
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck - dsr12
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/
======
protonfish
This seems like the obvious result of many of the unhealthy forces against
science today: replacing professorship with part-timers, rewarding publishing
quantity over quality, pressure to promise a quick monetizable result over in-
depth basic research.

I don't buy the "low-handing fruit" argument. I think it vastly overstates the
fraction of scientific knowledge that we possess. Contemporary scientific
research is in a state of crisis: unhealthy and dysfunctional. Until we pay
the most talented researchers to spend decades on in-depth study instead of
spending pennies on segmented, p-hacked, post-hoc conclusion garbage papers,
major discoveries will continue to disappear.

~~~
706f6f70
> Until we pay the most talented researchers

It's not even that. One of the contributing factors is that we are no longer
hiring for talent or merit. If you're a male child interested in science and
in high school right now you've been through 8 years telling you that you
should not go into science because they need more women of colour who follow
the right religions and have the right sexual orientation. You're constantly
bombarded with "SCIENCE DOES NOT WANT MEN".

And sure, we can say "well if he had the necessary grit, this would not
discourage him". No. No amount of grit will get you in when governments are
shaping science funding to punish having male staff. No amount of grit will
get you in when indoctrination training is mandatory for the selection
committees. No amount of grit will get you in when the first filter in a
hiring process is to remove all males applicants.

I'm sorry but science has to go through a decline in the West for a bit. We
still have some remnants to be worked through the system, but the next couple
generations of Western scientists are going to be generally pretty low
quality. On the bright side, science is not exclusively a Western tradition at
this point. Other cultures that at least pretend to still focus on merit and
talent will carry the scientific tradition forward.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> If you're a male child interested in science and in high school right now
> you've been through 8 years telling you that you should not go into science
> because they need more women of colour who follow the right religions and
> have the right sexual orientation. You're constantly bombarded with "SCIENCE
> DOES NOT WANT MEN".

Do you have any examples of teens / young adults being discouraged from going
into science because they are white and male? There are certainly some (I'd
say good!) programs to encourage women and minorities, but that's quite a
different thing from men being actively discouraged.

Scientific fields are still significantly more male than female, even among
recent graduates.

~~~
v_lisivka
> Scientific fields are still significantly more male than female, even among
> recent graduates.

Why "still"? Majority of mans are genetically selected to be adventurers,
while minority of woman are adventurers. It's impossible to change genetics
with advertising, so we will never have 50/50% split, until human genome will
change. Why not just accept natural distribution?

~~~
max76
I'm not convinced that joining the scientific community is an adventure or
that this genetic difference exists. The differences can be explained without
using genetics.

For example, there is a popularly held opinion that girls are bad at math.
Girls who believe they are bad at math might try less in math courses. Girls
that receive lower grades in math from trying less might be intimidated by the
math requirements of a science program.

~~~
dnautics
It's not an adventure, but it is a high-risk with a slim chance of a very high
payoff endeavor, and men are typically more drawn to that than women, for
example there his a huge gender disparity in fishing the Alaskan fisheries or
base jumping.

~~~
v_lisivka
Offtopic: Can you explain to non-native English speaker, please, why
"adventure" does not match "a high-risk with a slim chance of a very high
payoff endeavor"? I saw "adventure in science" few times, so I assumed that
someone who does this "adventure in science" can be named "adventurer". What
is wrong in my conclusion?

~~~
max76
I wouldn't consider a career in science to be high risk. It's often easy to
transfer from academic science to private engineering. Science degrees holders
have respectable earnings on average.

------
madhadron
I'm not sure where to begin on this, so I'll resort to a brain dump.

The Nobel prize has become steadily more political. More senior researchers in
the field have had more time to accrue political power, so expect the awards
to reach further back in time.

Research productivity has dropped, though. Today a professor in biology has a
more than full time job just to get money for their lab. So you go through
gradschool, go through postdoc, and when you've got all this training, you
stop doing science and become a grant writer. If you don't bring in money, you
don't have a lab.

