Scientific Progress is Slowing Down. But Why?
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- Опубліковано 8 тра 2024
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We see constant progress in the world every day, from better cars to faster phones to virtual reality and the internet of things. However, despite all the technological and engineering advances, science seems to be slowing down? Let’s have a look.
Paper here: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
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#science #sciencenews #scientists #research - Наука та технологія
Science is slowing down because scientists write papers and papers and more papers, not to achieve scientifical progress, but to achieve a better university-ranking.
This. There is a great article published in science in 1960s I think, called strong inference by platt. I really think that while many scientists are still doing this, we have moved away from this some due to focusing on publications and getting “results” we don’t value critical confirmation of the null hypothesis, we don’t value negative results we don’t report them nearly as much.
Well said Herman!
100%
Publish or perish is the name of the game.
God Damned pedigree
We succesfully created a system encourages mediocrity and discourages novelty.
Conform and consume.
and only incentivices short-term profit
Agree, just by looking at the US, there are no more places like Bell Labs that focused on pure research but instead, companies focus only on creating commercial products. This trend started in 70-80s…
Mediocrity because they look at science from a biased view, scientists are not open. James Webb telescope has shown that the universe has all been created at the same time, the further they look or deeper into space the stars and galaxies are the same age. They thought they would be seeing younger ones. Nothing must upset the big bang theory. They measure time on how far it takes light to travel the universe, Maybe this is the wrong measurement.
@@meshuga27 Now you have companies like IBM, it looks like doing research but in reality steals open source projects and turns them into closed source for profit.
The big problem here is a significant shift in funding towards marketable products and ideas. A perfect example, the CSIRO (commonwealth science and research organization) was doing hard research into black holes when they developed wifi (Fourier transformation technique). That same organization has now had a total shift to 'work with and support industry' and would never have made that same breakthrough with their current focus and funding focus. It's why we have better things but less actual scientific innovation. Same thing is happening across the research sector.
From James Burke's first episode of Connections:
And you’ll never believe the extraordinary things that led to us being the way we are today. Things like, for instance, why a sixteenth-century doctor at the court of Queen Elizabeth did something that made it possible for you to watch this screen now? Or the fact that, because eighteenth-century merchants were worried about ship’s bottoms, you have nylon to wear? Or why a group of French monks and their involvement with sheep-rearing helped to give the modern world the computer? Or what medieval Europeans did with their fire in winter that led to motorcar manufacture?
No Brain Soap, very interesting, but kind of proving a Eurocentric view of science, I.e. only white people do that. Completely unreasonable when we considered how advanced China got by the 14th century, and how behind Europe had instead got after the fall of the library of Alexanderia in the 4th century AD.
But ... but ... I was told capitalism breeds innovation :/
@@CrniWuk how could it . Wall st is about short term profit
@@jamiedoe6822 I know. I was just joking because a lot of people out there think like the "free market/capitalism" solves ALL problems ...
science without the philosophy of science made it not much of a warm environment for thinkers. When you look at most of the best scientists, they were very good at philosophy, reasoning and formal logic. The separation of sciences has really played its role, hindering the creation of polymaths
The separation of logic and reason in science is its downfall It's no more rational than religion, but, being based on the senses rather than feelings. Science is mathematics with a clunky, fallacious philosophy of empiricism and materialism superimposed over it, which produces irrational nonsense.
another hypothesis is we've picked most of the low hanging fruit. it only gets harder from here.
Everyone knows your research gets exponentially more expensive as the game goes on. Hell, even Psilons can get bogged down without feeding that constant drain properly.
;)
Yes, this is such an obvious reason I'm always a bit stunned when people more quickly turn to variations on "kids these days" reasons. It seems psychologically that "kids these days are worse" is such a compelling thought that people will willfully ignore other explanations so they can jump to it.
Of course progress has slowed down, anything easy to figure out, we have figured out. We went through a brief period of acceleration when each discovery gave us new tools to make the next discovery easier, but that never goes on forever. Always sigmoid, never exponential. Such is life.
Usually, this demonstrates need for new ideas. Deflection, much?
