IMHO, ARPA-H and other new agencies need to change how funding is allocated.
Right now, in experimental sciences, lots of professors from prominent universities have a monopolistic attitude towards research. They have just become middlemen. They manage large groups, have become completely detached from technical things and use their position to secure most funds in the field and also veto others from publishing or getting funded. This is a recipe for disaster, stagnation and fiascos as we can see e.g. in the field of Alzheimer's disease.
Innovative laboratories like LMB Cambridge or Cold Spring Harbor, where a great deal of work was done during the golden age of molecular biology, were at odds with this approach. All funding was internal, and the number of people managed by senior researchers was capped to a single digit.
In short, we need funding policies that weed out scammers and promote good technical work. ARPA for example is quite aware of this problem, and IMHO has much better policies than, say, the European Research Council (ERC). ERC is quite infamous as they don't even bother about withdrawing funds from laboratories that are known to have manipulated research results and had to retract their publications (produced using ERC's funding!). https://retractionwatch.com and https://forbetterscience.com are full of these stories.
I am at a US national lab, and for a lot of our history, we operated that way, too, where much of our money was fundamentally internal. There was a scientific track and management (money-bringing track). No salary or title differences.
But, for the last decade, DOE has been obsessed with productivity metrics such as dollars per paper. These metrics do not make much sense from an NL perspective because the goals of such an institution are different. One reason for this productivity obsession that many old-timers suspect is that many grant and performance reviews are done by established university professors. As you accurately describe, for such a group of rent-seekers, everything is a nail for which they have an h-index hammer.
Yes, I too happen to know some research groups which are organized rather bluntly as not much more than citation factories for the researchers who are pulling in all the funding. Papers produced within the group are cross-cited with the express purpose in mind, and the 'middlemen' get their names in the papers without having anything to do with the actual research. They have amazing impact metrics, as can be expected.
I said funding was internal. This meant the director secured generous funding for the whole institute from the usual sources.
Individual researchers were not allowed to spend their time writing grant applications, everything was provided by the institute with the core funding I mentioned above.
I think this is quite important as, in modern Academia, most professors spend the majority of their time bidding and lobbing for grant money.
Ok yes, this makes perfect sense. I've observed the same thing in academia. For the professors I've seen, even when they're not bidding and lobbying for grant money, they're often doing research that is not necessarily what they really want to do or that they could make the greatest scientific impact doing. Instead, they often contort their research to make it at least appear that they are advancing the scientific agenda of their funder.
I sometimes think about how eccentric the leading scientists of previous generations were. Kurt Gödel for instance would only eat food prepared by his wife, and starved to death when she fell ill and couldn’t cook for him. Just look at a picture of Albert Einstein and you see he was a bit of a character. To say the same about Richard Feynman you may need video, but it’s quickly quite clear.
When you consider how “political” everything has become over the last few decades it seems likely to me that this generation’s Gödels, Einsteins and Feynmans where “outmaneuvered” early in their careers by more socially adept rivals and never reached any positions of influence. Sadly I think you see this pattern in any high status field. The few that love the nitty gritty and can really contribute are typically outmaneuvered by the many who are drawn to the prestige.
Arguably, neither of the two is a scientist. Their contributions weren't particularly novel from a scientific perspective: most of what they did was commercialize things that had been previously invented - in most cases, several decades ago.
Working VR setups first showed up in the 90's (I think). Electric cars were a 100 year old concept, and had many previous attempts. Vertically-landing rockets happened in the late 80's. Almost all of the rest of the Musk companies (small tunnels, "hyperloops," Twitter) have little novelty. The exception may be neuralink, which may not be making any real scientific progress at all.
You can argue about whether the commercialization or the invention is more important, but "science" is about proof of existence and invention, not commercialization.
The whole "mad genius" idea is alive and well on the commercial side, but scientists today are much more conservative and conformist.
business success is often the opposite of science: to be successful in business you have to convince a ton of people to give you money. When you are successful in science, usually nobody believes you
Measuring scientific progress is tricky. The elucidation of the structure of DNA transformed genetics and biology. But was it bigger than recombinant DNA, or CRISPR? In some ways yes, because we knew so little before that breakthrough. But we keep making unexpected and even sometimes revolutionary discoveries. It is a lot easier to make big discoveries when little is known. So, on a percentage basis, the more you know, the harder it is to have a big impact. But recombinant DNA, embryonic stem cells, CRISPR, were transforming discoveries. Molecular biology was not "done" once the central dogma was established.
