negative results and doing more replications? Is this a sign that those two good practices are already occurring? Is it possible that the higher rate of disruption was due to shoddier work in the past?

SoftTalker 4y ago
> Think about what it was like in the 1950's, when many scientists were hiring typists to convert their longhand manuscripts into something an editor could read This was done well into the 1980s, if not longer.

LarryMullins 4y ago

All apparent exponential growth is just an S-curve we haven't found the inflection point of yet.

deleted 4y ago

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scifibestfi 4y ago

"People talk glibly about science. What is science? People coming out of a university with a master's degree or a PhD, you take them into the field and they literally don't believe anything unless it's a peer-reviewed paper. It's the only thing they accept and you say to them 'But let's observe. Let's think. Let's discuss.' They don't do it. It's just, 'Is it in a peer-reviewed paper or not?' That's their view of science. I think it's pathetic. Gone into universities as bright young people. They come out of them brain dead, not even knowing what science means. They think it means peer-reviewed papers etc. No, that's academia. And if a paper is peer-reviewed it means everybody thought the same therefore they approved it. An unintended consequence is that when new knowledge emerges, new scientific insights, they can never ever be peer-reviewed. So we're blocking all new advances in science that are big advances. If you look at the breakthroughs in science almost always they don't come from the center of that profession, they come from the fringe. The finest candle makers in the world couldn't even think of electric lights. They don't come from within they often come from outside the bricks. We're going to kill ourselves because of stupidity." — Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist, research biologist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated the Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkXZ3_ZmKzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkXZ3_ZmKzw

kickout 4y ago
Yea, sadly I can relate to this quote. Modern science has lost it voice and purpose it seems and it nothing more than a glorified printing press of poor research and glad-handing consortiums.
dekhn 4y ago
While I appreciate the sentiment, nearly all new knowledge goes through peer review because for every important problem in academia, there's a competitor who is the best person to point out problems with the theory. "Holistic management of agriculture to fight desertification" is a non-quantitative science and falls under a very different regime from, say, people working at the state of the art in particle physics or biology.
- deleted 4y ago

varelse 4y ago

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perardi 4y ago

So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of “disruptive”. (Also, can we just stop using that word? Such a though-terminating cliche at this point.) But let’s accept that we are seeing less fundamental breakthroughs in science. Is that a failure of the system…or, depressingly, what if we really are hitting the limits of what we can model and describe? In a roughly 200 year timespan, we figured out the at least the rough outlines of…wow, where even to start…electromagnetism, general and special relativity, quantum mechanics as it relates to field theories and chemistry, genetics, and computability. We really picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and what if there just isn’t any fruit left to easily get at? There’s certainly things like dark energy that we don’t have particularly satisfying theories for at all, but, the basics? We seem to have good models.

mistermann 4y ago
The physical realm seems largely picked clean, but there is bountiful fruits available in the metaphysical realm - shame that ~no one can see it, despite complaining about it constantly.
- worik 4y ago
  > The physical realm seems largely picked clean, Famous Last Words
  - mistermann 4y ago
    It's a great meme, but memes are only good for estimating the future, and while the future can indeed be strongly influenced by the fact that much of human cognition is meme-based, there are also many other influences on it. This and many other pieces of very useful knowledge are there for the taking in the metaphysical realm, just as was the case hundreds of years ago in the physical realm, prior to the rise of science (a metaphysical phenomenon itself).

felipelalli 4y ago

Maybe it's wrong. At least in the chart, they are missing the Bitcoin invention in 2009 (technology). There was the last "disruptive" science in the area.

jschveibinz 4y ago

Every time I read one of these editorials on the topic of lack of available research, I just look at the huge list of significant problems that still exist for life on earth and wonder: “what are they thinking?”

jjk166 4y ago

Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming an ever more complete and accurate view of reality. Disruption really just means stumbling upon something unexpected. Once you know there is something there, it opens up a whole world of new avenues for studying in that space, but it doesn't really make it any easier to find something unexpected again. Consider for example deep sea archaeology. When you find a shipwreck, there's going to be a flurry of activity as people study the shipwreck, and the more they answer the questions they started with, the more new questions they are going to want to ask, so even long after the initial discovery there's going to be a continuous string of studies refining knowledge about that wreck. And this is true of every wreck. But finding one shipwreck doesn't generally make it easier to find the next, assuming the same resources, new wrecks are going to be discovered at a pretty steady rate. So the number of discovered wrecks grows linearly, but with each being revisited regularly, the cumulative amount of research done on all wrecks grows geometrically. Similarly discovering a new chemical opens up many possibilities for studying that chemical, likewise for a new phylum of bacteria, a new type of star, you can only see something for the first time once, but you can take closer looks forever. We should expect the ratio of new things to look like a graph of 1/x. Perhaps it's weird that the absolute number of disruptive papers is holding steady. While there are competing forces at work - on the one hand we have more scientists with better instruments, but on the other hand the low hanging fruit is gone and they must go ever further to find something new - there's no fundamental reason these two forces should perfectly counterbalance. I might posit our society has a certain appetite for discovery and we adjust our allocation of resources to science and innovation to maintain this continuous stream of disruptions, but I at least feel that scientific breakthroughs tend to excite people about science and desire to double down on science, not pull back. Perhaps more realistically we just move the goal posts as to what we consider disruptive such that the top X discoveries of the year are always "groundbreaking." Regardless of the why, this definitely the more interesting part of the story.

