Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
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?
Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
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?