For the postdocs and grad students, they live very insecurely. Their pay is
poor, they live knowing they will probably relocate somewhere entirely
different in three or four years, so there's no point having links into the
local community. They work for someone has no training in management and has
no time to deal with them if the money is going to flow. And there are still
lots of places where the postdocs aren't considered full time employees of the
university and don't have, say, health insurance. These are hardly the
conditions that you can expect to produce good work.

Fields are mined down to the last details rather than looking at unexplored
areas nearby. There are many reasons for this. As a grad student you work on
what your advisor works on. As a postdoc, you work on what your lab works on.
As a professor, you work on what you worked on as a postdoc and it requires
multiple years and lots of luck to reorient a lab. You need a community to
provide evidence of your competence in order to advance at each stage and get
tenure, which you can't easily get if you wander out of an established field.
Nor is there any training on how to look effectively find things to work on.

~~~
lumost
Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts
their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there
Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab.

The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to
keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block
grant with periodic evaluation.

~~~
dnautics
Keep in mind by small grant we mean 100-200k towards a million.

~~~
madhadron
Which _is_ a small grant. You would be hard pressed to run a five year
software project on a million dollars, much less a project that requires real
laboratory overhead and materials.

------
kuanbutts
Quickly scanning comments I do not think anyone else has brought up:
administrative bloat.

More money is being spent on science, but is more money actually making it
through the administrative bloat encumbering most institutions to the actual
performance of research?

Anecdotally, I have a colleague who has received funding from the NSF and the
amount of regulations and paperwork and various travel and meeting-related
obligations related to the funding soak up so much of the actual dollar amount
supplied. (You have to use your funding dollars to satisfy the various
required meetings, travel, and paperwork-filling.) The constraints are so
ridiculous that satisfying them consumes nearly all the resources the NSF
provided, and the little that remains is actually not sufficient to perform
the research with. Worse, he has now wasted months of his time satisfying
various oversight requirements administrated by both the NSF and the research
institution he works in, leaving him an unreasonably small amount of time to
actually achieve any significant progress on his work. Once this round of
funding dries up, he will be left with no choice but to repeat the process in
order to secure some more funding to continue to barely make progress on his
stated research goal.

If I had to make up a number to describe the dollar efficiency of research
funding, in some cases I might assert it is negative: Not only is it just
being soaked up by self-serving, efficiency-draining administrative
requirements, it literally destroys the most valuable resource (time!),
leaving the researcher with none to actually engage in their subject matter of
expertise.

~~~
buboard
it's huge. Similar in an european ERC-funded lab: the PI is constantly
traveling, there is little oversight of the work let alone actual scientific
output. It feels like a large portion of the funding is designed to keep a lot
of people people busy doing nothing.

~~~
nonbel
At least the US government treats it like a "jobs program", just like
everything else.

------
Yaa101
In my opinion science is getting less bang for bucks because the low hanging
fruit has been picked by now. The big fundamental structures describing nature
its working are more or less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes
more time and effort to get the details right. You can see that it takes multi
disciplinary teams nowadays to discover the connections between these large
systems and how they (how all in the universe) connect. People are curious
which is our most precious gift from nature and science will go on as long as
people stay curious. But yes, not all science is about returns of value in
economic sense, a lot of it is fundamental and also often results of science
is laying in a drawer waiting to either getting monitized or used for further
discovery. Science moves by spurts and hiccups, not straight forward with an
even pace.

~~~
forkandwait
> The big fundamental structures describing nature its working are more or
> less known. It's about details nowadays and it takes more time and effort to
> get the details right.

This (bullshit) is what they thought in the 1890s,and is why physics was
considered boring, basically a dead field. Oops!

~~~
Koshkin
Difference is, this time around we might be standing at the edge of what we
can possibly know and/or understand.

~~~
davidivadavid
And how could we possibly estimate if we are or not?

