Lots pf people have moaned about this problem, but this is a clean description of the situation, the forces that might be creating it, and a clear, simple possible solution.
No doubt the proposed solution has problems of its own, but it is certainly an interesting idea.
Great piece. It's a great example of the dark sides of results-orientation, accountability, transparency, and the fear of punishment from spending "Other People's Money." These things are good, but when they take over the entire process, we've got problems; things need to swing back and settle into a new equilibrium that's more tolerant.
These are exactly the kind of things that governments and universities with large endowments were good at funding. Right now, we're dependent on large corporations like Alphabet subsidizing moonshots to do this kind of basic research (and as some recent articles indicate, investors are already getting antsy about these.)
Short-termism discourages deep thinking and deep working. VCs already understand that one winner subsidizes all the losers; so too is it with basic / speculative research. Until we're will to culturally accept, openly and without reservation, that there will be waste and that fact is OK, we're not going to get anywhere.
The article mentions how many discoveries come from individuals. I think it's worth considering that human knowledge and technology may be so advanced that a single individual, however great their creativity and intelligence, simply can't make a large contribution like they used to be able to.
In principle I like the article, because it points out the problems with doing research today. But I don't like that the proposed solution is given so quickly, without more discussion about the ups and downs of it. Basically the article falls into the same trap that it describes.
The main reason imho is that academia is overcrowded. When a field becomes crowded, popularity starts weighing more than inventiveness, perseverence, creativity and risk-taking. It may sound counterintuitive, but maybe they should reduce public spending for research.
I think this is a very good point. Population density seems to play a crucial role in the dynamics of group behavior, not just in phenomenon of the article, but in many other aspects of society as well.
Could be. Both sides in the cold war pushed education as a social "cure all". And thus many that would be quite happy in a hands on job as long as it offered decent pay has gone on to get a degree.
As someone who has been in grad school way too long this article provides a succinct description of the reason I hesitate to consider an academic career.
However, I'm not sure the suggested solution at the end of the article is viable. Many successful researchers have learned that funding and reputation are based on creating and managing a brand, with scientific substance being a secondary consideration. I feel like it will be difficult to prevent that from factoring into hiring decisions regardless of the metrics used.
The premise that scientific progress has been slower in the past 50 years than in the 50 before that, and incremental in a way that it was not in the past, seems untenable to me and consistent with the authors being nostalgic for an earlier time that perhaps does not exist. I’m pretty sure someone in 1965 would be impressed to hear that (1) we can engineer viruses that allow in vivo neurons to be controlled by light; (2) we can build robots that use reinforcement learning and ML techniques to drive around a city; or (3) we discovered that humans interbred with Neanderthal, by means of sequencing 40k-year-old bones. To me these projects seem as impressive as any of the past. They all benefited from massive collaborations and would have been impossible to do alone, even by a world-class genius with a plenitude of coffee, time, and tenure.
I also object to a few more minor points. Today we have many of yesteryear’s Bell Labs and new ones spring up every year. I think we might be in the most active time period ever for independent and industrial research labs — consider for example OpenAI, the Allen Institute, RAND corporation, Charles River laboratories, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Facebook, 2AI labs, Draper Laboratory, YC Research, IBM Watson Group, Communications Design Group, Xerox PARC, fivethirtyeight, New York Times R&D lab, Microsoft Research* , Google* , Bose Corporation, and SRI, not to mention the hundreds of biotech startups and tech companies that do applied reseach (*s because they are acknowledged in the article). Interestingly, I think Nokia Bell Labs might itself qualify as a modern Bell Labs — it still exists, and in 2014 a scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for work done there in the 1980s, which is after the authors’ cutoff.
Furthermore, I’d be interested in seeing evidence that discoveries of the past can be at least in part attributed to a lack of communication between the scientist and others, and that today’s levels of communication are greater and that it has a negative impact. I have evidence that at least one world-class scientist of the past, Francis Galton, spent a ton of time communicating with others and used what he learned from that communication as a core part of his most important works (see, in particular, his autobiography, which discusses his communication in detail). Similarly, at least some classic big discoveries of the past, such as Watson & Crick’s DNA work, was possible only because there was more than one person involved — in fact, more than two.
Cannot agree with this more. I'm a little sick of all these articles on how science is in so much trouble and is doomed. I've been a biologist now for ~18 years. In that time, I've seen so much advancement and real breakthroughs I'm at times astounded and giddy. If folks are really disappointed in the progress in at least biology over the last two decades, people aren't paying attention. I am also very optimistic that progress will only continue to accelerate.
I'm not saying it's a perfect system, or it wouldn't be nice to a be a little less competitive, easier to get longer-term grants, more stable and certain paths for careers, etc – but to say the system is not producing important results is in my opinion wrong.
