5 ms·

I wonder what percentage of academic work is based on cargo culting and practices like these. There are more "scientists" than ever and yet we dont really have

I wonder what percentage of academic work is based on cargo culting and practices like these. There are more "scientists" than ever and yet we dont really have a quantitative increase of people that are as productive as Euler, Einstein, Newton, Neumann or whoever you want to pick as a luminary

mjburgess 3y ago
Would any of them work in academia today? It seems unlikely. There are research problems to solve in industry, with more prestige, more pay, and so on.
- bsdpufferfish 3y ago
  Companies hire few of these people too (bad culture fit).
tutfbhuf 3y ago
I think that also has to do with the amount of complexity. Henri Poincaré is often said to have been the last man who knew all of math. Today, you need research teams across the world working on a very narrow topic to make tiny progress iteratively in the best case. I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone.
- questinthrow 3y ago
  Yeah the quantity and complexity of what you need to know now is daunting. But even so I dont think Einstein for example had to know the entirety of physics and math in order to produce a groundbreaking revolution in physics.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone. I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras. You're not wrong about how much more complex things have gotten, certainly. But you don't know what you don't know. Another Ramanujan or von Neumann could be right around the corner. Just look at all the wasted potential in our education system - it's impossible to quantify just how much effort is profoundly wasted. This article points directly to that wastage. We've tolerated an academic system that's hated by just about everyone except publishers, in an era where publishing is as close to free as it could be.
  - lupire 3y ago
    There is not room to make education a million times more efficient and effective for one single person. A brain has extreme physical limits. Computers can do it because they can combine millions of computers to work together, limited only by asymptomatic constraints like the Amdahl's law.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      You don't know what the limits of brains are. People like von Neumann show that we really have no idea what the upper bound on braininess is. Now, start extending that limit by integrating computers? The options are literally unimaginable. But that all kinda misses the point, which is, there's a lot of low lying fruit that we're leaving unpicked.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    >> I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone. > I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras. Pythagoras is best known as the center of a mystery cult. What did he bring a century forward?
    - Someone 3y ago
      I think he’s best known for his alleged mathematical discoveries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#In_mathematics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#In_mathematics: “Although Pythagoras is most famous today for his alleged mathematical discoveries, classical historians dispute whether he himself ever actually made any significant contributions to the field. […] The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but he may have been the first to introduce it to the Greeks. Some historians of mathematics have even suggested that he—or his students—may have constructed the first proof. Burkert rejects this suggestion as implausible, noting that Pythagoras was never credited with having proved any theorem in antiquity.”
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
epolanski 3y ago
Problem is as always greed for fame, power and money. Labs and researchers are given funds based on "impact". As we all know, when a metric becomes the goal, the metric gets gamified. This is very hard to fix. Gonna give you an example. As soon as you move in any direction in science you're entering a niche. Pretty much everything is its own niche where there's a limited number of people really able to review your paper. No, there's not thousands of experts dedicating their life to helicoidal peptides interactions with metal layers. It's an extremely small number of people. They all know each other and are gonna review each other's papers regularly. Solar-powered water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen? Again, extremely small club. Perovskite? Graetzel solar cells? Bigger club, but still, at the end of the day the relevant luminaries are a handful again. You think it's much different for quaternions or advanced complex numbers analysis? And those small clubs set the rules and standards, and there is really not much way to have oversight on those small clubs. Plenty of terrible science is published every day, I can confidently say 90 to 95% of experiments in Physics or Chemistry are impossible to reproduce (numbers people get by taking outlier results or even more often by tweaking the data). When it comes to softer sciences like psychology it's even worse. It's crap. It's sad, but I think the world desperately needs a *free* alternative to the biggest publishers out there like Nature or ACM or all these things. That free alternative has to be funded by universities and governments globally. This entity should only allow papers that present clear experiments that are reproduced elsewhere or under supervision. This would greatly enhance the quality and reliability of papers.
- questinthrow 3y ago
  Yeah its very true, the incentives are screwed. I think you're touching on the key difference here. Someone like Euler would have had to been forced not to do math, it was his passion. But you have all these "scientists" going through the motions doing "science" because its their job. Passionate individuals will always be rare and the worse part is that the current scientific system in place is tailor made to root these passionate individuals out. A good modern example is Grigori Perelman.
  - lupire 3y ago
    Outside of math, even passionate people need funding.
ants_everywhere 3y ago
These big names are usually promoted beyond their actual achievements [0] because of the tendency to make stories about great people who changed the world. The reality is murkier. Huge names like Lorentz and Poincare had worked on relativity before Einstein. Gregory and Barrow had proved the fundamental theorem of calculus before Newton, not to mention Leibniz's work. If you mythologize the past it's easier to look around and wonder why we don't have immortals like Zeus or incredible warriors like Achilles anymore. But the truth is science always proceeds by steps that look small at the time and it's often only in retrospect that things seem amazing and unprecedented. Semi-relatedly, I used to attend a seminar with a well-known Russian mathematician who would often chime in with Russian/Soviet priority over historical results mentioned by visiting speakers. The cold war created two mathematical cultures that had limited contact. So famous European and American mathematical results from, say the 40s to the 90s often had Soviet versions worked out independently in journals nobody here had ever heard of and written in a language they can't read. So this is all just a way of saying that empirically, the big kahuna theory of mathematical development seems more fiction than reality. And it should be treated with skepticism when you hear things framed in those terms. [0] Not that their achievements aren't great. They are all incredible. I just mean they seem more incredible than they are if we forget all the other incredible achievements. Shoulders of giants etc etc.
- lupire 3y ago
  Where all of today's Lorentzes and Poincares?
  - ants_everywhere 3y ago
    Realistically, a lot of them are probably training AI algorithms to get people to click on ads and questioning their life choices. But math keeps advancing at a good clip, there are tons of brilliant young people. Physics IIUC is largely gated on waiting for new experimental results. Einstein, Poincare, Newton and many others arrived at a time when the experimental physics data was perplexing and theoretical advances were needed to clear up the picture. The reverse is true now if I understand. People are just waiting for more funding to build larger accelerators or whatever big expensive astronomy things they need to test the many predictions we have from the various mathematical attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity. Biology seems to be moving pretty briskly. I can't speak to chemistry or any of the other sciences. EDIT: I should add that when I left academia about 8 years ago, the mood was that academia was increasingly hostile to smart people who just wanted to do research. The move toward running universities like businesses has pushed out a lot of people who would be candidates for the next Einstein or Poincare. Poincare happened to be independently wealthy, so wealth may again be more of a factor than it was during the last century.
User3456335 3y ago
No offence to them of course, but they already took the lower hanging fruit. It's hard to come up with fundamental axioms and laws when they have already been found. And there are definitely people around that have the same potential.

