
Is Science Slowing Down? - ctoth
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/
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smackay
I can't help but have the feeling that there is something simplistic and
fundamentally flawed with the concept of productivity in this context. The
assumption appears to be that advances, like buses in the public transport
system, should show up on a more or less regular basis. However that appears
to ignore or misunderstand what all these scientists and engineers are
actually doing - foraging. They are searching for new things in a multi-
dimensional space with the added complication that traversing the area where
ideas may be encountered gets increasingly more complex to navigate and relies
on more people - either searchers or support staff or other searchers building
the tools needed to do the searching, etc. etc.

The apt (but somewhat stretched) analogy here is space travel. It's relatively
simple to put up a high-altitude balloon - even school kids can do it now.
Travel to the local planets - difficult but we've been doing it for a few
years now. Sending probes to the next galaxy - not happening anytime soon. So
why don't we ask the same questions of the aerospace industry? Probably
because it's easier to see that getting from A to B and then to C takes a lot
more effort and a lot more people and support infrastructure.

Of course the other possibility is that advances are simply harder to find,
not because we are looking in the wrong places or not looking hard enough but
that there are limits to creativity in the way we think and so advances become
a form of the infinite number of monkeys scenario where if you throw enough
monkeys at the problem you will get the complete works of Shakespeare -
eventually.

I know this must be disappointing for the bean-counters that fund all this
science but some problems are hard and barring the arrival of a generation of
super-geniuses are going to stay hard unless we can find completely new ways
of doing things - which is going to take a lot more effort.