"In a working paper published last year, Chiara Franzoni of the polimi Graduate School of Management and Paula Stephan of Georgia State University look at a number of measures of risk, based on analyses of text and the variability of citations. These suggest science’s reward structure discourages academics from taking chances"
I believe the focus should be in making more basic science affordable to private parties where the incentives for innovation are more clear.
Scientific instruments and equipment are incredible expensive, taking action to make them affordable and within reach of more startup companies would definitely have an impact.
There's all sorts of problems with the academic institution as it stands, but I don't think forcing anyone to retire at an arbitrary age is much of a solution.
But I agree that the problem with science starts there, in academia. The barrier to entry and the ideological loops you're asked to jump through; Well, you're told that's just how it is. Imagine carrying that attitude into your Scientific career because, well that's just how it is, if you want to be funded. Doesn't leave a lot of room for progression, only products.
This would have so many beneficial knock-on effects, and would also advance science very quickly.
Old professors tend to cling to both prestigious chairs and disproven ideas until they die.
A lot of labs live for decades on dumb projects that are funded because the lab has "future potential." If there were a defined expiration date on professors, there would be a lot less of this grift.
Unfortunately the average age of the people who would decide to do this is probably around 75, and they would like to keep their jobs until they die.
This is exactly the mindset that holds science back. While we often romanticize the idea of the eccentric genius who has some brilliant eureka moment and revolutionizes a field, such instances are an incredibly small minority of scientific progress. Every once and again there is indeed a paradigm shift that opens up a new area of knowledge to explore, but then there are decades of methodical effort actually exploring that space. A small improvement in one area can be used to make a more precise measurement in another, which in turn gives further insight to some third thing. And ultimately, while we might not give out nobel prizes for something as "mundane" as a mild refinement to semiconductor manufacturing or drug synthesis, the value to society of any such development might be many billions of dollars.
High risk, high reward moonshots might sound like an appealing alternative to the current strategy of methodical investigation, after all it's just a numbers game and a you only need a few wins to justify many attempts. But unfortunately it does more harm than good. A single experiment without the context to interpret the data it yields or the commitment to refine its operation is not going to lead to new understanding. Unless you were incredibly lucky and just happened to set everything up right to strike gold on the first try, odds are you will see nothing and convince people that therefore there is nothing of interest to be gained by continued pursuit. In analogy to actually prospecting, you're much more likely to hit paydirt by taking the time to study an area's geology and identifying good spots to dig than digging holes in the ground at random.
Finally, the very premise that scientific stagnation is a problem we need to deal with is shaky. While it is very difficult to quantify scientific progress, various proxies like numbers of papers published, numbers of subdisciplines spun off, number of patents filed, etc all seem to indicate that progress not only is ongoing but has been steadily accelerating. While the change in our understanding of the world from any one discovery might be less and less, there are so many more possible avenues for discovery than at any other time in history, and each discovery expands our frontiers to expose new opportunities. There is no shortage of scientific inquiry and ideas, the only limit is that we have advanced so far that it is becoming hard to find natural phenomena at measurable scales that our models of the world do not already fully explain. We found all the particles of the standard model, we can construct things on atomic scales, genetic engineering has become mundane and protein folding is solved, we have mapped the earth from space with millimeter precision and are in the process of doing the same to other worlds, we can accurately simulate airflows at hypersonic speeds and the cores of collapsing stars. Most of these achievements would have been gibberish a mere century ago, and the achievements yet to come will be just as unimaginable to us if not more so.
It's actually capitalism that has stagnated scientific progress. Initially capitalism revolutionizes production by liberating it from the backwardness of feudalism, establishing division of labor, science over church, automation, etc.
But after a long process of development, capitalism becomes a fetter on scientific discovery. It requires a permanent underclass which is never able to develop their talents. So most humans are trapped doing repetitive and mind-numbing work. Like Stephen Jay Gould said of Einstein there's a:
"near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops"
Also capitalism is generally focused on short term profit rather than projecting long term social needs. This is a major reason we're sprinting toward climate catastrophe when the technology exists to overcome it. Capitalism cannot put the resources and manpower available to work solving the glaring needs of our time. This is the main reason there is scientific (also cultural) stagnation.
There are more scientists now than ever before. I don't see how what you're saying fits the facts. There is probably more funding available for research that has little expectation of ever leading to anything economically significant than at any time in the past.
