
Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? - hankewi
http://www.nber.org/digest/mar16/w21788.html
======
Mz
_The results suggest that outsiders to a specific scientific field are
reluctant to challenge a research star who is viewed as a leader within that
field._

I don't think this is how it works at all. I think people are _unable_ to
challenge stars in their field.

When everyone is celebrating some star, good luck getting heard if you
disagree with them. It is worse if, like so many people, this star will defend
their territory by following the maxim "A good offense is the best defense."

My observation of behavior in online forums is that a typical pattern of
behavior is that everyone seeks to either align themselves with one of the
"stars" of the forum or position themselves as being "against" anything that
person says. It is very much about pecking order, not truth, and if you have
two or three really popular people, then you get camps that revolve around
each person. All conversation tends to default into a polarizing back and
forth of "I am for STAR!" and "I am against STAR!"

Since all conversation is framed as either for or against STAR, no
conversation can occur that genuinely diverges from the framing given. Even if
you genuinely try to diverge from this framing of for or against the idea set
that this star individual represents, people will actively paint you into a
corner as being in either the for or against camp. Good luck with saying
"Yeah, no. That isn't what I am saying _At All._ "

This only stops when that person exits the picture. Dying is the most final
and absolute means to exit the picture.

~~~
emcq
This is so true. We can see it very recently too.

As a specific example look at evolutionary optimization. It's existed for
decades, has a bit of a non mainstream cult following, but now the leaders of
the field are finding they can beat the fanciest deep reinforcement learning
approaches with it. [https://blog.openai.com/evolution-
strategies/](https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/)

~~~
leereeves
How does that fit in this discussion? The stars of deep reinforcement learning
haven't exited the picture. Have there been polarized discussions here between
the two camps?

~~~
emcq
Up until the last sentence of the grandparents post, the point was "I think
people are unable to challenge stars in their field."

The fact that an alternative perspective that proves simple, effective, and
popular in alternative communities is now popularized from stars in the field
of deep learning rather than the alternative communities is exactly this.

In fact, the resources available to the stars is much different than what
these other communities may have access to such that they may never be able to
demonstrate value themselves. It's not very often you have a 720 core machine
to run these tests. Resource constrained science exists all over from
chemistry, physics, and biotech to computer science. The rich get richer as
they say.

However it's also a great instance of solid science to test alternative
approaches and I don't mean to take anything away from anyone, but simply to
point to a case where that it is extremely difficult for people to challenge
stars in the field.

~~~
leereeves
That OpenAI article is based on the paper:

Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning

by Tim Salimans, Jonathan Ho, Xi Chen, Ilya Sutskever

This seems like counter-evidence to the idea that people are unable to
challenge the stars of the dominant paradigm.

------
kepano
Reminds me of the old Max Planck quote: "A new scientific truth does not
triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather
because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is
familiar with it."

~~~
drostie
That would be because that quote inspired the research. However the mechanism
that they discovered is actually somewhat more subtle; it is that "rockstar
scientists", intentionally or not, suppress radical new ideas coming into
their disciplines. Since radical innovation is by and large something that the
community-as-a-whole has (in the sense that each person has a tiny probability
of coming up with the radical idea so the actual idea-havers are kind of
randomly selected from the community), either implicit effects of "oh things
are moving so fast in that field, these people are so smart, I will never
measure up" or explicit effects of people in the field saying "why the heck
would you pursue that path, it's obviously bonkers and we're doing so much
better with this other approach..." convince those community members to not
come forward with their radical innovation, even as it's sorely needed. Rather
than the opponents of the idea dying, they are interested in the cases where
the supporters of an idea die, which allows these radical ideas to come out of
the woodwork.

~~~
ams6110
A good argument for allowing aging to progress naturally.

