I wonder how much of the fact that there hasn’t been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government—that is by the signaling and control view. Maybe we have too many “accredited” scientists and they are too beholden to government, and to a lesser extent other grant-making organizations—and they have crowded out or controlled real, idealistic science.
If this is so, then there should be an observable effect when comparing between countries, shouldn’t there? Hard to see how one country having massive academic/government control of science could affect all other countries to an equal level. Oughtn’t there be research on this? It’s an obvious question and has equally obvious ideological value, so funding wouldn’t be such an issue.
I suppose you could explain both those away as being already corrupted (#1) and entirely unrelated to actual scientific productivity (especially of breakthroughs), but then you’re paddling upstream...
You seem to be saying: Countries that spend more money on publishing papers to signal their expertise publish more papers. Therefore, they are not signalling.
This sounds like a fully-general counterargument: if a country is publishing few papers and those papers aren’t getting cited or hailed, then obviously they have no major scientific expertise; but if they are publishing scads of highly cited papers, then they’re merely spending lots of money on signaling and so have no major scientific expertise.
As I said, there being zero correlation between papers & citations and genuine scientific productivity seems unlikely to me and requires actual evidence and not hand^Wsignal-waving suggestions.
If this is so, then there should be an observable effect when comparing between countries, shouldn’t there? Hard to see how one country having massive academic/government control of science could affect all other countries to an equal level. Oughtn’t there be research on this? It’s an obvious question and has equally obvious ideological value, so funding wouldn’t be such an issue.
Nobel laureates is one possible metric: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau_percap-nobel-prize-laureates-per-capita Looks pretty much like one would expect: a bias towards northern Europe (likely in part due to Literature & Peace), and then G8 countries. Only #3, Switzerland, is a country I’ve ever heard as having a relatively small government.
Or here’s a statistical study of scientific papers published per nation: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=190149 US, then UK, then Japan, then Germany & France. All places with very large powerful governments.
I suppose you could explain both those away as being already corrupted (#1) and entirely unrelated to actual scientific productivity (especially of breakthroughs), but then you’re paddling upstream...
You seem to be saying: Countries that spend more money on publishing papers to signal their expertise publish more papers. Therefore, they are not signalling.
This sounds like a fully-general counterargument: if a country is publishing few papers and those papers aren’t getting cited or hailed, then obviously they have no major scientific expertise; but if they are publishing scads of highly cited papers, then they’re merely spending lots of money on signaling and so have no major scientific expertise.
As I said, there being zero correlation between papers & citations and genuine scientific productivity seems unlikely to me and requires actual evidence and not hand^Wsignal-waving suggestions.