The fact that progress exists does not technically constitute a counter-example.
Maybe in a parallel world, where capitalism does not exist, the progress is 10x faster, or the funding is 10x more important. Maybe the capitalism needs some progress, so needs to invest in it, but has also as effect to cut the roots that would generate more progress.
Or maybe not. My point is just that I don't think that what you point out does not really prove anything.
The pocket change invested in serious scientific research by capitalist-run foundations proportionally increases with the wealth of those capitalists. That it grows is not impressive. What would be impressive is if these foundational social forces were disrupted.
Every system of government has its own local optimum for each thing a society does. No system of government has a monopoly on the best local optimums across the board. Whenever any given state becomes too dogmatic about adhering to one system of government, things will be limited by that system. The ideal is to approach different issues more dynamically by using approaches best fit for each issue.
Take space for example (a mix of science and engineering). The Soviets made the first giant leaps because the size of the investments and types of returns (national security, political, national pride, etc.) only made sense at the state level. That scared the US into its own state level program: "...this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."[0] Once the state level investment cleared enough of the obstacles, profit motive emerged that starts to let private industry take a larger role in advancing the state of the art [1].
This mix has played out exceptionally well is smartphones. It's hard to imagine anything other than private industry profit motive creating or advancing smartphones to where they are today. But without connectivity, smartphones would merely be a feature phone with iPod functionality.[2] It's just as hard to imagine private industry cooperating enough to create the foundation of that connectivity... the internet. The steps of ARPANET -> commercial internet -> smartphone are part of an amazing example of the power of mixing state and industry programs for the parts of the problem they are best at. "Socialism" and "capitalism" working together for an outcome that has transformed how we go about our daily lives.
It requires true leadership to make these different approaches fit together. Dogmatic arguments about these kinds of systems makes it even harder to get the next great examples. The best system is the one that finds a way to balance the best of each of the other systems in a way that is good for the population at large.
If that is the case, why did all the golden ages of science occur under capitalism?
Why didn't modern commumist societies produce greater scientific progress than the capitalist world?
I'm not fan of communism, but was not the first man in space from a communist country?
I agree that progress is more impressive under capitalist countries (and that capitalist countries have other very useful advantages, such as not having gulags), but I rather feel that the reason was rather that capitalism was very well positioned to grab the low hanging fruits before the others (and also that, due to our position, we see the progress of capitalism as more impressive as the ones from renaissance, antiquity, ... while maybe, relatively, the step was more impressive at the time)
It's a tautology. The whole idea of a "golden age" is premised on liberal/enlightenment values which were brought to life through the revolutionary transition from feudalism to capitalism.
I think it's plausible if you think of it in periods or "waves".....Capitalism may indeed be superior entirely, or it may only be superior up until a certain point, and then once it reaches a certain level of power (political/regulatory/cognitive capture) it could cause certain levels of progress to stagnate...and if adequate capture and ~censorship of information production & distribution has been accomplished, people may never be able to realize the position the system has assumed (or, some may notice, but their messages may be censored or disbelieved).
Wow and here I thought most people hadn't read the communist manifesto.
I agree with your vision, obviously once we replace capitalism with socialism run by a dictatorship of the proletariat then the organs of the state will quickly devolve into obselescene and will will all live in a stateless classless atheist communist utopia.
BTW: how is that Lysenknism working out for you now that you are free from the shackles of capitalism.
Right now, in experimental sciences, lots of professors from prominent universities have a monopolistic attitude towards research. They have just become middlemen. They manage large groups, have become completely detached from technical things and use their position to secure most funds in the field and also veto others from publishing or getting funded. This is a recipe for disaster, stagnation and fiascos as we can see e.g. in the field of Alzheimer's disease.
Innovative laboratories like LMB Cambridge or Cold Spring Harbor, where a great deal of work was done during the golden age of molecular biology, were at odds with this approach. All funding was internal, and the number of people managed by senior researchers was capped to a single digit.
In short, we need funding policies that weed out scammers and promote good technical work. ARPA for example is quite aware of this problem, and IMHO has much better policies than, say, the European Research Council (ERC). ERC is quite infamous as they don't even bother about withdrawing funds from laboratories that are known to have manipulated research results and had to retract their publications (produced using ERC's funding!). https://retractionwatch.com and https://forbetterscience.com are full of these stories.