Yes, that’s an important issue certainly. To some extent, scientific and engineering progress clearly feels slower than it seems to have been historically. We don’t have frequent things like the theory of evolution showing up now. But when phrased that way, it seems that much of the slow down is simply that we’ve picked off the low-hanging fruit. We have a pretty good understanding of basic physics and biology today, so the remaining discoveries will be necessarily more incremental.
If you compare the money and manpower put into science today, to fifty and 100 and 150 years ago, you will be astonished at the reduction in productivity.
Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?
As always, relative to what?
Yes, that’s an important issue certainly. To some extent, scientific and engineering progress clearly feels slower than it seems to have been historically. We don’t have frequent things like the theory of evolution showing up now. But when phrased that way, it seems that much of the slow down is simply that we’ve picked off the low-hanging fruit. We have a pretty good understanding of basic physics and biology today, so the remaining discoveries will be necessarily more incremental.
I’m more interested in prospective comparisons than retrospective comparions.
If you compare the money and manpower put into science today, to fifty and 100 and 150 years ago, you will be astonished at the reduction in productivity.
Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?