------
plg
Can't believe they didn't cite/discuss the book "The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions" (1962) written by philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. From the
wikipedia article about the book:

"Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science".
Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of
accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which
periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by
periods of revolutionary science. "

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

~~~
dredmorbius
In the paper (see Sci-Hub link comment elsewhere):

 _Philosophers and historians have long debated the extent to which the
pragmatic success of a scientific theory determines how quickly it gains
adherents, or its longevity (e.g., Kuhn [1970], Laudan [1977], and their many
detractors)._

------
Balgair
The quote is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does occasionally come up as a
real issue. I have an anecdote on it:

A former fellow grad student was expressing their dis-belief that though there
was a lot of work done in the brain with electrical signals, there is
effectively no work done on measuring the magnetic properties of the brain or
neurons. The much older and much more esteemed PI that was also present simply
shut the student down, to the point of telling them to 'shut up'. "There are
_no_ magnetic fields in the brain", I think was the quote. The student,
misunderstanding the situation, pressed onward and challenged the PI on fMRI
and the like. The discussion turned into a 1-sided argument where the PI
basically told the student that they were an idiot and that things like fMRI
were useless (actually a debatable point at the time, re: the dead salmon
experiments). I'll say I never quite trusted PIs after that dressing-down,
they seem to be more concerned about their mortgages than their legacies.

------
curtis
This reminds me of "Clarke's First Law" [1]:

 _When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong._

[1]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s_Laws)

------
arcanus
As someone who's published in Bayesian inference, that quote has always struck
a cord.

I've met countless young researchers who embraced Bayesian practices. And all
the opposition seems to come from older hands. It's finally turning a
corner... Because of retirement!

~~~
jtraffic
In my field the embrace of Bayesian methods seems to have come because of
increases in computing power, rather than a decrease in "opposition."

~~~
rspeer
I'm guessing what you're talking about is using Bayesian techniques to compute
something useful, which nobody will stop you from doing.

The part that has opposition is using a Bayesian justification for the
experimental results in a paper -- presenting a conclusion about how we should
update our beliefs because of the experiment, instead of a p-value.

Right now it seems pretty common to translate Bayesian experimental results
sloppily into frequentist ones to get them past reviewers.

~~~
jtraffic
> Right now it seems pretty common to translate Bayesian experimental results
> sloppily into frequentist ones to get them past reviewers.

This is interesting. I'm glad for a different perspective. I chalk this up to
differences across fields, because my experience is so different. My advisor
learned Bayesian statistics from Arnold Zellner a few decades ago, and his
synopsis of the class was: "It was great in theory, but we could't implement
it." Once computers made if more possible, it seems to have spread rather
quickly, possibly because computing power was the last piece of a mostly
complete puzzle.

It's _almost_ to the point that reviewers prefer the Bayesian approach, in my
neck of the academic woods.

~~~
Fomite
This is pretty much my experience as well - accessible Bayesian methods (and
now accessible causal inference models) were a major portion in those methods
being adopted.

------
aisofteng
This idea dates at least to Kuhn:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

------
HillaryBriss
The abstract of this paper says:

 _Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators
into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star
scientist (relative to control fields). In contrast, we find that the flow of
articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average._

I haven't read the paper, and maybe this is just completely wrong, but
wouldn't we expect the number of published papers by non-collaborators to rise
_no matter what?_

I mean, a star scientist is dead now. There are no more papers coming from
that person. _Of course_ other people's papers fill the gap. The number of
journals didn't change. The number of articles in an issue of each journal
didn't change. These journals need to get articles from _someone_.

------
Roboprog
Reminds me of a Douglas Crockford presentation (which is obviously referencing
this idea) where he talks about computer science progress, and having to wait
for people to die or retire before practices change: "Are they gone yet? Can
we stop doing X now?"

~~~
Analemma_
When he said X, did he mean it as a generic variable, or the X Window System?
Because the latter would be a lot funnier.

~~~
Roboprog
Also, "X" for me is OOP as the sine qua non of programming practice. I mean,
the concepts of Simula 67 were promoted endlessly in the 80s, but I'm tired of
being stuck with that as the primary design mechanism.

"COBOL with separate compilation and parameters" is what we seem to be stuck
with, even though the advances in hardware and garbage collection software
have made FP type stuff practical now, rather than something that was scoffed
at back in the 80s with the advent of microprocessors posing as general
purpose computers :-)

------
1propionyl
Even more important than forming synapses is the subsequent pruning of
synapses.

I imagine the same principle applies to networks of people as does to networks
of neurons.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a profoundly critical element of learning and creativity, by a fair
amount of psychological work I've seen lately.

------
zeristor
This would suggest that a hidden cost of enhanced longevity would be social
sclerosis.

