My tentative theory is that you don’t need to be reliable to create progress. Exploratory behavior isn’t supposed to e reliable—it’s just supposed to succeed every once in a while. After the initial success, the reliable folks can take over and keep going until they hit a wall again.
There’s an easy way to test this. Just pick a recent technology for which 1) you don’t know the history 2) you don’t really know how it works. Look around your room (or your head) and find any random example of recent, remarkable technology...and then check wikipedia. You’ve got to go roughly recent enough that not everyone was using them before 1990.
Prediction (before doing it): The pattern will emerge that the first crucial step was done by a scientist, and then later it was expanded into something useful by others.
I picked Pacemaker, LCD screen and contact lense. Reading these pages, I judge that the first, key breakthrough which made contacts and LCD possible were done by scientists. (In the case of the contact lens, the tech was there but impracticle until science made a breakthrough.). Pacemakers seems to be largely non-scientists.
Just keep picking various technologies at random and see the history to get a sense for the extent and nature of science’s contribution to technology. Don’t look at the reliability of new science.
Edit: Come to think of it, cardiac pacemaker might actually not be recent enough...
There’s an easy way to test this. Just pick a recent technology for which 1) you don’t know the history 2) you don’t really know how it works. Look around your room (or your head) and find any random example of recent, remarkable technology...and then check wikipedia. You’ve got to go roughly recent enough that not everyone was using them before 1990.
Given that sentence, the first technology that springs to mind is wikipedia itself. The crucial step here seems to be the discovery that people actually start editing much more when you give them a wiki interface then when you ask them to send you their contributions via email.
It was an accidental discovery.
Prediction (before doing it): The pattern will emerge that the first crucial step was done by a scientist, and then later it was expanded into something useful by others.
From the outside it’s not easy to know what happened to be the crucial step. There are certain things that are obvious when you tinker with a technology. A scientist has probably dealt with the effect years earlier but the engineer might not know about the work of the scientist.
It’s quite often that people file patents for stuff that people can later discover independently. As far as the Wikipedia article for Pacemakers goes it’s not clear that Mark C Lidwell knew about J A McWilliam or that McWilliams work was crucial for him.
The Wikipedia expertiment only shows you that scientists like to credit themselves and their collegues with advancing technology and that public culture supports them in that quest.
Science is optimized for taking credit for other peoples work. Scientists get payed for being credited. Engineers on the other hand get payed to produce useful technology.
Wikipedia breaks the “it’s not immediately obvious how it works even when it’s right in front of you” rule. A window does not pass this criteria, but glass passes. Once you have glass, you can expect people to innovate cool ways to use it...but you can’t expect people to come up with glass making without any evidence to work from.
The reason for that rule is that scientists only come into the picture where the limiting factor is a lack of knowledge about the world. If it’s a clever implementation of existing knowledge (like wikipedia), it’s not science
Glass is fairly simple—at some level of complexity, you need a systematic knowledge of what you are working with to do useful stuff. Informal knowledge won’t cut it. It’s easy to point to some bad statistics, but stats are baby science taking first steps into a new field—in its mature “we’re finally starting to get this” stages, science creates mechanisms which are highly predictive of reality. Finding correlations is just a method of knowing what direction to go.
Science is optimized for taking credit for the discovery. Engineering is optimized for taking credit for the invention. It’s not like engineers are disinterested in who gets credit for the work...and the discovery and invention both get produced nonetheless. Although I suppose you are correct that popular culture (and thus the wiki page) might favor the scientist.
Glass is fairly simple—at some level of complexity, you need a systematic knowledge of what you are working with to do useful stuff. Informal knowledge won’t cut it.
Glass is interesting. Obsidian is the first glass that got used and people got it because it occurs naturally and is highly useful.
Wikipedia suggest that the first custom glass was made as an accidental byproduct of metalworking or in the production of faience. It doesn’t suggest that it was created by someone doing science.
In Egypt people started to deal with glass the same way they dealt as gold and silver.
This meaned that you got craftsman who made pretty objects with it. Those craftsman then gathered a lot of informal knowledge about it and after some time passes they make windows with it as they get better at dealing with it.
Engineering is optimized for taking credit for the invention.
It isn’t. Most engineers are payed to create produced that get sold. If an engineer invents something and 20 years later another company brings the product to market the engineer gets nothing.