It's this combined with the metrics used to evaluate researchers (no. of papers), which prevent people from trying different ideas.
Exactly. I am pretty sure that the geosciences have been mined out and that researchers are effectively picking over the spoil heaps. Some years ago I jumped ship and moved into an area of bio-geo crossover. There, there is still some interesting stuff to chase after, but give it another 10-15 years and that will be spent.
Former researcher here. You get funding for publishing tons of paper and sticking to the status quo. If you challenge the status quo without very powerful backing, you don’t get funding and your career dies. Speaking as someone who had a paper killed by by Michel Mayor because the results threatened funding for the espresso spectrograph. I was right though
“Espresso Spectrograph”
Rule #1, don’t threaten things with great names.
What was threatening about your paper? What were your conclusions?
probably you were just wrong, and you are naif enough to understand why
@@nlssvdr7107 ooo a cynic, I like you. lol
@@DeepThinker193 Cynics on UA-cam comments are a rare and precious commodity.
Reminds me of the stagnation in popular music, art and fashion - my take: creativity requires being mentally 'off the grid' for some time, reduced media consumption, long walks and long showers. Groundbreaking ideas can neither be forced nor planned. They come, when the mind is in a dream-like, distracted state. Of course, you have to burden your memory with a lot of very specific factual and conceptual information first. And you need enough sleep.
Neoliberalism has stolen our dreamy lazy life hence diseapear new revolutionary ideas 😩
Dream like , distracted state, that sounds familiar. All this originates from a Point, do you know what that's called?
@@user-bm1mh4db2pUnfortunately it's easier to get distracted from our distracted state these days
@@user-bm1mh4db2p drugs?
@@user-bm1mh4db2pthe subconscious
Basically, making science nowadays is more effective if you are the DIY-superman and you are not interested in getting any funds from anybody. My friends from Wrocław city salvaged tons of equipment from trash and bankrupt companies, scavenging what they can, eventually they even aqquired 30yo electrone microscope on a junkyard, refurbished it and now they're gonna start their own research. Writing scientific papers is waste of time - it's better to have youtube channel nowadays, gather small community of interested people and publish one bonkers paper every few years.
im not sure this is the great idea you think it is
PS: sounds like a fun hobby though
Learning from Sci Hub University also, I hope. I wish them all the best.
In my postdoctoral experience in theoretical evolutionary biology, it seems like science is often driven by ego, especially among senior investigators, who would rather be "right" than know the truth.
Can absolutely relate to that. Had a supervisor who could not explain to me why he was right and I was wrong scientifically.
Only „arguments“ he had was supposed „experience“ and a theory that’s „already published“ (although for a different experiment).
Works if you want papers, doesn’t work if you want truth and competence.
i fail to see the difference. isnt being right mean knowing the truth?
And thus the problem is scientists live longer, depriving the younger, reckless, innovators the chance to bankrupt the faculty with their crazy ideas. Instead bankrupting the faculty with stale ideas.
@@TheBayru The bloated ego of many "top scientists" makes it impossible to work with them, hence the transfer of experience and knowledge between different generations of scientists is greatly hampered.
The root of the word science also pertains to criminal law where a scienter is required in order to define a crime. Thus all Scientists are inherently recognized as liars. Mostly, only by sophisticated attorneys, though.
I work in the biomedical industry or at least I am trying to. The problem in my field is 3 fold: 1. innovative thinkers are punished and excommunicated from the field, 2. scammers game the system and have the appearance of productivity and lots of papers that are either redundant/obsolete, falsified, or side details rather than useful for breakthroughs, 3. dishonesty when raising capital poisoning the well for people with good ideas that are feasible and valuable.
I’ve seen much of this firsthand, it’s a very accurate assessment.
That just means science isn’t perfect. Nothing is perfect.
Scientific innovation is doing just fine if you know where to look
Some places to look: synthetic biology, RNA chemistry (Sure, putting more transistors on chips isn’t very surprising or new, but mRNA vaccines are surprising and relatively new and very broad in their likely applications. Look at CRISPr, Or the improvements (still recent) In battery technology, and in materials science. (Look up: Tetrataenite.)