mjburgess 3y ago

Would any of them work in academia today? It seems unlikely. There are research problems to solve in industry, with more prestige, more pay, and so on.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago
Companies hire few of these people too (bad culture fit).

tutfbhuf 3y ago

I think that also has to do with the amount of complexity. Henri Poincaré is often said to have been the last man who knew all of math. Today, you need research teams across the world working on a very narrow topic to make tiny progress iteratively in the best case. I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone.

questinthrow 3y ago
Yeah the quantity and complexity of what you need to know now is daunting. But even so I dont think Einstein for example had to know the entirety of physics and math in order to produce a groundbreaking revolution in physics.
mandmandam 3y ago
> I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone. I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras. You're not wrong about how much more complex things have gotten, certainly. But you don't know what you don't know. Another Ramanujan or von Neumann could be right around the corner. Just look at all the wasted potential in our education system - it's impossible to quantify just how much effort is profoundly wasted. This article points directly to that wastage. We've tolerated an academic system that's hated by just about everyone except publishers, in an era where publishing is as close to free as it could be.
- lupire 3y ago
  There is not room to make education a million times more efficient and effective for one single person. A brain has extreme physical limits. Computers can do it because they can combine millions of computers to work together, limited only by asymptomatic constraints like the Amdahl's law.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    You don't know what the limits of brains are. People like von Neumann show that we really have no idea what the upper bound on braininess is. Now, start extending that limit by integrating computers? The options are literally unimaginable. But that all kinda misses the point, which is, there's a lot of low lying fruit that we're leaving unpicked.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  >> I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone. > I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras. Pythagoras is best known as the center of a mystery cult. What did he bring a century forward?
  - Someone 3y ago
    I think he’s best known for his alleged mathematical discoveries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#In_mathematics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#In_mathematics: “Although Pythagoras is most famous today for his alleged mathematical discoveries, classical historians dispute whether he himself ever actually made any significant contributions to the field. […] The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but he may have been the first to introduce it to the Greeks. Some historians of mathematics have even suggested that he—or his students—may have constructed the first proof. Burkert rejects this suggestion as implausible, noting that Pythagoras was never credited with having proved any theorem in antiquity.”
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago

epolanski 3y ago

Problem is as always greed for fame, power and money. Labs and researchers are given funds based on "impact". As we all know, when a metric becomes the goal, the metric gets gamified. This is very hard to fix. Gonna give you an example. As soon as you move in any direction in science you're entering a niche. Pretty much everything is its own niche where there's a limited number of people really able to review your paper. No, there's not thousands of experts dedicating their life to helicoidal peptides interactions with metal layers. It's an extremely small number of people. They all know each other and are gonna review each other's papers regularly. Solar-powered water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen? Again, extremely small club. Perovskite? Graetzel solar cells? Bigger club, but still, at the end of the day the relevant luminaries are a handful again. You think it's much different for quaternions or advanced complex numbers analysis? And those small clubs set the rules and standards, and there is really not much way to have oversight on those small clubs. Plenty of terrible science is published every day, I can confidently say 90 to 95% of experiments in Physics or Chemistry are impossible to reproduce (numbers people get by taking outlier results or even more often by tweaking the data). When it comes to softer sciences like psychology it's even worse. It's crap. It's sad, but I think the world desperately needs a *free* alternative to the biggest publishers out there like Nature or ACM or all these things. That free alternative has to be funded by universities and governments globally. This entity should only allow papers that present clear experiments that are reproduced elsewhere or under supervision. This would greatly enhance the quality and reliability of papers.

questinthrow 3y ago
Yeah its very true, the incentives are screwed. I think you're touching on the key difference here. Someone like Euler would have had to been forced not to do math, it was his passion. But you have all these "scientists" going through the motions doing "science" because its their job. Passionate individuals will always be rare and the worse part is that the current scientific system in place is tailor made to root these passionate individuals out. A good modern example is Grigori Perelman.
- lupire 3y ago
  Outside of math, even passionate people need funding.

ants_everywhere 3y ago

These big names are usually promoted beyond their actual achievements [0] because of the tendency to make stories about great people who changed the world. The reality is murkier. Huge names like Lorentz and Poincare had worked on relativity before Einstein. Gregory and Barrow had proved the fundamental theorem of calculus before Newton, not to mention Leibniz's work. If you mythologize the past it's easier to look around and wonder why we don't have immortals like Zeus or incredible warriors like Achilles anymore. But the truth is science always proceeds by steps that look small at the time and it's often only in retrospect that things seem amazing and unprecedented. Semi-relatedly, I used to attend a seminar with a well-known Russian mathematician who would often chime in with Russian/Soviet priority over historical results mentioned by visiting speakers. The cold war created two mathematical cultures that had limited contact. So famous European and American mathematical results from, say the 40s to the 90s often had Soviet versions worked out independently in journals nobody here had ever heard of and written in a language they can't read. So this is all just a way of saying that empirically, the big kahuna theory of mathematical development seems more fiction than reality. And it should be treated with skepticism when you hear things framed in those terms. [0] Not that their achievements aren't great. They are all incredible. I just mean they seem more incredible than they are if we forget all the other incredible achievements. Shoulders of giants etc etc.

lupire 3y ago
Where all of today's Lorentzes and Poincares?
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  Realistically, a lot of them are probably training AI algorithms to get people to click on ads and questioning their life choices. But math keeps advancing at a good clip, there are tons of brilliant young people. Physics IIUC is largely gated on waiting for new experimental results. Einstein, Poincare, Newton and many others arrived at a time when the experimental physics data was perplexing and theoretical advances were needed to clear up the picture. The reverse is true now if I understand. People are just waiting for more funding to build larger accelerators or whatever big expensive astronomy things they need to test the many predictions we have from the various mathematical attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity. Biology seems to be moving pretty briskly. I can't speak to chemistry or any of the other sciences. EDIT: I should add that when I left academia about 8 years ago, the mood was that academia was increasingly hostile to smart people who just wanted to do research. The move toward running universities like businesses has pushed out a lot of people who would be candidates for the next Einstein or Poincare. Poincare happened to be independently wealthy, so wealth may again be more of a factor than it was during the last century.

User3456335 3y ago

No offence to them of course, but they already took the lower hanging fruit. It's hard to come up with fundamental axioms and laws when they have already been found. And there are definitely people around that have the same potential.