
Scientific Stagnation - ironchief
http://www.gwern.net/the-long-stagnation
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nabla9
Comment on drug discovery:

Drug industry have been criticized for exaggerating their R&D numbers. Critics
also claim that private funding is directed towards drugs that contain active
moieties that are same or closely related to active moieties in products that
have been previously approved by FDA and that wast majority of important
breakthrough drugs are the result of publicly funded research. If someone
discovers drug that already works and makes billions, it justifies pushing new
molecule that has same functionality but is covered with different patents.

FDA approves typically less than new 30 NCE:s per year. Some are classified as
NCE:s just for administrative purposes.

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eli_gottlieb
Comment on the lengthening "time to PhD" and "time in postdoc" measures:

Those don't indicate a declining marginal productivity of scientific labor,
but a declining marginal _demand for it_. PhDs and post-docs take longer
nowadays because it takes more publications and more experience to get a "real
job" (defined as some combination of a permanent paid research position _and_
the ability to win grants for oneself) (due to the exponential growth of
university-going student populations leveling off starting in the late '70s).
Most of the claims and measures about academic science actually show much less
trend towards stagnation when this trend in scientific employment is
considered as an independent explanation.

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benbreen
Exactly - and the declining demand explanation doesn't even necessarily imply
a general societal-level lack of demand. Simply that the academic system is
now weighted to favor increasing funding for administrators rather than the
professoriate, which creates a lack of opportunities for early-career
researchers.

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sbspalding
We typically have a very hard time predicting the path of technological
development, primarily because we have a hard time understanding when there
will be inflection points that will utterly obliterate the previous status
quo.

One great example is the Malthusian check/catastrophe, the idea that
agricultural development would not be able to keep up with population growth
and that without a plague or other substantial check on population, there
would be millions of people starving.

Malthus posited this in the late-1700s and probably would have been right if
the Industrial Revolution and the associated massive shifts in the
technological landscape hadn't changed everything.

We can see similar ideas when we think about the various "Peak" energy scares
over the last 50 years ago.

While it is absolutely true that technological stagnation occurs and possibly
is occurring right now, I think we are always better off recognizing that
thinking linearly about how technology develops and will develop can be a
fools errand.

That's my two bitcoins.

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ekm2
My hypothesis is that high end math talent from which scientists are
historically recruited simply has other avenues of making money.Wall street
and Silicon valley basically milks them away.

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jostmey
In every generation there have been great minds that could reshape the world.
Tesla & Edison gave the world electricity, Von Braun & Goddard brought us to
space, and Oppenheimer unleashed the atom bomb. The question has always been
will society support what these people can offer us. The answer is 'not
always'. Take genetic engineering for example. Recombinant Genetic Engineering
has been around since the 70's but society never fully embraced its
applications. The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social
media and video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and
technological achievement (in my personal opinion).

~~~
FD3SA
_The current generation seems to be more preoccupied with social media and
video games and less with pushing the boundaries of scientific and
technological achievement "_

This is because the current generation has been dealt the worst deck since the
Great Depression. Education, housing and healthcare costs have skyrocketed
while wages have remained stagnant. Social trust has been eroded by corrupt
public institutions and markets (big banking, big law, big corp and big
politics all in bed).

This generation has dealt with their realities quite calmly in my opinion. Any
other would've been rioting in the streets by now.

~~~
jacobr1
> Any other would've been rioting in the streets by now.

This seems likely because is absolute terms the current situation is a
relatively comfortable one. While being underemployed, having a huge debt
load, high cost of living and observing corruption clearly sucks, if you are
still housed clothed and fed, if you still have general liberty and democratic
enfranchisement (albeit perhaps seemingly with less impact) you are in a
generally good shape by any historical standard. The costs of civil unrest are
high. Direct injustice needs to occur (outside of a mob situation), social
injustices just don't seem sufficient.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The levels of homelessness and malnutrition are actually at historic highs for
the post-WW2 Western world.