I posit that all of these things are effects of a ruling class usurping more and more resources for themselves rather than investing in social programs to benefit humanity as a whole.
For the first factor, innovative thinkers being pushed out of the field, this would not be a problem if there were societal programs in place for these innovative thinkers to freely tinker on things they found important rather than needing to think about how they're going to feed their family.
Factors two and three are similar because they both deal with people being dishonest to game the system for themselves. Dishonesty in the community would be lessened by supportive social programs because people wouldn't be pressured into scamming others in order to make ends meet. Rather they could be more innovative thinkers and pursue the ideas they are passionate about.
The current system that rewards dishonesty and incentivises group think is exactly the type of environment that leads generative AI algorithms to be overvalued because they can't produce anything that's truly groundbreaking. However, the entire system will eventually collapse when the ruling class has confined itself to a local optima that it can't break out of without radical change.
Perhaps I should write a paper 🤣🤣🤣
Extremely sad state of affairs😢
Our modern society is entirely based on seeming good rather than being good.
And I get extremely angry when I run into the people that reinforce this attitude. My emotions get the better of me and I have to choose between humiliating them or walking away. And given that I’m too conscientious, I walk away and wish I could walk away entirely from this society.
When everyone's got a Masters = nobody's got a Masters.
When we have to master more and more difficult content to progress, fewer people are able to do it and progress slows down. It's insane how much you have to know in order to do anything accurately quantitative in general relativity. Differential geometry alone is brutal.
As I am currently in the center of the paper treadmill in electrochemistry, I am not surprised. As a PhD, you try to get things working that your big boss has barely thought about for 10 minutes, and then they insist it has to work with their materials, just because of their ego. I am actively sabotaged to work on something that is truly competitive or new because it only should work with our stuff. Obviously, it doesn't, and you try to find workarounds to get your damned papers published and this stories are never groundbreaking. And yes of course it's getting harder to find something. 1906 you can get a noble price for the isolation of fluorine. It's not that easy these days.
From my personal experience: PhD mentors are not scientists. They are cotton plantators. If You're a good Uncle Tom, one day You'll be freed by Your master. Then You must try to find Your luck alone (mostly not possible in the science, but anyway)
You know contractions exist, right? Jeez. You don’t need to separate _I_ and _am._
As a young scientist struggling to survive in science, I can point to three things that are killing it:
- publish or perish, that is, quantity is more important than quality!
- most scientists are underpaid and very overworked, specially in academia.
- The bloated ego of many "top scientists" makes it impossible to work with them, hence the transfer of experience and knowledge between different generations of scientists is greatly hampered.
If senior scientists are that biased and are not that open so how are they making progress at all.because in science you can't progress at all with a mind like that.
Indeed. It's crazy that if you want to have a decent scholarship during the PhD , you must publish 2-3 papers during the masters ahah
@@geordi-gabrielrenauddumoul449 really please guide me I am preparing to enter a research institute ug
And I can't come up with an idea to improve 1 (publish or perish) without making 3 (ego, power centralization) worse. Or the other way around. Quality of research is so subjective and have to be evaluated by the "top scientists" in the field or we try with more objective quantitative messures and we instead get 1.
Stop being lazy Communists first and foremost, lololl.
As an ex-academic, my vote is for option 3. The publication industry coupled with managerialism have established a set of incentives for scientists that align poorly with discovery and knowledge generation. Amusingly, there were a number of social science papers published in the 70s (i think) that predicted this... And here we are.
Social science doesn't count as science if you ignore their accurate predictions!
References?
Can we get reference to those Social Science papers? They seems to be more important than ever. If you don't remember the papers, just give me some good pointers.
Advances are made. A lot. But not from university research anymore. but from private sector imo
@@cwpv2477 Firstly, the papers sited considers patents and papers by everyone. The decline is clear across the board.
