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>We are in a period of widespread outright institutional collapse who is "we"? This thesis is easily tested by zooming away from the US for a second (I know, v

>We are in a period of widespread outright institutional collapse who is "we"? This thesis is easily tested by zooming away from the US for a second (I know, very hard exercise). The burden of knowledge is visible everywhere even in countries that have drastically improved their governance. Lee Kuan Yew used to lament the increased levels of education at the expense of family formation, experts are getting older everywhere from India to China, to Indonesia and South Korea, making the same gains in computing performance is harder and harder regardless if you're in Taiwan or Arizona. Capital required for economic growth, or drug discovery cost or any other reasonable proxy for the cost of new ideas also increases everywhere. Institutional collapse is completely coincidental to the basic mechanism that is perfectly well laid out in the article. To build better knowledge you need to account for the old knowledge and then some, so pretty much by definition it's an information theoretical necessity that better ideas get more expensive. Try to imagine a world where the theory is actually true that there is no burden of knowledge and the reason is institutional collapse. Then you'd have countries where the life expectancy grew faster than when we invented soap and antibiotics. You'd have places that make advances in computing as we did in the 80s and 90s. You'd have places where VC's invest less money every year but get more returns every year. It'd be a completely bizarre world compared to the one we're in.

advael 2y ago
I think you're right to point out that some "burden of knowledge" is essentially inevitable, especially within a particular field or targeting a particular metric (e.g. life expectancy, though of course that's one that's so broad that there will be considerable influence from factors other than knowledge advances at the technological frontier). Burden of knowledge shows up in individual endeavors too, with most skills following a learning curve to mastery that looks somewhat logarithmic But I don't think the article is arguing that there is no such thing as burden of knowledge, nor am I. In fact, the article has a whole section where it explicates this, concluding that since it's talking about a phenomenon for which there appears to be a marked shift in the last few decades, an inherent and permanent problem like burden of knowledge isn't adequate alone to explain this change. The article is arguing against treating this phenomenon as the sole or most important factor behind the widespread sense that it's hard to do research, and I stand by the assertion that the more relevant driving factor right now is institutional decay: The faculty of universities are in a near-constant state of complaining about administrative bloat in their institutions, which has dramatically increased relatively recently. Also, there are a lot of methodological issues that have come to light as a result of the widespread cross-disciplinary replication crisis that got some press in the last decade, and which seem to largely stem from misaligned institutional incentives which come from various sources, including pressure from increasingly muscular industries about the nature and results of research they're interested in, pressure from publishers, both traditional journals and the journalistic organizations that by and large publicize scientific results in practice, and careerist pressures that create publication biases as well. I think for this specific case, the article makes the case more eloquently than I can. My comment made the further claim that institutional decay is such a widespread serious problem in many of our institutions today that it should be our first guess for why any outcome we care about that can reasonably be assumed to be mediated by some important institution is worsening over the last few decades. I call this the null hypothesis because that is the traditional name for this kind of assumption As with anything complicated compressed into a single articulable concern, the reasons why research is perceived as slowing down are no doubt attributable to a variety of factors, and saying this perception isn't primarily a burden of knowledge issue isn't equivalent to the claim that burden of knowledge doesn't exist at all

advael 2y ago

I think you're right to point out that some "burden of knowledge" is essentially inevitable, especially within a particular field or targeting a particular metric (e.g. life expectancy, though of course that's one that's so broad that there will be considerable influence from factors other than knowledge advances at the technological frontier). Burden of knowledge shows up in individual endeavors too, with most skills following a learning curve to mastery that looks somewhat logarithmic But I don't think the article is arguing that there is no such thing as burden of knowledge, nor am I. In fact, the article has a whole section where it explicates this, concluding that since it's talking about a phenomenon for which there appears to be a marked shift in the last few decades, an inherent and permanent problem like burden of knowledge isn't adequate alone to explain this change. The article is arguing against treating this phenomenon as the sole or most important factor behind the widespread sense that it's hard to do research, and I stand by the assertion that the more relevant driving factor right now is institutional decay: The faculty of universities are in a near-constant state of complaining about administrative bloat in their institutions, which has dramatically increased relatively recently. Also, there are a lot of methodological issues that have come to light as a result of the widespread cross-disciplinary replication crisis that got some press in the last decade, and which seem to largely stem from misaligned institutional incentives which come from various sources, including pressure from increasingly muscular industries about the nature and results of research they're interested in, pressure from publishers, both traditional journals and the journalistic organizations that by and large publicize scientific results in practice, and careerist pressures that create publication biases as well. I think for this specific case, the article makes the case more eloquently than I can. My comment made the further claim that institutional decay is such a widespread serious problem in many of our institutions today that it should be our first guess for why any outcome we care about that can reasonably be assumed to be mediated by some important institution is worsening over the last few decades. I call this the null hypothesis because that is the traditional name for this kind of assumption As with anything complicated compressed into a single articulable concern, the reasons why research is perceived as slowing down are no doubt attributable to a variety of factors, and saying this perception isn't primarily a burden of knowledge issue isn't equivalent to the claim that burden of knowledge doesn't exist at all