"Shinya Yamanaka proved that introduction of a small set of transcription factors into a differentiated cell was sufficient to revert the cell to a pluripotent state. Yamanaka focused on factors that are important for maintaining pluripotency in embryonic stem (ES) cells"
That you can revert a differentiated cell into a pluripotent embryonic stem cell using just four transcription factors is astounding.
It just depends on the field really. If aviation was your thing you would be amazed at the progress from biplanes to space travel in 1915-1965. But if you jumped forwards from 1965 to 2015 you might wonder what progress had been made, or even if we had gone backwards. Where's the lunar colony? In 1965 they were confident that fusion power was 30 years in the future. Right now, we think the same thing!
All fields seems to follow something like an S curve.
It starts off slowly as the foundation is laid (aerodynamic understanding, electric generator, etc etc) then then goes near vertical for a number of decades as the possibilities that said foundation unlocked gets plucked.
And then it flattens out again as it starts running into physical limitations etc.
Never mind that the last century or so saw two massive, highly technological, wars. Wars, to be a bit cynical, is the one thing that seems to get a free pass when it comes to the politics of money.
Nonsense. Look at 90,000 lb. thrust high bypass turbofan engines that makes flying long distances cheap, even for poor people with moderate savings rates. Look at avionics and control systems that make the flight safer than the drive to the airport.
You want spectacular. You missed the real advances.
And the gas turbine itself (steam variant) had been created by the late 19th century.
Going from steam turbine to kerosene-fueled jet engine took some doing, but the fundamental concept had been validated. What needed to happen were improvements in fluid mechanics, in materials science, in machining, and in the iterative process of design, build, test, and refinement that simply takes build cycles.
Both the Germans and British were flying jet-powered aircraft by the end of WWII (though only the Germans flew these in combat IIRC). So again, the fundamental principles had been worked out, but iterating on design took more development.
I'm kicking around an ontology of technological mechanisms (or dynamics), which tries to detail what the specific bases of technological change are.
* The engine itself is an energy transformation system (converting fuel to thrust), and relies on numerous other energy transmission and transformation components (shafts, bearings, fan blades, turbine blades, actuators).
* It relies on fuel -- vast amounts of cheap liquid hydrocarbons, or similarly energy-dense fuels which are safe and convenient to handle.
* It requires a fundamental understanding of fluid dynamics -- systemic scientific knowledge.
* It requires materials capable of supporting operation under the conditions of a jet engine: very high RPM, high stress, high thermal load, high pressure load, resistance to material creep, resistance to vapour or cavitation damage, etc. Containment that is light but effective for the fan casing itself.
* High levels of precision in specification, machining, and inspection of components.
* Specific imaging and sensing capabilities (multiple x-ray, acoustic, and other sensing beyond mere human abilities) are required.
* Organisational structures capabile of designing, producing, operating, and maintaining highly technical equipment.
* Information recording, processing, and transmission of the technical requirements for building, operating, and maintaining highly technical equipment.
* The technical domain skills required to design, build, operate, and maintain HTE.
* Understandings and mitigation of adverse consequences of design and operations.
Vaclav Smil has a book dedicated to the two most significant prime movers of the 20th century, diesel engines and gas turbines, which might have a better breakdown of power output over time. In his earlier Energy in World History (1994), his plot of gas turbine outputs from about 1940 - 1990 increases from about 10^5 watts to 10^8 watts, with a distinct trailing off toward the last decade or two of the plot. (Steam turbines exceed these with maximum power in the gigawatt range.)
The gas turbine plot on a log-linear scale (log power, linear time) is largely linear through the 1970s, though detail is low. Sources aren't provided, I suspect this is Smil's own compilation.
From my reading, they didn't seem to claim that all scientific progress has been slower, just fundamental advancements and theory, c.f.
"...the pace of fundamental innovation, the kinds of theories and engineering practices that will feed the pipeline of future progress, appears, to some observers, including us, to be slowing..."
That's not to say that we haven't accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge and techniques, but our findings don't seem to be simplifying in a way that makes them easier to understand.
"This is not to deny that our time traveler would find the Internet, new medical imaging devices, advances in molecular biology and gene editing, the verification of gravity waves, and other inventions and discoveries remarkable, nor to deny that these developments often required leaps of imagination, deep mathematical analyses, and hard-earned technical know-how. Nevertheless..."
You have to be enormously jaded to list off a bunch of huge advances and then basically say...meh. How doesn't this line invalidate everything that follows it?
I disagree with the author but this position is consistent with his thesis: that basic science hasn't advanced as dramatically in the past half century as it did in the preceding half century, even if its exploitation has.