Secondly, those "Advances" you're talking about are all in AI, nearly nothing else. And almost all them follow the same pattern. Just see how all of them are either trying to make money of chatGPT or trying to build their own chatGPT or a language model for something else, or extend the language model to generalized reasoning or at least for non-language applications etc. Even the most innovative a few are just buzy building AI accelerator chip by petrifying the ML on silicon, or pull some old linear algebra trick to accelerate the LLM or reduce size etc. Nothing, almost nothing else at all.
As an independent researcher so far I paid my own research, and conference fees. In a course of 20 years I witnessed increase in prices of everything related to research, and simultaneously the increase in pressure to publish. It all boils down to the only people publishing papers are those in the business of printing papers that can afford it. Naturally, instead of two groundbreaking ideas being published in a single paper, a single publishable idea is being published in many conferences.
It is no surprise that scientific progress is slowing down. The surprise is that people needed a scientific paper to spell it out. To get breakthroughs often requires thinking outside the box, using imagination and being free enough to be willing to take risks.
In a world where people are increasingly taught what to think rather than how to think and students are being punished rather than praised when they try something new rather than the tried and tested, it leaves less and less room for the necessary, freedom of imagination, willingness to take risks by thinking outside the box, that is so essential and needed to get scientific breakthroughs.
"taught what to think rather than how to think" is a genuine issue, especially with regard to physics. Physics challenges our concept of reality where reality was never present for the human to begin with. It requires a certain kind of education to see beyond that veil.
The problem is that every new discovery makes that box bigger and bigger, so to think something that isn't already inside the box somewhere becomes harder, specially that given the nature of the universe the ammo it of stuff to discover certainly is finite, so there is an ever decreasing quantity of ideas outside that box and eventually the box will encompass everything that is there to think and discover.
Remember that we are not dealing with a physical box but a figure of speech to encourage us to be imaginative and be creative to try something different. So, the process involved to be imaginative remains the same and give the same breakthrough results no matter how big the box gets. Also keep in mind that the world of science is much bigger than people imagine it to be so that we won't have to be concerned in our lifetime that the box will ever be big enough to encompass everything there is to discover.
Likewise, just when science thinks it has come to the end of the road and gets the impression that there is nothing more to be said or discovered is often when a major breakthrough happens. One example is when Newtonian physics gave way to Quantum physics. Another example was when scientists discovered the human cell and thinking it was the end of the road that the DNA helix inside the cell was discovered.
Finally, even when it truly is the end of the road in a certain field like using typewriters where the mechanic typewriter evolved into the electric typewriter and eventually the electronic typewriter you get a breakthrough in a new area like the discovery of the computer which takes you off onto a new side road.
I just left academia after a PhD, I think another part of it is that, at least in ecology, research councils aren't in the habit of funding work that could be groundbreaking as they view it as too risky/ a high likelihood of wasted money. Calls for funding are often highly tied to something we already know a lot about and applying it to a different scale or location.
If you had stayed in academia you would have found that this statement is false.
Groundbreaking innovation tends to break up wealth generating paradigms.
@@paintspot1509 'Playing it safe' is what I've seen as the predominant strategy for grant applications. Use a wealth of prior research and ask a slightly tangential question such as those I suggested, like 'does this apply to x situation as well?'. This scenario is furthered by a proliferation of short-term academic contracts where institutions essentially put you in a position of 'get grant money in or you're gone'. No early career researchers want to risk their futures on risky grant proposals for research councils that often value marginal progress on a topic that is already well studied. I'll also add, that the increase in publications required to keep a career leads to these marginally different/smaller scope studies that can be written up faster to keep people in their jobs.
I was involved in a few grant application during my PhD and after.
The funding committees who review the applications _love_ the idea of funding groundbreaking work!
What they don't like is funding things that don't have a firm explanation of the supporting evidences behind the theory to be tested or don't have a clearly presented indication that the applicant understands the topic they're exploring the limits of.