~~~
htrp
Let's get to clinical immortality before worrying about scientific stagnation.

~~~
Mz
Let's not. Let's go ahead and assume such things matter in the here and now
and are actively in the way of getting to clinical immortality (assuming
clinical immortality is even possible).

------
Qwertious
Maybe we should have scientists rotate through unrelated professions on a pre-
set schedule?

Just putting it out there. Killing scientists to stimulate progress is out for
ethical reasons, obviously.

~~~
BurningFrog
Professorial term limits?

Could be a good system, but I don't see the professors endorsing it.

~~~
beevai142
Why not term limits for all occupations? 1 year white collar work, 1 year on
the farm.

~~~
throwaway2048
Yeah it would be a real Cultural Revolution

------
SubiculumCode
The idea that science advances only when old scientists die is used to promote
the idea that science has nothing over politics. It is anti-science
propaganda.

I will say this though. Young scientists are hungry and there not enough
positions for them. Every department has that old rockstar or two who doesn't
really push the boundaries of science anymore, but takes up available
positions. When they retire or die, new people come in who are still young and
full of energy.

~~~
jmcmichael
> The idea that science advances only when old scientists die is used to
> promote the idea that science has nothing over politics. It is anti-science
> propaganda.

Sounds to me like you believe that science proceeds without politics.

> Young scientists are hungry and there not enough positions for them. Every
> department has that old rockstar or two who doesn't really push the
> boundaries of science anymore, but takes up available positions. When they
> retire or die, new people come in who are still young and full of energy.

This process you've described here resembles the political process we observe
in government (or any human social system that involves a competitive
hierarchy), with the exception that in government the problem of 'taking up
available positions' is attenuated by the existence of term limits for most
leadership positions.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Of course there are politics in research. But that is moving the goal post.
The question is whether politics and science are equivalently grounded, and
they are not.

~~~
andrewflnr

      The question is whether politics and science
      are equivalently grounded...
    

Maybe that's how you most frequently encounter this topic, but it's a gross
overstatement to say that's the only question here. Was Planck was motivated
by anti-science sentiment when he said that? I suspect not.

No one seriously debates _whether_ politics is a factor in science. AFAICT,
the the question is entirely _to what degree_ politics influences the progress
of science. In my experience, even people with relatively radical views
understand this.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Why do you go through the act of arguing when we agree that scientific
progress is a mix of politics and science?

My first claim in great grandparent was that the argument that science on
progresses when scientists die is used to argue that politics and science are
equivalent, that science is reducible to politics. Since we agree that is not
so reducible to politics, let us agree that we agree and move on.

------
lossolo
So true:

[https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172e...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172ec3fb0b6ce654c191f214360.jpg)

~~~
idreyn
Why not link to the author's website? [http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3947](http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3947)

------
elliotpage
Given that new ideas in a field often get reviewed by incumbents in said field
(due to the requirements of pre-publication peer review) this can certainly
delay their uptake or even full examination.

This kind of ingrained conservatism can delay progress both of a field and
those examining it. It is a catch-22 as you want qualified reviewers to
examine a paper so it isn't bunkum but equally those reviewers may slow it
down because it is a valid advance in contrary to their position.

Perhaps a move to post-publication peer review and greater pre-print
deposition would help, but that would take a deep cultural shift.

------
Gatsky
This is true in many ways.

But as always it doesn't have to be that way, it has arrived at this point due
to a combination of sometimes perverse incentives and natural human
tendencies.

I was thinking for a while that having a mandatory retirement age could be a
good idea, but retirement is becoming obsolete for economic reasons, and
scientists are now employed in so many different ways by so many different
institutions that I don't think it is possible.

------
jpttsn
Alternative: Collaborators are the same age?

Next up: a curve showing that friends of WWI vets decrease their tuna
consumption when the WWI vet dies, relative to their non-friends.

------
oblio
There's a deeper question here: how does this apply to politics and what are
we going to do about it as life spans become longer?

It's a really tricky topic...

------
Animats
I saw this happen at Stanford around 2005, as the logic-based and expert
systems people were pushed aside as machine learning people moved in.

------
chplushsieh
Alternative explanation: Star scientists are just highly productive
scientists. After they die, their not-as-productive collaborators can't keep
up with the amount of publication as high as before. Naturally collaborators
publication percentage falls while Non-collaborators' rise.

------
annonch
Maybe it is all about funding, the established scientists will receive the
greatest chance of getting a grant because they have their previous work to
support their ability and direction. Challenging scientists may not be able to
contest the established scientists because of this

------
eternalban
Didn't Bohr sideline Einstein when the latter was very much alive and kicking?

------
malodyets
> The Digest is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate
> attribution of source.

It sounds like they want CC-BY, but as it stands they haven't really licensed
the digest in an understandable way.