miguelazo 4y ago

>and no one knows why Really? Too much talent going into trivial tech ventures. The shift towards rentier capitalism in the US, especially in terms of cheap money/QE being used for share buybacks instead of R&D. The colossal cost of higher education in the US, with grad stipends barely budging until literally this month. Fewer people willing to tolerate the (mostly) toxic culture of academic advisors overseeing Phds and post-grads. Google Scholar skewing papers to exist more for popularity/citation prevalence. The Internet as the biggest distraction in the history of humanity. etc. etc.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

There are just too many gatekeepers and too many people who are used to doing things a certain way. The world is just more populous now. We also need to make sure that people can speak their minds freely and write freely without worrying about getting cancelled.

raziel2701 4y ago

When I was in grad school I had done measurements of the magnetic anisotropy of amorphous compounds. I had found an interesting link between the structure and the magnetic properties which is surprising since the material is amorphous, the material properties should be isotropic yet these had a preferred magnetization axis. During the discussions of these results with my advisor I was told in very clear terms that he would not let me publish results that contradicted a paper of his from the 1980s. I didn't push back, because I had no power and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there and start making money after being scammed out of 5 years of my life where I poured a lot of effort and got shit pay. I lost respect for my advisor and I was stunned by how un-scientific his response was when it came to correcting his 1980s results. My measurements were more accurate and were strongly supported by structural measurements he never did and couldn't do back then. But he was more interested in protecting his "legacy" of his paper with 13 citations. So petty and small. I dropped those efforts and was able to get out completely obviating those results, never mentioned them in my thesis even. Anyway, my point is that I'm not surprised that scientific results are lame, vanilla, uninspired. When the committees that decide on what gets funded are all 65+ dinosaurs stuck in their ways, very few disruptive ideas will be founded because you're disrupting the very research that got the committee members clout and recognition. As they say, change comes a funeral at a time.

droopyEyelids 4y ago
It used to come a funeral at a time, but now that the next generation is forced to build their careers on the mistakes of their advisors, mistakes can easily outlive their creators.
dkqmduems 4y ago
Did you push at all? From experience, this is not an uncommon story. Perhaps this was your advisor's way of saying 'convince me'.
jasmer 4y ago
I see this kind of stuff all the time and I'm convinced that Academia is corrupt. While working against a Grad Student doesn't seem particularly evil, rather just a bit backstabby/political, I suggest that it is 'really bad' because it contravenes the basic organizing principle of science itself. Kind of like a Judge ruling one way or another for personal reasons, or ruling with a heavy conflict of interest. There needs to be much stronger ethical principles around this and an advisor hinting at obfuscating work for such reasons should be up for review.

stainablesteel 4y ago

"all metrics seem to decline as we keep adding more metrics" it's called bureaucracy

chrisbrandow 4y ago

Nice to see numbers put to this. I remember thinking through a bunch of tech/science that I was familiar with, and realizing that most (not all) of the fundamentals in every case were known by the early 60's, and we've been working out the (very important) details ever since. Nuclear, electronics, chemistry, biology, etc. plenty of counter-examples, I'm sure, but like once you know the structure of DNA and it's fundamental operations, the remaining discoveries will have a smaller impact.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436 - Jan 2023 (20 comments)

college_physics 4y ago

The science knowledge base grows monotonically but not necessarily at a steady rate. Actually far from it. There was a time in the 19th century when people thought physics discoveries were complete. A few decades later all hell broke lose. The problem we have right now is that we are stymied on the complexity front (materials, chemistry, biology, medicine etc) Our mental / mathematical models that we use to understand the world and even enable us to ask original scientific questions are losing their edge when things get complex. These tools are 19th century stuff (including all the AI junk) and we have milked them for all they are worth I would hypothesise that a new period of discovery will correlate with some breakthrough in the mathematics of complexity. We had a few false dawns but not the real thing

feoren 4y ago
> These tools are 19th century stuff (including all the AI junk) I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. I mean, you could claim that modern cryptography is based on ideas from the ancient Greeks (factoring numbers), and is therefore old and busted. Is every idea just derivative unless it uses a completely new kind of math? Software developers (maybe not you, but a large percentage of the users of this site) tend to automatically think older ideas are worse. But that's not true in math. Mathematical ideas don't expire. The idea of the number 7 is aeons old; the number 0 over a thousand years; the complex number i 450 years. But the numbers 7 and 0 and i are still extremely useful, in infinite combinations. If you think we have milked those numbers for all they're worth, you have an extremely limited imagination. Sure, most of the "AI junk" is a combination of old ideas like linear algebra and gradient descent, but used at a scale orders of magnitude larger than their creators ever imagined. (And quantity has a quality all its own.) It's that combination of ideas that is so powerful. Besides, backpropagation is a pretty damned novel idea. If you're looking for the one truly new idea from AI, it's backpropagation. You are vastly underestimating the volume of the idea space available to explore simply by combining the ideas and materials we already have. Crossover is a better source of variety than mutation is. You may be right that truly new concepts are the "raw materials" of invention, but we never run out of the raw ideas we have, and they prove to be useful in their combination up to the limits of our imaginations. It's actually surprising how likely you are to come up with a reasonably good idea by simply considering a few randomly-selected ideas together. > we are stymied on the complexity front (materials, chemistry, biology, medicine etc) Again you seem like your standard is: if it's not an entirely new thing where nothing like it has ever existed before, then it's boring!. If you think the volume of the idea-space from combining the materials, chemistry, biology, and medicine we already have/understand is X, it's almost certainly at least 2^X, or even X! (factorial). Besides, we are coming up with brand new materials all the time! Materials science is one of the most exciting frontiers of human technology.

signaru 4y ago

I had worked in academe long enough to see many papers submitted simply out of pressure to finish the degree.

deafpolygon 4y ago

I know this is OT, but I keep reading this as "paupers and parents"...