To them that looks like they're throwing away money at a person who isn't going to deliver what they say they will
Research is always a gamble but not all gambles have the same odds. It's risk management and is entirely sensible
Depends on how crazy your ideas are. I knew one girl who thought she proved Artin's conjecture on L functions for her PhD, until she found the mistake in her thesis the week before her defense. Lots of people think they've proved the Riemann Hypothesis, Goldbach's conjecture, the twin prime conjecture, given and elementary proof of Fermat's Last Theorem etc. etc. and some think they've done it all. Some even think they can trisect angles and square the circle (there are well known proofs they can't be done). Bottom line: It's hard enough to get funding, can't throw good taxpayer money after crazy. Bad enough giving money to mad scientists, but what would these plebian truck drivers think of the gov't giving their money to bad scientists?
I think back to my PhD mentor. He had a ton of grants and won a bunch of awards because his h-index was very high for his age and it was growing fast. But what exactly did he do to be so highly cited? Well he collaborated with other high impact labs and got his names on their papers. And many of those labs were massive 100 person research groups that cited their own papers highly. So in reality, most of his exceptional KPIs were hollow. But he still got loads of money to do research. He was very good at "the game", the business of being a researcher. But he spent little of his time studying papers extensively and being an expert in a particular field. You need fewer generalists, businessmen and more nerds who are obsessed with a particular subject and dedicate their lives to it. Its becoming harder to be an expert in a small field and easier to be a generalist/networker to attain the KPIs. The remedy in my opinion starts by getting over the obsession with publishing in huge journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. It should be very rewarding to do rock solid, reproducible research on a niche topic and to publish in "lower impact" but more focused journals.
I totally agree.
We need some kind of "open source" movement for science. Crowdfunding for science that requires funding. Publishing in open journals, free for anyone to read. Take the celebrity and status out of the equation. Its too commercial and too corrupted by perverse incentives.
@@ASpaceOstrichsounds amazing, honestly
@@kuroinokitsune Idk, the current system works for the people currently in power. Maybe humans just aren't qualified to advance to a technological utopia and are doomed to a long slow decline because nobody in power would like their power disrupted. We are stuck with the economists vision of the future.
@@emptyshirt well.. the were human civilizations before, let's hope we won't be last
I'm just a small mechanical engineer, not a scientist, but I noticed something similar in my field.
My observation is that many oldtimers lived the evolution from handdrawing to CAD-design, which was a phenomenal tool for them. But the new generation gets tought the new tools and the foundation only in theory. The difference in the result couldn't be more stark! It gives me a strong feeling, that they don't really understand why they are doing things the way they were tought to do them. They fully live in their abstract layer.
Yes, the University I attended required 80% hand drawing and 20% 3D renders/CAD. I also did technical drawing by hand in high school - which I loved. Then the University (in order to further their accreditation - and keep up to date), dropped the hand drawing requirements in favor of CAD. This happened two years after I graduated.
Should we ban the calculator and computers? What are you guys saying? Where do we draw the line ? At what point is technology too much? Please elaborate.
@@bendedstraw4294they have no idea what they’re talking about
Losing the skill of hand drawing or hand writing detracts from the quality of thinking. CAD is great, but there is such a thing as "more haste, less speed"
@@bendedstraw4294 Quite A Good Question Ngl
There has been a plethora of insightful comments pointing this trend down to vested interest of companies, senior research officials, financial feasibility, and shift of societal perspective on science, but could it be that we have simply produces so many theoretical and procedural advancements, and so many data points, most of which need not even be viable for extrapolation, That a single researcher, or even a research group cannot hope to effectively utilize it in order to produce a groundbreaking discovery/advancement?
There is only so much an individual can learn over the span of their life, and knowledge and data that we generate is so vast at this point, that researchers are struggling to find the means to use it as effectively as it could be used. The more steps need to be taken on someone's educational journey in order to be competent enough to participate in current debates in the field, the less time can be devoted to understanding and side lighting individual subjects and assumptions. And of course, that makes greater demands on a scientist's analytical and syntopical (especially so) reading capacity. At some point, either we produce ever more and more exceptional minds, or find means to produce such individuals to keep up the level of innovation given the sheer amount of data, or we have to resort to segregating and cataloguing, and "applied research. Maybe the human capacity to assimilate and process information is just not up to par yet?
OFC this is exacerbated by a rapid decline in mental health in youth and our media and culture, which decrease out attention spans. Man, we are in such dire straits.
