Something missing from the top-level post: why stagnation.
I’ll just put out that one of the tiny things that most gave me a sense of “fuck” in relation to stagnation was reading an essay written in 1972 that was lamenting the “publish or perish” phenomenon. I had previously assumed that that term was way more recent, and that people were trying to fix it but it would just take a few years. To realize it was 50 years old was kinda crushing honestly.
Here’s google ngrams showing how common the phrase “publish or perish” was in books through the last 200 years. It was coined in the 30s and took off in the 60s, peaking in 1968. Interesting & relevant timing!
I think there’s a case for two different sources: one external, the simple lack of any further low hanging fruit to exploit, and one internal, which is exactly this—the increasing inadequacy of our institutions to create the conditions for innovation, often caused paradoxically by the excessive focus on promoting innovation. “If scientists gave us all this cool stuff by working on their own, imagine how good they will be if we hire a lot more of them and pit them into a competition for funding with each other!” was a catastrophically stupid idea, assuming humans can be made to produce highly creative work on command and like clockwork. It led to short-termism, creating a humongous confusing, amorphous mass of tiny innovations, many of which non replicable or straight up bogus, and efficiently killing off any incentive to actually work on long term, solid, sweeping discoveries.
Something missing from the top-level post: why stagnation.
I’ll just put out that one of the tiny things that most gave me a sense of “fuck” in relation to stagnation was reading an essay written in 1972 that was lamenting the “publish or perish” phenomenon. I had previously assumed that that term was way more recent, and that people were trying to fix it but it would just take a few years. To realize it was 50 years old was kinda crushing honestly.
Here’s google ngrams showing how common the phrase “publish or perish” was in books through the last 200 years. It was coined in the 30s and took off in the 60s, peaking in 1968. Interesting & relevant timing!
I think there’s a case for two different sources: one external, the simple lack of any further low hanging fruit to exploit, and one internal, which is exactly this—the increasing inadequacy of our institutions to create the conditions for innovation, often caused paradoxically by the excessive focus on promoting innovation. “If scientists gave us all this cool stuff by working on their own, imagine how good they will be if we hire a lot more of them and pit them into a competition for funding with each other!” was a catastrophically stupid idea, assuming humans can be made to produce highly creative work on command and like clockwork. It led to short-termism, creating a humongous confusing, amorphous mass of tiny innovations, many of which non replicable or straight up bogus, and efficiently killing off any incentive to actually work on long term, solid, sweeping discoveries.
That’s a great way of putting it
Some hypotheses for “why stagnation” in my review of Where Is My Flying Car?