The reason I disagree with the author is that there's an ebb and flow, and the advances of the period 1915-1965 built on a lot of other interesting work done before 1915 (the period from Maxwell to the end of WWI were amazing too; Einstein's three astonishing papers dated from 1905 and of course themselves built upon prior work).
I think we're just in a tough period where we've reached the limits of our current tools (both theoretical/mathematical and experimental) -- essentially the rowboats of physics and biology are wallowing while people understand the implications and try to catch up.
Re: "basic science", what about "advances in molecular biology and gene editing"? I don't know exactly what the authors have in mind, but CRISPR-Cas, recombinant DNA, RNA interference, identity of the hox genes, DNA sequencing...all of these were huge advances in basic science in the last 50 years (some of them are also now being used practically).
I guess it's tough to really put myself in the shoes of someone living 75 years ago, but from where I'm sitting (I'm a biologist) the basic science is moving so unbelievably fast it's exhilarating.
1. Hand someone from 1965 an Iphone.
2. Let her be discharged from the hospital the next day, after robotic surgery for stage 1 ovarian cancer. (A lot of tissue was left in the hospital.)
3. His slower (535mph vs 600 mph) cross country round trip only cost him $60 in 1965 dollars.
4. Oh, we've detected 2 gravitational wave events.
5. Oh, we've detected an elementary particle with the mass of a Barium atom.
6. We've detected superconductivity at temperatures higher than dry ice.
7. Lasers are ubiquitous and some are more than 50% efficient, energy in to laser energy out. The developed world runs on 1.5 um laser light.
8. Two groups figured out how to control-x control-v DNA.
But yes, the share of innovation due to professors has gone down, as complex work is now done by millions, and driven by consumers, not philosophical questions.
In academia, the two most important sources of feedback scientists receive about their performance are the written evaluations following the submission of papers for publication and proposals for research funding. Unfortunately, in both cases, the peer review process rarely supports pursuing paths that sharply diverge from the mainstream direction, or even from researchers’ own previously published work.
Hmmm. All referee reports I receive or write usually revolve around novelty of the idea. Incremental work gets published too, but not if it's only a small delta w.r.t. previous work.
Science was so much elite, now it goes OpenSource (say BioHacking)! There is this "official" science treadmill, paid and with reputation. And there are thousands of scientist that quit, some continuing in their garage. Eventually, they get a place in industry. And as the cultural shift continues, they will come back and publish their results. Platforms for such scientific exchange already exist. Prior art is key!
34 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadNo doubt the proposed solution has problems of its own, but it is certainly an interesting idea.
These are exactly the kind of things that governments and universities with large endowments were good at funding. Right now, we're dependent on large corporations like Alphabet subsidizing moonshots to do this kind of basic research (and as some recent articles indicate, investors are already getting antsy about these.)
Short-termism discourages deep thinking and deep working. VCs already understand that one winner subsidizes all the losers; so too is it with basic / speculative research. Until we're will to culturally accept, openly and without reservation, that there will be waste and that fact is OK, we're not going to get anywhere.
However, I'm not sure the suggested solution at the end of the article is viable. Many successful researchers have learned that funding and reputation are based on creating and managing a brand, with scientific substance being a secondary consideration. I feel like it will be difficult to prevent that from factoring into hiring decisions regardless of the metrics used.
I also object to a few more minor points. Today we have many of yesteryear’s Bell Labs and new ones spring up every year. I think we might be in the most active time period ever for independent and industrial research labs — consider for example OpenAI, the Allen Institute, RAND corporation, Charles River laboratories, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Facebook, 2AI labs, Draper Laboratory, YC Research, IBM Watson Group, Communications Design Group, Xerox PARC, fivethirtyeight, New York Times R&D lab, Microsoft Research* , Google* , Bose Corporation, and SRI, not to mention the hundreds of biotech startups and tech companies that do applied reseach (*s because they are acknowledged in the article). Interestingly, I think Nokia Bell Labs might itself qualify as a modern Bell Labs — it still exists, and in 2014 a scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for work done there in the 1980s, which is after the authors’ cutoff.
Furthermore, I’d be interested in seeing evidence that discoveries of the past can be at least in part attributed to a lack of communication between the scientist and others, and that today’s levels of communication are greater and that it has a negative impact. I have evidence that at least one world-class scientist of the past, Francis Galton, spent a ton of time communicating with others and used what he learned from that communication as a core part of his most important works (see, in particular, his autobiography, which discusses his communication in detail). Similarly, at least some classic big discoveries of the past, such as Watson & Crick’s DNA work, was possible only because there was more than one person involved — in fact, more than two.