------
Animats
That observation is decades too late. Big companies set up sizable research
labs in the 20th century. After WWII, it was expected that a big industrial
company would have a sizable R&D operation.

Then, in the 1980s, those big R&D operations stopped paying off. Gradually,
the big corporate labs closed - Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Labs, Xerox PARC,
Westinghouse Labs - gone. IBM's labs are far smaller than they once were. The
payoff wasn't there. The easy hits from research were gone.

~~~
marcosdumay
Hum...

My reading is that R&D facilities couldn't compete with the sheer amount of
small improvements that came from the uneducated labor force. Japan grew out
empowering the employees to do development, and the entire world copied it.
What leaded us on a path where people are making the Uber-for-X apps and some
actually getting rich that way.

And that is exactly the opposite of a sarcity of low hanging fruit.

------
ozborn
Another problem with this data is the rise of team science and huge author
lists for papers - something the Nobel prize isn't really able to deal with.
Think of the human genome paper or the Higgs boson paper - both good 21st
century science but lacking the easily identifiable "super scientists" the
Nobel committee is looking for.

Additionally it is hard to fully evaluate the impact of scientific work fully
until many years have passed since publication.

It's no wonder they prefer to find their winners in the 80s. ..

------
pvaldes
A lot of 'money spent in science' has not really been spent. Just offered with
lots of requisites that nobody can reach and then recycled for other projects.
If granted, the money can be blocked for months (instead to pay an entire year
to scientists, you pay 7 months... for one year of work), and can be partially
siphoned off again using bureaucracy. Some politicians are very fond of this
'miracle of bread and fishes' trick.

"In the last ten years we spent '10 millions' in science projects". Looks
great.

"In the last ten years we flashed the same million 10 times before to put it
again in our pocket". Not so great, often the real thing.

------
justaguy1212
I actually don't see this from his data. It seems more like he started with a
hypothesis, wrote the article as if he was correct, and then gathered data to
try to support it. Then after seeing the data wasn't as commensurate with his
idea, he wrote around the inconveniences.

~~~
ImaCake
Yep. I don't know what article the other people in this thread read, but it
wasn't the same one I did. At best, the graphs can conclude that scientist's
opinion of nobel prize winners stays about the same, regardless of time.

------
DenseComet
This is why science should be led by the government, not for profit companies.
Science is for the greater good of humanity, it should not be solely about
making money.

~~~
CuriouslyC
I love science (at least in the ideal form). That being said, if knowledge
provides a real, tangible benefit to mankind, people should be willing to pay
for it. If it doesn't, people shouldn't be forced to pay for it.

I agree that some valuable research would go undone if performed by companies
because the time window to see a return on investment would be too long.
Unfortunately, academia is a huge mess, and we really need a new approach to
basic science.

~~~
Konnstann
What's your definition of basic science?

The requirement for Science to produce real, tangible benefits to mankind for
it to get funded makes a lot of it unfeasible, because a good bit of it is
useless on it's own, but is good to figure out because of potential uses in
the future.

~~~
bluGill
The real problem is we won't know if something is useful until after we get
results.

Gravity is a perfect example - physics has a lot of open questions on gravity.
What if someone closed one of them? It could mean nothing, just a slightly
better understanding of why things fall - or it could be a major change that
allows us to create "anti-gravity paint" making a self-supporting colony on
Jupiter simple (image all the "land" you could own there - whatever "owning
land" on gas planet means)

~~~
AstralStorm
Come on, such a thing would allow for reasonable space travel even better than
for just making colonies. It is essentially Mass Effect Element Zero - you
could create gravity wells for things to "fall into", creating enormous
accelerations of space ships while at the same time protecting the crew from
the effects.

Potentially even a kind of faster than light travel.

As a side boon new kinds of materials can be created in extreme artificial
gravity conditions some this maps to extreme and impossible to achieve
otherwise pressures. Including just creating stars in a controlled environment
making for immense energy availability. Instead of magnetic fusion containment
you'd have gravitational fusion containment.