~~~
dredmorbius
Using CC-BY would be an improvement, though the _intent_ here is at least
relatively clear.

I've seen worse. Went a few rounds back in the 2000s with a developer who'd
claimed simply "this has no copyright". I pointed out the several problems
with that claim, and the (almost wholly) trivial approaches to fixing them.

He ... wasn't interested.

~~~
5ilv3r
That's the WTFPL in a nutshell.

~~~
dredmorbius
No.

It is, legally, difficult to divest yourself of copyright. Some people say
it's possible, some people say it isn't.

It's _not_ difficult to divest yourself of your _exclusive rights_ under
copyright. Which is what the WTFPL accomplishes. It's a subtle but significant
distinction.

Similarly, you could:

1\. Simply disclaim any copyright _interest_. "I disclaim all copyright
interest in this work."

2\. Disclaim any exclusive rights: "I disclaim all rights under copyright in
this work."

3\. _Allow others_ any exclusive rights: "I grant to all parties any exclusive
right under copyright."

Etc.

The fundamental problem is that under Berne Convention copyright, which dates
to the early 20th / late 19th century (I'd have to check) in at least some
jurisdictions, _copyright is manifest at creation_ in any work. Which means
these very words as I'm writing them. _And there 's no procedure for
disclaiming those rights._

The Berne Convention rules have been adopted widely particularly since the
1970s.

Again: there are those who disagree that you can't claim a work is
"uncopyrighted", but the ambiguity of such a comment (and the trivial means by
which that ambiguity is removed) makes certain uses highly imprudent.

------
reasonattlm
It happens over a shorter timeframe than funerals are needed to explain. The
past decade or decade and a half has been long enough to see outsiders having
significant influence in the aging research community, steering it from
determined non-intervention to greater willingness to work towards therapies
capable of addressing the causes of aging. All of the players are the same at
the start and the end, aside from the new faces coming in from outside.

~~~
jamesrcole
That's interesting, but still that's only in one field. I'm curious if others
can comment on the rate of change in other fields?

------
k__
I think if people were immortal this would solve the problem, because you
don't have the "this only pays off after I die anyway" mentality.

Sadly most people think waiting till the nonbelievers die is the way to go and
not much money is spent in immortality research.

~~~
dredmorbius
You're failing to consider any number of reasons this wouldn't fix the
problem:

1\. Future-value discounting. Even an immortal may well value present
experiences over future ones.

2\. Consolidation of power. There's little evidence that any system based on
perpetuities _won 't_ result in the accumulation of wealth and/or power in a
limited set of hands.

3\. Strategic intentional long-term power consolidation. If you live forever,
you'll be concerned _forever_ about upstarts seeking to claim / disrupt your
space / power base.

------
dredmorbius
I'm trying to access the source paper for this study, and am finding that
despite NBER and SSRN, both _generally_ open-access sites, as hosts, the PDF
itself is paywalled on SSRN.

The backstory here is that SSRN, a site for open dissemination of largely pre-
publication papers, was bought by Elsevier in 2013, to the loud dismay of the
open-access community.

It seems that the predictions of what would transpire are being fully born
out.

[https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-
destroying...](https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying-
ssrn/)

The Sci-Hub workaround is to chase the NBER PDF download link:

[http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf](http://www.nber.org.sci-
hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf)

------
anthonyskipper
Marvin Minsky died and we have a revolution in AI. Jeff Hawkings called that
one in "on intelligence"

~~~
Analemma_
I don't know if I agree with this. We're having a revolution in NN-based
statistical modeling and machine learning, not AI. And it's not happening
because Minsky was holding back the field, it's happening because GPUs
improved to the point where these models could work and investing in them made
economic sense.

------
jostmey
Yes it does!

------
mchannon
TL;DR: Yes.

~~~
bgun
Apparently Betteridge's Law holds less true for science journal articles. :)