I'm not saying it's a perfect system, or it wouldn't be nice to a be a little less competitive, easier to get longer-term grants, more stable and certain paths for careers, etc – but to say the system is not producing important results is in my opinion wrong.
Can you share some with us that we might not have heard about outside of the field of biology? I'd love to share a little of the excitement. :)
"Shinya Yamanaka proved that introduction of a small set of transcription factors into a differentiated cell was sufficient to revert the cell to a pluripotent state. Yamanaka focused on factors that are important for maintaining pluripotency in embryonic stem (ES) cells"
That you can revert a differentiated cell into a pluripotent embryonic stem cell using just four transcription factors is astounding.
It starts off slowly as the foundation is laid (aerodynamic understanding, electric generator, etc etc) then then goes near vertical for a number of decades as the possibilities that said foundation unlocked gets plucked.
And then it flattens out again as it starts running into physical limitations etc.
Never mind that the last century or so saw two massive, highly technological, wars. Wars, to be a bit cynical, is the one thing that seems to get a free pass when it comes to the politics of money.
You want spectacular. You missed the real advances.
Going from steam turbine to kerosene-fueled jet engine took some doing, but the fundamental concept had been validated. What needed to happen were improvements in fluid mechanics, in materials science, in machining, and in the iterative process of design, build, test, and refinement that simply takes build cycles.
Both the Germans and British were flying jet-powered aircraft by the end of WWII (though only the Germans flew these in combat IIRC). So again, the fundamental principles had been worked out, but iterating on design took more development.
I'm kicking around an ontology of technological mechanisms (or dynamics), which tries to detail what the specific bases of technological change are.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
Taking the case of the jet engine:
* The engine itself is an energy transformation system (converting fuel to thrust), and relies on numerous other energy transmission and transformation components (shafts, bearings, fan blades, turbine blades, actuators).
* It relies on fuel -- vast amounts of cheap liquid hydrocarbons, or similarly energy-dense fuels which are safe and convenient to handle.
* It requires a fundamental understanding of fluid dynamics -- systemic scientific knowledge.
* It requires materials capable of supporting operation under the conditions of a jet engine: very high RPM, high stress, high thermal load, high pressure load, resistance to material creep, resistance to vapour or cavitation damage, etc. Containment that is light but effective for the fan casing itself.
* High levels of precision in specification, machining, and inspection of components.
* Specific imaging and sensing capabilities (multiple x-ray, acoustic, and other sensing beyond mere human abilities) are required.
* Organisational structures capabile of designing, producing, operating, and maintaining highly technical equipment.
* Information recording, processing, and transmission of the technical requirements for building, operating, and maintaining highly technical equipment.
* The technical domain skills required to design, build, operate, and maintain HTE.
* Understandings and mitigation of adverse consequences of design and operations.
Vaclav Smil has a book dedicated to the two most significant prime movers of the 20th century, diesel engines and gas turbines, which might have a better breakdown of power output over time. In his earlier Energy in World History (1994), his plot of gas turbine outputs from about 1940 - 1990 increases from about 10^5 watts to 10^8 watts, with a distinct trailing off toward the last decade or two of the plot. (Steam turbines exceed these with maximum power in the gigawatt range.)
The gas turbine plot on a log-linear scale (log power, linear time) is largely linear through the 1970s, though detail is low. Sources aren't provided, I suspect this is Smil's own compilation.
"...the pace of fundamental innovation, the kinds of theories and engineering practices that will feed the pipeline of future progress, appears, to some observers, including us, to be slowing..."
That's not to say that we haven't accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge and techniques, but our findings don't seem to be simplifying in a way that makes them easier to understand.
You have to be enormously jaded to list off a bunch of huge advances and then basically say...meh. How doesn't this line invalidate everything that follows it?
The reason I disagree with the author is that there's an ebb and flow, and the advances of the period 1915-1965 built on a lot of other interesting work done before 1915 (the period from Maxwell to the end of WWI were amazing too; Einstein's three astonishing papers dated from 1905 and of course themselves built upon prior work).
I think we're just in a tough period where we've reached the limits of our current tools (both theoretical/mathematical and experimental) -- essentially the rowboats of physics and biology are wallowing while people understand the implications and try to catch up.
I guess it's tough to really put myself in the shoes of someone living 75 years ago, but from where I'm sitting (I'm a biologist) the basic science is moving so unbelievably fast it's exhilarating.
But yes, the share of innovation due to professors has gone down, as complex work is now done by millions, and driven by consumers, not philosophical questions.
Hmmm. All referee reports I receive or write usually revolve around novelty of the idea. Incremental work gets published too, but not if it's only a small delta w.r.t. previous work.