This is how powerful practically breaking gravity can be.

~~~
bluGill
I just hand wave assumed a slightly different set of rules. With your set of
rules (which is at least as likely as mine) you are correct. Since both of us
are speculating we are both equally right. Of course it might be that better
understanding of gravity proves that artificial gravity is impossible.

------
AstralStorm
I'd personally bet on some sort of major breakthrough in space travel or
energy sources or both (perhaps due to new physics) to have comparable results
to the decades of the atom.

Being that, there is just not enough gain or even potential gain of
technologies being surveyed right now, even considering full on genetic
engineering and universal nanoconstructors.

Well, unless immortality or nigh immortality of some form happens. Or we found
a way to expand our intelligence and performance in some huge way. And then it
becomes available.

Compared to atomic and subatomic physics AI is a joke and genetics is at witch
doctoring levels. Self driving cars are like the steam experiments in 1800s at
best, with even less of an impact.

At least genetics has potential to change everything, more than automated
transportation ever can.

Nanotechnology is making some progress but not nearly fast, good or cheap
enough.

Another breakthrough could come from side physics like photonics.

------
seizethecheese
This could also be titled: “the foundational truths in a field are more
consequential than subsequent findings”.

------
vharuck
What if the survey respondents value earlier discoveries more because they
understand them better? I remember my mathematics professors saying, once they
chose a specialty within a field, there wee only a dozen or so people in the
world who could discuss it on the same level. So concurrent appreciation is
rare within a single field, let alone across fields.

But, as a high schooler, I was taught the basics of Einstein's general theory
of relativity. I couldn't do the math, but I appreciated its value. Maybe the
respondents undervalue recent discoveries in different fields.

~~~
LeonB
Effects like that could only be measured if they repeated the same survey many
times over decades before publishing. Even then it would be confounded by a
lot of other factors.

Instead they’ve marched forward using junk science to discredit science. I
found it a really weird and off key article.

They might be right but I wouldn’t use this article to demonstrate it. (And I
otherwise have a lot of respect for the authors.)

------
rjkennedy98
A huge part of this is the general perversion of science. It starts at the
bottom with the abuse of p-hacking by lowly grad students. It goes all the way
to the top with fraudulent for-profit science by Big Pharma to get drugs and
medical devices approved that don't work. All of it is part of the academic-
medical industrial complex that views science not as process for discovering
truth, but as a tool that can be used to generate profit.

There are enormous breakthroughs that I know are very close, but simply
inconceivable due to the academic-medical establishment that has stranglehold
on science.

------
alpineidyll3
Ex-professor here. Reason for this is trivially obvious to any outsider
observing the day of an academic: A dazzling torrent of time-wasting grant
applications, awards and other such nonsense.

The system is basically designed to take productive scientists, and waste them
as quickly as possible. After all, how better to protect your mediocrity?

Never been happier than after leaving...

------
socalnate1
Does anyone else find it fascinating the Patrick Collison (the co-founder and
current CEO of Stripe) co-wrote this article?

The dude makes me feel inadequate like no other.

------
chiefalchemist
Probably impossible to find out, but seeing a comparison - however loose - to
other countries would be ideal.

Annecdotally, it seems there's at least one significant leap per week listed
on HN that can be attributed to China. Reaching 100 million degrees from a
fusion reaction (from earlier this week) comes to mind.

But of course the general public isn't enlightened by the mainstream media
about such things.

~~~
pas
The Chinese fusion reactor was not a leap. Already achieved in JET (Joint
European Torus).

That said, if China decides to pour a lot more into R&D, it'll be doing leaps
in no time, simply due to brute force.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Link to JET achievement? Please??

Chinese? European? Any comparison would be better than none.

Brute force? Does it matter? Results are results, yes?

The arc of my point is, the USA so often as a very self-serving, often myth-
based view of itself. It's as if no one else in the world might have a better
approach. That's a mistake.

