I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?
I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?