That's an interesting assessment.
IF it's accurate (& it may well be), do u think maybe the new AI systems could help solve, or at least minimize / workaround the problem?
I spent my career in an R&D environment. One of the key things that happened over the last 20 years is the change from basic research to applied research. Applied meaning it has a specific product in mind vs achieving basic understanding. I've even had other scientists argue that only applied research should be funded. In my organization they used to be managed by technical people who moved up. Around 2005 they changed the promotion path and specifically limited the level a technical person could reach while creating specific management tracks to reach upper levels. This caused more and more of the senior decision makers to have zero knowledge of what we actually did and to focus more and more on short term financial measures than long term research and game changing output. Compared to the 60s and 70s the number of papers our organization produced greatly decreased but also the content changed from technical scientific content to more of a "look at how great we are" marketing content.
I would argue the actual opposite. “Real” Applied research is almost non existent nowadays, because we’ve VC-fied applied research. All the people who should be playing with things like fiber optics and devising new clever ideas are instead wasting their time in quantum internet simulations, or in quantum computers or fusion.
Nobody cares about achievable improvements, because x1.2 is not enough for VCs, they want x10.
Your “Organization’s” name hypothetically “rhymes with” … ? Worked for an organization that had a dual track career structure for technical people. Interesting example of how the intent can be subverted. Nothing like the “Bean-Counters” setting technical directions, (like Boeing).
This is a really good point.
Do you work at Boeing?
At IBM this was the era when the bean counters took over - financial guys with Wall Street backgrounds sent to squeeze the last penny out for exec's and investors. IBM is now a husk of its former self, I can't even tell you what they do anymore.
it's the Sophons' fault
😍
😂 meddling with reactors
lol. You beat me to it!!!!
Somebody needs to shut down SETI. Obviously.
Oh, you noticed the same too!
Honestly, this topic deserves more than 5 minites video.
Nonsense! The topic was covered perfectly. The video even provided a solution to the problem with Brilliant! "Speed up your scientific progress with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ link." I'm sure if everyone buys Brilliant we'll have more scientific innovation in no time, so get to buying people and hurry before the sale is over. :)
I'm happy more and more people are finally talking about this technological stagnation issue.
If you look around most rooms and take the screens out, we are mostly back in the 1970s except for some design choices.
Also if you look at a picture of the world in 1920 and a picture of the world in 1970,
You can see a lot has changed over that 50 year period.
Meanwhile, if you look at the differences between 1970 and 2020 not as much changed, except for in the digital world.
This issue is so underrated and probably the most important issue of our time.
Also, I think culture should be considered as a possible reason we have this problem.
Anecdotally we know this - it's almost impossible to get funding for your own research, and almost all smaller research grants are set in the framework of conferences, events, larger programmes and 'thematic' groups that funders are interested in. I don't fancy my chances of getting anything more speculative and long range funded. Who would I go to? How would I apply in the first place when much of the application process is governed through existing programmes? The day of the departmental budget, there simply to fund staff research is long, long gone, at least in my field. We can't even fund the basic infrastructure of the unit, even at the level of basic admin.
I think this is the major problem.
Which country are we talking about here?
Which country are we talking about here?
Long past are the days when a cathodic ray tube, some photographic material and a lot of cables on a backyard shack can lead to a physics revolution 😂.
The main reason for that, is because all the research that could be done with a small departmental budget, has already been done. To do relevant research nowadays, you need bigger budgets. That's why a lot of research money goes to large scale efforts, like the LHC, and James Webb telescope.
Born too early for space exploration, born too late for exciting scientific breakthrough, born at right time to enjoy meme.
I think we'd be watching memes in some spaceship during space exploration
Born just in time to take the existing science to build the foundations that births the age of space exploration?
Born in right time before meme become to cringy like skibidi toilet
Space exploration has been around for over half a century. I'm always puzzled why people say otherwise
@@hieronymusvonlipschitz We sent a man to the moon, and then kinda stopped, hasn't it?