~~~
pas
JET achieved 0.7 Q, 24MW in 16MW out.

It operates somewhere around 100-200M Kelvin.
[https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion](https://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue26/fusion)

> Brute force? Does it matter?

No, I doesn't mean to say it as a negative thing. Fusion research funding is
very low compared to what is needed to build big enough devices. Because when
it comes to fusion, size matters, as efficiency goes up with size.

And that's what I meant by brute force. China can simply build a bigger one
and reap the benefits of size.

> Results are results, yes?

Yes, and more data is always better in plasma science.

------
pascalxus
Why do they assume something went wrong? At some point, we ill reach a point
where there is far less left to discover or invent. (other than AI -> as long
as anyone has a job, there's always room for automation, yikes!)

We assume that technological progress can continue forever and ever. I think
this is an incorrect presumption.

------
jgalt212
Excellent book on this topic.

Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-
Industrial Complex

[https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-
Milita...](https://www.amazon.com/Big-Science-Lawrence-Invention-Military-
Industrial/dp/1451675763)

------
netcan
Considering how large the corporate sector is today and how corporate inspired
the government sector is today... Science is remarkably unaffected.

We have tenure and sociology departments, a teacher-researcher combo
tradition... All stuff that does not lend to ROI calculations or the kinds of
resource allocation done elsewhere.

------
cossatot
I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-
hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years
of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in
the exact dates), there were a lot of fundamental questions that could be
addressed through the application of relatively systematic, rigorous
observation and experimentation, and modeling with the kind of math you can do
on a chalkboard.

Within this time period, though, a lot of these questions were addressed and
the _new_ questions that arose required more data, better instrumentation, and
more advanced mathematical modeling techniques to address.

In my own field (geology, in particular tectonics and earthquake studies),
this was laid out in a very explicit manner: the fundamental mode of
observation is geologic mapping, and the terrestrial surface of the earth
slowly got mapped. The mapping of the past may be refined or re-interpreted
but rarely does it need to be redone from scratch. It is done to a reasonable
level of resolution. There is still a lot of unknown under the ocean basins,
but we have strong theoretical and empirical arguments for why those areas are
not as complex as continents and therefore less interesting.

The late 1960s through the mid 1980s saw the development of plate tectonic
theory which _completely_ revolutionized the science. Now, 50 years in, we
have some second- or third-order questions but most of the first-order
questions have been addressed.

Today, the major developments of the field come from better instrumentation,
for the most part. In the sub-field of tectonics, progress comes from the
development and application of new methods for dating rocks or other geologic
features (including things like exposure dating or 'how long as this rock been
at the surface of the earth'), and from using satellite-based measurements of
earth deformation (GPS and radar interferometry) to actually measure the
motion of tectonic plates and sub-plates. Additional, continuous refinements
in seismic imaging of the subsurface (driven by the oil industry primarily)
has also been very helpful.

This stuff is really expensive! It's hard to go camp out, hike a bit, make
some observations, and write a good paper. The instrumentation to get the age
of rocks might cost $100,000 and then when consumables and salary are factored
in it might cost $500-$2000 per sample. You might need 10-20 samples to really
find out anything new in your 10-km by 10-km area of interest. And I believe
that geology is quite cheap relative to high-energy physics or whatever. Major
geophysical experiments can cost millions. We piggyback on physics and other
tech to a large extent---launching GPS satellites for example, or using
obsolete particle accelerators for geochemical measurements. The oil industry
spends (tens of?) billions a year acquiring data as well but very little of it
becomes public or available to researchers, though the cumulative data release
from industry is significant. [NB, I may be 1 order of magnitude short on any
of these numbers.]

