5 ms·

Scientific Stagnation

58 points by ironchief 12y ago

nabla9 12y ago
Comment on drug discovery: Drug industry have been criticized for exaggerating their R&D numbers. Critics also claim that private funding is directed towards drugs that contain active moieties that are same or closely related to active moieties in products that have been previously approved by FDA and that wast majority of important breakthrough drugs are the result of publicly funded research. If someone discovers drug that already works and makes billions, it justifies pushing new molecule that has same functionality but is covered with different patents. FDA approves typically less than new 30 NCE:s per year. Some are classified as NCE:s just for administrative purposes.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Comment on the lengthening "time to PhD" and "time in postdoc" measures: Those don't indicate a declining marginal productivity of scientific labor, but a declining marginal demand for it. PhDs and post-docs take longer nowadays because it takes more publications and more experience to get a "real job" (defined as some combination of a permanent paid research position and the ability to win grants for oneself) (due to the exponential growth of university-going student populations leveling off starting in the late '70s). Most of the claims and measures about academic science actually show much less trend towards stagnation when this trend in scientific employment is considered as an independent explanation.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Exactly - and the declining demand explanation doesn't even necessarily imply a general societal-level lack of demand. Simply that the academic system is now weighted to favor increasing funding for administrators rather than the professoriate, which creates a lack of opportunities for early-career researchers.
ekm2 12y ago
My hypothesis is that high end math talent from which scientists are historically recruited simply has other avenues of making money.Wall street and Silicon valley basically milks them away.
jostmey 12y ago
In every generation there have been great minds that could reshape the world. Tesla & Edison gave the world electricity, Von Braun & Goddard brought us to space, and Oppenheimer unleashed the atom bomb. The question has always been will society support what these people can offer us. The answer is 'not always'. Take genetic engineering for example. Recombinant Genetic Engineering has been around since the 70's but society never fully embraced its applications. The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social media and video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and technological achievement (in my personal opinion).
- FD3SA 12y ago
  The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social media and video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and technological achievement" This is because the current generation has been dealt the worst deck since the Great Depression. Education, housing and healthcare costs have skyrocketed while wages have remained stagnant. Social trust has been eroded by corrupt public institutions and markets (big banking, big law, big corp and big politics all in bed). This generation has dealt with their realities quite calmly in my opinion. Any other would've been rioting in the streets by now.
  - jacobr1 12y ago
    > Any other would've been rioting in the streets by now. This seems likely because is absolute terms the current situation is a relatively comfortable one. While being underemployed, having a huge debt load, high cost of living and observing corruption clearly sucks, if you are still housed clothed and fed, if you still have general liberty and democratic enfranchisement (albeit perhaps seemingly with less impact) you are in a generally good shape by any historical standard. The costs of civil unrest are high. Direct injustice needs to occur (outside of a mob situation), social injustices just don't seem sufficient.
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
      The levels of homelessness and malnutrition are actually at historic highs for the post-WW2 Western world.
sbspalding 12y ago
We typically have a very hard time predicting the path of technological development, primarily because we have a hard time understanding when there will be inflection points that will utterly obliterate the previous status quo. One great example is the Malthusian check/catastrophe, the idea that agricultural development would not be able to keep up with population growth and that without a plague or other substantial check on population, there would be millions of people starving. Malthus posited this in the late-1700s and probably would have been right if the Industrial Revolution and the associated massive shifts in the technological landscape hadn't changed everything. We can see similar ideas when we think about the various "Peak" energy scares over the last 50 years ago. While it is absolutely true that technological stagnation occurs and possibly is occurring right now, I think we are always better off recognizing that thinking linearly about how technology develops and will develop can be a fools errand. That's my two bitcoins.

58 points by ironchief 12y ago

Comment on drug discovery: Drug industry have been criticized for exaggerating their R&D numbers. Critics also claim that private funding is directed towards drugs that contain active moieties that are same or closely related to active moieties in products that have been previously approved by FDA and that wast majority of important breakthrough drugs are the result of publicly funded research. If someone discovers drug that already works and makes billions, it justifies pushing new molecule that has same functionality but is covered with different patents. FDA approves typically less than new 30 NCE:s per year. Some are classified as NCE:s just for administrative purposes.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Comment on the lengthening "time to PhD" and "time in postdoc" measures: Those don't indicate a declining marginal productivity of scientific labor, but a declining marginal demand for it. PhDs and post-docs take longer nowadays because it takes more publications and more experience to get a "real job" (defined as some combination of a permanent paid research position and the ability to win grants for oneself) (due to the exponential growth of university-going student populations leveling off starting in the late '70s). Most of the claims and measures about academic science actually show much less trend towards stagnation when this trend in scientific employment is considered as an independent explanation.

benbreen 12y ago
Exactly - and the declining demand explanation doesn't even necessarily imply a general societal-level lack of demand. Simply that the academic system is now weighted to favor increasing funding for administrators rather than the professoriate, which creates a lack of opportunities for early-career researchers.

ekm2 12y ago

My hypothesis is that high end math talent from which scientists are historically recruited simply has other avenues of making money.Wall street and Silicon valley basically milks them away.

jostmey 12y ago

In every generation there have been great minds that could reshape the world. Tesla & Edison gave the world electricity, Von Braun & Goddard brought us to space, and Oppenheimer unleashed the atom bomb. The question has always been will society support what these people can offer us. The answer is 'not always'. Take genetic engineering for example. Recombinant Genetic Engineering has been around since the 70's but society never fully embraced its applications. The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social media and video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and technological achievement (in my personal opinion).

FD3SA 12y ago
The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social media and video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and technological achievement" This is because the current generation has been dealt the worst deck since the Great Depression. Education, housing and healthcare costs have skyrocketed while wages have remained stagnant. Social trust has been eroded by corrupt public institutions and markets (big banking, big law, big corp and big politics all in bed). This generation has dealt with their realities quite calmly in my opinion. Any other would've been rioting in the streets by now.
- jacobr1 12y ago
  > Any other would've been rioting in the streets by now. This seems likely because is absolute terms the current situation is a relatively comfortable one. While being underemployed, having a huge debt load, high cost of living and observing corruption clearly sucks, if you are still housed clothed and fed, if you still have general liberty and democratic enfranchisement (albeit perhaps seemingly with less impact) you are in a generally good shape by any historical standard. The costs of civil unrest are high. Direct injustice needs to occur (outside of a mob situation), social injustices just don't seem sufficient.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    The levels of homelessness and malnutrition are actually at historic highs for the post-WW2 Western world.

sbspalding 12y ago

We typically have a very hard time predicting the path of technological development, primarily because we have a hard time understanding when there will be inflection points that will utterly obliterate the previous status quo. One great example is the Malthusian check/catastrophe, the idea that agricultural development would not be able to keep up with population growth and that without a plague or other substantial check on population, there would be millions of people starving. Malthus posited this in the late-1700s and probably would have been right if the Industrial Revolution and the associated massive shifts in the technological landscape hadn't changed everything. We can see similar ideas when we think about the various "Peak" energy scares over the last 50 years ago. While it is absolutely true that technological stagnation occurs and possibly is occurring right now, I think we are always better off recognizing that thinking linearly about how technology develops and will develop can be a fools errand. That's my two bitcoins.