Great video! I wish there was a bit of a deeper dive into the reasons why we're observing these findings in the first place.
This is exactely how I feel like as an engineering student. My professors actually set the foundations to many things we use today, but today's research is rather on "how can we make XY cheaper?". I am a mechanical engineer and I increasingly feel like that working with design, solid mechanics and materials is very finite in innovation. Today most research topics I see are on how can we do the thing we always did now using 3d printing or machine learning. AKA AI
There is a very old definition of an engineer - someone who can do for 50 cents what any fool can do for $50 - so I guess its always been a focus of the job.
this is what engineering is about tho, no? thousands of years ago you had to carve things by hand with a stone. Then a hammer was invented. then automatization. Now this process is scaled.
More and more I begin to think that the whole "IT" and "AI" hype deserves the following call: ECRASEZ L'INFAME!
He is clearly talking about excessive corporate greed, but replies are retarded.
The whole society suffers from this post capitalistic fever and cultural/spiritual death. It's so sad
'Publish or perish' forced many researchers to focus on 'easy science'.
Why push forward on a risky venture with little hope of success, when there are any number of simpler paths to take?
I saw this at University; workers slavishly duplicating historical experiments with no real change in the set-up, procedures or conclusions.
"We did the thing that other people did, the same way they did it. We got the same results, so we know we did it right. Here is our article, publish please."
Maybe this was unique to Psychology research?
Fair point, but having said that, reproducibility of experimental results is critical for confirming scientific hypotheses and data.
Yes and no.
This one set of experiments was conducted year after year without any variation...for 7 years in a row.
That's a lot of Rats* sacrificed and nothing new learned.
The 'research' they were conducting had first been published in the 1930's.
The students were being taught how to publish papers, not how to conduct proper scientific inquiry.
*Rats were having their feet burned off to verify that nitrous oxide is an effective anesthetic.
If the animal pulled their foot away from the heat, they'd be given more gas until the stopped responding to pain.
Here's the fun part: 8 cylinders of Nitrous were ordered for the experiment and three Rats.
All 8 cylinders of Nitrous were found at a Frat Party after the last Rat died.
'Research'...
You've described good science.
Shockingly, psychology does not always have reproductible results.
Just google this scandal where a big time US psych lecturer falsified results of her study on honesty. Look at this and laugh because otherwise we can only weep at how our field is being dragged in the mud
...except that Psychology has just went through a whole epidemic of "we did the same thing and did NOT get the same result" , raising great concerns of old papers
The state of knowledge today is such that serious effort is required to truly innovate, yet few scientists have the luxury to spend significant amounts of time on risky and work intensive ideas: on 3 to 5 year contracts they have to get publishable results, write up papers, present them at conferences, apply for grants with proposals that senior peers in the field find exciting and get ready for another 3 to 5 year PostDoc position. There is no room for a few years lost chasing down an idea that doesn't pan out. In fact, admitting that an idea failed is not incentivized at all: better to stick with it, make it look like it worked out in a fashion and write papers anyway, increasing the overall noise in academic publishing. Few of those who obtain the luxury to take risks and go for the high hanging fruit through a permanent contract actually change their mode of operation.
There are too many poor people who become researchers. So they suffer through this whole academia process. Back in the the day, you had to be of money to do research or you were forced to work in the mines or do book keeping.
Science will one day come to a halt. An example: There are only so many continents you can discover. At a certain point everything will be known. And while there might be things beyond of what we can comprehend they are by defintion beyond our understanding. I would recommend reading THE END OF SCIENCE.
@@EbonyPope Such sentiments are not new. Albert Michelson (Nobel price in physics 1907) opined in 1894: "While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice." This was shortly before quantum mechanics and the special and general theory of relativity fundamentally changed our understanding of nature and enabled significant technological progress in the 20th century. Today we are still looking for a consistent theory that combines quantum mechanics and general relativity, one among many open questions in physics alone. The issue is not that science is anywhere close to ending, but that there are systematic problems in the way we conduct science today which stand in the way of progress, in addition to putting increasing stress on many of the researchers in academia, often in an attempt to increase short term efficiency.