In general there have been very few major theoretical advancements in the past
20-30 years. We have gotten better at recognizing coupling between tectonic
process and earth surface processes, and as instrumental datasets slowly
increase (as we observe more earthquakes, etc.) some smaller boxes get
checked. However, a geologist from the mid-1980s would be able to navigate
today's scientific landscape pretty well. The fads are different but like any
fashion, many are cyclical and were fads in the 80s too.

I personally see advancement coming from better statistical and numerical
modeling, and the availability of high-quality global datasets (primarily
created through large international collaborations, which is a post-cold war
thing). I also see a lot of room for improvement in our understanding of the
coupling of mechanisms spanning vastly different timescales--for example
earthquakes occur in seconds, post-earthquake phenomena last weeks to decades,
the earthquake cycle lasts hundreds to thousands of years, and the cumulative
deformation from earthquakes and related processes is what we call 'tectonics'
over millions of year timescales. It's really hard to make a single numerical
(i.e., finite element) model that works over all of these timescales and is
driven by basic physics (i.e. an earthquake results from forces applied rather
than being imposed). Nonetheless there are almost certainly a lot of really
important coupling processes that occur on these different timescales but they
are really hard to analyze (and a lot of interesting stuff happens at 20 km
depth and at mm/yr rates, which is pretty damn hard to observe).

So I guess I see a lot of 21st century science as bridge building rather than
outright discovery. This is fine. An analogy would be moving to a new country.
The first bit is the discovery of the place, then you learn what language they
speak. The learning doesn't stop there. As you learn the language, a lot of
daily stuff makes sense. As you gain an understanding of the culture and the
history, and can interact in a meaningful way, the value of that learning
continues to increase, but it doesn't feel like 'discovery' like it did in the
first year.

------
lostmsu
Yet we directly observed gravitational waves, and compute power continues to
grow.

------
oh-kumudo
Human have succeeded most of the applicable rules of our physical world. What
left to be discovered requires much more time and effort.

------
jrochkind1
An unpopular possibly "devil's advocate" opinion: Considering that our
scientific advances have led to us quickly using an enormous developed
capacity to make the earth much less hospitable to human life, maybe a
slowdown in scientific advances is not a bad thing.

On the other hand, yes, we are going to need some science to deal with what we
have wrought without maximum misery. But I don't really trust us with it.

------
fastaguy88
What a joke. There are hundreds of thousands of papers published each year,
and some very small faction of those (but certainly hundreds to thousands)
make a bit impact on their field. But we summarize science based on three
yearly prizes? Clearly science is not having enough impact on science policy
writers.

------
a_bonobo
I find this article preposterous.

>While understandable, the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per
dollar or hour spent.

The only evidence for this is Nobel Prizes won, split up by decade, and
polled!? Biology, arguably one of the most exciting fields right now, doesn't
even get considered in the Nobel Prizes! You _can_ get a Nobel Prize in
medicine/physiology for biology-related efforts (see GFP), but there's no
Nobel Prize for plant-related biology (that's what the Kyoto medal is for,
which isn't mentioned here?!?)

I can't wait for science-illiterate politicians to take this ('Look at what
YCombinator is saying!') and say we should defund science.

It has _never_ been as hard to get funding for your science as now - see e.g.
[https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-
science...](https://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science-on-
the-decline-whats-the-role-of-a-profit-motive-in-research-93322) \- with huge
issues (scientists living in precarious circumstances, ridiculously low
salaries, attacks and defunding by conservative governments (US, Australia,
Harper government in Canada) - writing an article _now_ saying that science is
stagnant is foolish at best, dangerous at worst.

>Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in
science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important
breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis,
this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.

A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think
of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on
beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts
to go for the harder fruits.

~~~
CompelTechnic
>>Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in
science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important
breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis,
this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.

>A much simpler explanation is that we've picked the low-hanging fruits (think
of how diverse the work of Darwin was! He picked up novel fossils literally on
beach walks), now (especially in physics!) we need bigger and stronger efforts
to go for the harder fruits.

Your explanation that we have picked the low-hanging fruits is not mutually
exclusive with the increased time and money invested in science. They would
even be two sides of the same coin- as the easy pickings disappeared, we chose
to invest more to get the harder fruits. As the trend continues, the search
space for novel, useful discoveries becomes larger and larger, and the cost
increases.

How do you prove to the politicians that a particular scientific investment is
worth it?

