I’ll contribute my hypothesis for why science hasn’t made as much progress since 1920, even though I have no special conviction in it. I just thought about the problem recently and it was the best I came up with.
First, I asked a few people to see if they thought it was the case, also, that science hasn’t been progressing ‘lately’. The small set of answers were unanimous with respect to basic science (e.g. physics) but it was pointed out that plenty of progress has been made in biology and medicine (e.g.,genome project) and technology fields.
My hypothesis is that we evolved a paradigm for science and thinking in the 18th/19th centuries that was really good at systematizing, and we quickly did all the systematizing we readily could. (All the low-hanging fruit.) For another big jump in progress, we need a new, qualitatively different way of thinking about science that is not based on systematizing.
(I personally don’t like this hypothesis because I like systematizing and would hope it could be ever-productive.)
A second hypothesis I heard from one of the people I asked is that all the progress has in fact been indirectly due to Gauss; he laid the seeds for all the progress we’ve made, and we just need to wait for another systematizing genius to come along. I consider this remotely possible, because Gauss significantly touched so many fields.
With respect to the hypothesis of this post, I think there are certain inefficiencies built into the system (endless grant writing, publication gymnastics, etc.) and possibly more publications than necessary clogging up the system, but that there are good scientists doing good science so it’s not really such a problem as to be an explanation for the lack of productivity. I guess what I’m saying is that I believe science is both incremental hard work and progress with big game-changing ideas. We’ve been doing the incremental work well enough, perhaps, but it all seems incremental lately (after calculus, classical mechanics, relativity, .etc).
(My SO criticizes over my shoulder—what about Quantum Field heory in the 1950s?)
Later edit: was this down-voted for being off-topic, chatty, noisy or proposing unlikely hypotheses?
I voted the post down for, in a nutshell, flamebait.
The post starts off with observations about the CRU emails, but makes little use of these observations. The CRU-related reasoning appears to be the following: “Hanson dismisses the CRU leaked emails as not a big deal, supporting the hypothesis that economists are less interested in searching for reliable knowledge than in protecting their turf and signaling senority”. This is a) peripheral to the central claims of the post, b) using anecdotal evidence about anecdotal evidence in support of a strong overarching claim about science in general.
(Mark Twain once noted: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” This post gets a nice return of speculation out of a small investment of anecdote.)
The central claims are interesting, if caricatural, i.e. that “there hasn’t been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years” and this “has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government—that is by the signaling and control view”.
There would be value in a post that tried to build an actual argument in support of these theses, and such a post would require no reference to (commentary on commentary on) current events which are likely to be soon forgotten anyway.
What sociologists of science are actually saying about science is much more subtle and interesting than caricatures of “idealistic vs signaling”. The two “views” of science are not mutually exclusive, and it’s not a matter of one view being the Good Guys’ view and the other being the Bad Guys’ view.
I mentioned them because they are current, and because it was thinking about them that got me considering the problem again. Not “flamebait” just the most current application of the problem I am addressing. A decade ago I might have used Plasma Cosmology (http://www.plasmacosmology.net/), since I had then recently read Lerner’s “The Big Bang Never Happened” (http://bigbangneverhappened.org/ ).
I’ll contribute my hypothesis for why science hasn’t made as much progress since 1920, even though I have no special conviction in it. I just thought about the problem recently and it was the best I came up with.
First, I asked a few people to see if they thought it was the case, also, that science hasn’t been progressing ‘lately’. The small set of answers were unanimous with respect to basic science (e.g. physics) but it was pointed out that plenty of progress has been made in biology and medicine (e.g.,genome project) and technology fields.
My hypothesis is that we evolved a paradigm for science and thinking in the 18th/19th centuries that was really good at systematizing, and we quickly did all the systematizing we readily could. (All the low-hanging fruit.) For another big jump in progress, we need a new, qualitatively different way of thinking about science that is not based on systematizing.
(I personally don’t like this hypothesis because I like systematizing and would hope it could be ever-productive.)
A second hypothesis I heard from one of the people I asked is that all the progress has in fact been indirectly due to Gauss; he laid the seeds for all the progress we’ve made, and we just need to wait for another systematizing genius to come along. I consider this remotely possible, because Gauss significantly touched so many fields.
With respect to the hypothesis of this post, I think there are certain inefficiencies built into the system (endless grant writing, publication gymnastics, etc.) and possibly more publications than necessary clogging up the system, but that there are good scientists doing good science so it’s not really such a problem as to be an explanation for the lack of productivity. I guess what I’m saying is that I believe science is both incremental hard work and progress with big game-changing ideas. We’ve been doing the incremental work well enough, perhaps, but it all seems incremental lately (after calculus, classical mechanics, relativity, .etc).
(My SO criticizes over my shoulder—what about Quantum Field heory in the 1950s?)
Later edit: was this down-voted for being off-topic, chatty, noisy or proposing unlikely hypotheses?
I voted the post down for, in a nutshell, flamebait.
The post starts off with observations about the CRU emails, but makes little use of these observations. The CRU-related reasoning appears to be the following: “Hanson dismisses the CRU leaked emails as not a big deal, supporting the hypothesis that economists are less interested in searching for reliable knowledge than in protecting their turf and signaling senority”. This is a) peripheral to the central claims of the post, b) using anecdotal evidence about anecdotal evidence in support of a strong overarching claim about science in general.
(Mark Twain once noted: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” This post gets a nice return of speculation out of a small investment of anecdote.)
The central claims are interesting, if caricatural, i.e. that “there hasn’t been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years” and this “has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government—that is by the signaling and control view”.
There would be value in a post that tried to build an actual argument in support of these theses, and such a post would require no reference to (commentary on commentary on) current events which are likely to be soon forgotten anyway.
What sociologists of science are actually saying about science is much more subtle and interesting than caricatures of “idealistic vs signaling”. The two “views” of science are not mutually exclusive, and it’s not a matter of one view being the Good Guys’ view and the other being the Bad Guys’ view.
I mentioned them because they are current, and because it was thinking about them that got me considering the problem again. Not “flamebait” just the most current application of the problem I am addressing. A decade ago I might have used Plasma Cosmology (http://www.plasmacosmology.net/), since I had then recently read Lerner’s “The Big Bang Never Happened” (http://bigbangneverhappened.org/ ).