If a scientist discovers something and 20 years latter another person does something with it, the scientist get all the credit.
In general engineers aren’t hired based on what they have invented in the past. Scientists on the other hand do get hired based on published papers with as supposed to reflect how much the scientist can be credit for increasing human knowledge.
There no equivalent to publish or perish for engineers.
My tentative theory is that you don’t need to be reliable to create progress. Exploratory behavior isn’t supposed to e reliable—it’s just supposed to succeed every once in a while. After the initial success, the reliable folks can take over and keep going until they hit a wall again.
There’s an easy way to test this. Just pick a recent technology for which 1) you don’t know the history 2) you don’t really know how it works. Look around your room (or your head) and find any random example of recent, remarkable technology...and then check wikipedia. You’ve got to go roughly recent enough that not everyone was using them before 1990.
Prediction (before doing it): The pattern will emerge that the first crucial step was done by a scientist, and then later it was expanded into something useful by others.
I picked Pacemaker, LCD screen and contact lense. Reading these pages, I judge that the first, key breakthrough which made contacts and LCD possible were done by scientists. (In the case of the contact lens, the tech was there but impracticle until science made a breakthrough.). Pacemakers seems to be largely non-scientists.
Just keep picking various technologies at random and see the history to get a sense for the extent and nature of science’s contribution to technology. Don’t look at the reliability of new science.
Edit: Come to think of it, cardiac pacemaker might actually not be recent enough...
Given that sentence, the first technology that springs to mind is wikipedia itself. The crucial step here seems to be the discovery that people actually start editing much more when you give them a wiki interface then when you ask them to send you their contributions via email.
It was an accidental discovery.
From the outside it’s not easy to know what happened to be the crucial step. There are certain things that are obvious when you tinker with a technology. A scientist has probably dealt with the effect years earlier but the engineer might not know about the work of the scientist.
It’s quite often that people file patents for stuff that people can later discover independently. As far as the Wikipedia article for Pacemakers goes it’s not clear that Mark C Lidwell knew about J A McWilliam or that McWilliams work was crucial for him.
The Wikipedia expertiment only shows you that scientists like to credit themselves and their collegues with advancing technology and that public culture supports them in that quest.
Science is optimized for taking credit for other peoples work. Scientists get payed for being credited. Engineers on the other hand get payed to produce useful technology.
Wikipedia breaks the “it’s not immediately obvious how it works even when it’s right in front of you” rule. A window does not pass this criteria, but glass passes. Once you have glass, you can expect people to innovate cool ways to use it...but you can’t expect people to come up with glass making without any evidence to work from.
The reason for that rule is that scientists only come into the picture where the limiting factor is a lack of knowledge about the world. If it’s a clever implementation of existing knowledge (like wikipedia), it’s not science
Glass is fairly simple—at some level of complexity, you need a systematic knowledge of what you are working with to do useful stuff. Informal knowledge won’t cut it. It’s easy to point to some bad statistics, but stats are baby science taking first steps into a new field—in its mature “we’re finally starting to get this” stages, science creates mechanisms which are highly predictive of reality. Finding correlations is just a method of knowing what direction to go.
Science is optimized for taking credit for the discovery. Engineering is optimized for taking credit for the invention. It’s not like engineers are disinterested in who gets credit for the work...and the discovery and invention both get produced nonetheless. Although I suppose you are correct that popular culture (and thus the wiki page) might favor the scientist.
Glass is interesting. Obsidian is the first glass that got used and people got it because it occurs naturally and is highly useful. Wikipedia suggest that the first custom glass was made as an accidental byproduct of metalworking or in the production of faience. It doesn’t suggest that it was created by someone doing science.
In Egypt people started to deal with glass the same way they dealt as gold and silver. This meaned that you got craftsman who made pretty objects with it. Those craftsman then gathered a lot of informal knowledge about it and after some time passes they make windows with it as they get better at dealing with it.
It isn’t. Most engineers are payed to create produced that get sold. If an engineer invents something and 20 years later another company brings the product to market the engineer gets nothing.
If a scientist discovers something and 20 years latter another person does something with it, the scientist get all the credit.
In general engineers aren’t hired based on what they have invented in the past. Scientists on the other hand do get hired based on published papers with as supposed to reflect how much the scientist can be credit for increasing human knowledge.
There no equivalent to publish or perish for engineers.