~~~
a_bonobo
>How do you prove to the politicians that a particular scientific investment
is worth it?

I don't think that's possible. The history of science is full of science that
shouldn't have worked but did - think of Barry Marshall drinking Helicobacter
pylori, which no-one thought to be a causative agent, or think of Norman
Borlaug, who came up with shuttle breeding (grow a plant twice a year by
driving seeds around, at a time when people thought that you have to let the
seeds rest for a while) - but the history of science is also full of things
that should have worked but didn't, we just don't hear about those (classic
survivor bias).

In some cases, you can tell whether an experiment is going to work and how
it's important, especially if it's incremental work - in some cases, you
simply cannot predict.

Just think of how delighted G. H. Hardy was that his mathematics was kind of
useless to the general public, and how useful his work is nowadays (most
importantly the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium I guess?), he could not have
predicted how that works out! What would he have written into his application
for funding?

------
buboard
I don't understand their methodology at all. Considering that the frequency of
awarding nobel prizes remains the same , there is nothing that can be infered
from their survey.

That said i agree with the premise of their article that science is not living
up to expectations, and i believe this started somewhere in the 90s. For
example consider the recent "Burden of disease" survey which was linked here a
few days ago:

> GBD 2017 is disturbing. Not only do the amalgamated global figures show a
> worrying slowdown in progress but the more granular data unearths exactly
> how patchy progress has been. GBD 2017 is a reminder that, without vigilance
> and constant effort, progress can easily be reversed.

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(18\)32858-7/fulltext)

This effect was probably many years in the making , and is only now becoming
apparent. One possible explanation for the "sluggishness" in scientific output
is that nowadays it is lacking new grand ambitious projects, in other words
centralization and Big Science. The proliferation of PhDs has changed the way
funding is allocated in recent decades for purely political reasons. It favors
thousands of small grants that go to individual independent researchers who
are all studying minute effects, are looking for results that barely pass the
significance threshold and are publishing in order to build publication
records to advance their career. The total number of researchers has doubled
since the 80s , therefore this model may be actually detrimental to the
process of scientific knowledge discovery at this time. For example, in my
field of computational neuroscience, there is currently no equivalent of the
"large hadron collider" project for the brain. Some years ago one such
project, the 'Human brain project' was proposed and funded, which had a
specific and ambitious goal: to simulate the entire brain. Academic politics
however fundamentally altered the project and it is now a funding source for
various kinds of ordinary research. To be clear, the project was probably ill-
conceived from the start (imho), given that we don't have enough info to
simulate the brain correctly, but regardless it was one of the few such
efforts towards a singular ambitious goal. Subsequent funding schemes such as
the US Brain initiative do not have such a focus. The ones who do undertake
big science are private institutes like the Allen institute in their attempt
to accurately map the entire brain. In any case i think public policy has to
focus less on academia and more on science, in order to make progress
otherwise we are bound to see detrimental effects a few years down the road.

------
otikik
The graph should be adjusted by inflation, and probably by other factors, in
order to accurately back the article's claim. $1M in 1940 would be equivalent
to $17M in 2018.

~~~
jblow
The graph states that it is adjusted for inflation.

~~~
otikik
Ok thanks. I must have missed it.

------
agumonkey
science having its own logistic curve ?

------
DoctorOetker
A lot of the comments are listing their personal suspicion of causes, without
attempting to illustrate or provide evidence. Some of those suspicions are
probably true, and some false. Obviously it is also an outlet for all our
personal gripes with the system. Irrespective of the veracity of a proposed
cause, I would like to see more discussion of actual examples of current
progress, and trying to identify what caused or enabled the progress to be
made by comparing with the average paper in the back of our mind: what was
different, why did they achieve the progress today and did nobody achieve the
insight say five years ago?

Ideally, since we are discussing on HN, it should be an example that would be
understood by most participants here.

It is in this spirit that I will give exactly such an example of recent
progress (with which I am entirely unaffiliated).

First some minimal background which I assume you are _not_ familiar with:
quantum chemistry and solid state physics software.

Just take a quick look at this list on wikipedia, you may recognize the names
of some pieces of software like ABINIT... make sure you pay attention to the
DFT column, and that virtually all packages support DFT calculations, which
has been pretty much __state of the art for the last decades __.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_chemistry_and_solid_state_physics_software)

In physics gradients often arise naturally for example forces as gradients of
potential energy... But in general even outside physics gradients are useful
in nearly all field for optimization...

Now the part you probably already understand: AD, Automatic Differentiation or
Algorithmic Differentiation, and in the often occuring case of a single scalar
function in N variables, _reverse-mode_ AD... And that it takes on the order
of 5 times a single function evaluation to calculate a gradient.

Now specific subfields of physics have been using AD and adjoint sensitivities
for a long time (nuclear engineering, oceanography) but it is not a standard
part of physics curricula.

Outside of these specific subfields, __Automatic Differentiation has been
gaining momenta over the last decades __(books, comprehensive reviews, ...)

Physics students of course learn differentiation symbolically on paper for
short formulas, or in software packages like MACSYMA, Maple, ... but even then
you keep the number of variables low for tractability. These students will
also understand you can emulate differentiation numerically by using a finite
delta:

d f(x1, x2, ..., xN) / dx2 = ~ [f(x1, x2 +delta, ..., xN) - f(x1, x2, ...,
xN)]/delta

fully understanding that for a complete gradient you need (N+1) evaluations of
f, that delta too large will be inaccurate due to functional nonlinearity, and
delta too small will be inaccurate due to numerical rounding of floats...
Nobody thinks of showing reverse mode automatic differentiation to physics
students as part of their curricula! If you crash into a physics course and
ask the students how to calculate the gradient of a big function of 1000
variables, they won't be able to help you, but then you can explain that such
a thing is in fact possible!

You see where this is going...

What if some of the numerical computations, say molecular modeling, could
benefit from this insight?

That's exactly what happened recently:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-
mat](https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5560?context=cond-mat)

Now look at the authors' institutions of this paper:

SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, 2 DEMOCRITOS National
Simulation Center, Quantitative Strategies, Investment Banking Division,
Credit Suisse Group

That's people with an interdisciplinary background.

Could it be that we are over-specialized? Or perhaps mis-specialized?

Imagine an alternate world where there is so much math that mathematics has
decided to specialize thus: after a common course of Fundamental Math, you can
specialize in Definitions, or perhaps in Theorems, or perhaps in Proofs, or
perhaps in Conjectures... clearly their progress in math is going to suffer!!

Could it be that experts and professionals have become "too polite" to the
point of circle j* ? A kind of "politeness omerta"? Imagine a mathematician
and a physicist talking: as long as we're discussing math, the physicist nods
with interest, and doesn't make suggestions how he would do it differently and
vice versa. The "don't criticize a professional in his domain" attitude?
Wouldn't it have been better if someone who understood AD say 20 years ago,
who ends up in a conversation of molecular chemistry software physicist to say
something like "I don't have the domain knowledge, but first thing I would do
is find out if the calculation could be viewed as the computation of a
gradient, or else as an optimization of an explicit goal" "how dare you make a
suggestion outside of math?! and thats thousands of variables, its
_intractable_ " ?

We might have had this 20 years ago! Mansplain it if necessary.

it's this upside down world where we are polite and stoic in our papers, but
elbow working back stabbers undermining the workgroup next door, all the while
feigning this "politeness professional omerta"