@@EbonyPope This is not a new sentiment. Albert Michelson (Nobel price in physics 1907) opined in 1894: "While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice." This was shortly before quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity fundamentally changed our understanding of nature. How to reconcile both of these theories, incidentally, is just one of many open questions in physics today. Perhaps some day science will consist merely in the application of established theories, but not in the foreseeable future as far as I can see.
@@EbonyPopethat’s not anytime soon
Why would these three be the only choices? How about the fact that what we are currently studying require more and more expensive tools because they get further from our everyday scale? Or not having armies actively funding new ways to kill each other thereby having less actual money for research relative to our needs? Why raise two obviously false answers to one possible one but leave other plausible answers unexplored?
This. Very unscientific video.
Something else worth mentioning is that the farther the field progresses, the more challenging it becomes to 'catch up' to the state of the art and make contributions
Wasn't Physics considered settled literately days prior to Einstein's publication of the Special Relativity? It only takes one researcher to define what progress is.
I am psychiatrist and nothing great is coming
@@DrHrishikeshApte ok
@@DrHrishikeshApte Psychiatrist have flawed methodology in that psychoanalysis is full of human bias error. Correct method would be to remove as much human bias in diagnostics as possible. Such as using video game controllers that read surface brain waves, but retooling it to be an active wearable data collection. Example is depression, its a symptom of a wide range of things. I seen things like a women was diagnosed as bipolar, but her body type is like poster child for physiological changes for a cyst on the adrenal gland. She will never have a good life because of that error. Alternatively Surface brain wave data maybe able to spot if its a cyst, or vitamin deficiency, a problem with gut flora, etc..etc.. The whole idea of spamming neurotransmitters modification drugs could cause psychological illusions in bias generated data. Its like taking a depressed patient and tranquillizing them, then saying it cured their depression. That is just mindlessness of psychiatric field. US government should be slapped for promoting these inappropriate highly destructive bias prone methodology. More or less Neurology has correctly approached the problems, where the legacy of Sigmund Freud psychoanalysis should be thrown in the trash. Nothing great coming out of psychiatric care in the US until they update the methodology. Psychiatrist probably telling teens who get psychosis off of energy drinks that their schizophrenic, when it was really just vastly underestimating the dangers of the psycho active drug caffeine to cause neurological problems.
@@DrHrishikeshApte Perhaps therapy could help improve your attitude.
@@DrHrishikeshApte 🤣😂😂
It isn't the case in biological science the progress in the last 20 years is astounding. In 2004 they published the human genome after years of work and billions of dollars. Now you can do it in an afternoon for a few thousand.
and the progress that’s being made now that we have genomics as a tool for further experiments! optogenetics in neuroscience alone has allowed for experiments targeting highly specific neural circuitry, and there are so many highly specific circuits that we need a few more decades (and minute causal discoveries) to learn everything we can about the brain with this technique alone - not to mention the progress that’s being made with advances in the speed at which we can image with electron microscopy, allowing us to chip away at imaging larger and larger volumes of the brain. we’re at the point where we need extremely detailed experiments for extremely detailed biological systems - not every field is as cut and dry as physics
Cause rich people are interested in biology so that they can live longer what they don't want is general scientific advancements in the society so they can hold power to themselves
@@krunalsolanki5078 medical advancements aren’t restricted to rich people in the long run lmao ? worldwide life expectancy was 32 years in 1900, now it is 71. in the US, life expectancy in 1900 was 47, and is now 76. this is all due to biological advancements being distributed to many people. inequality in their distribution definitely exists but there are people working on making it better
Interesting topic. Thanks, Sabine!
Sabine, scientific progress maybe slowing down in the US , Europe, Africa and other parts of the globe but not in Asia particularly in my home country Singapore. In Singapore, scientific progress is alive and continually generate novel knowledge , inventions and innovations in quantum physics and technology. Singapore is small but big in accomplishments and is leading in many breakthroughs in science and technology.
And people criticize Stephen Wolfram for not engaging in the increasingly useless scientific paper publishing system, meanwhile he and his team (especially Jonathan Gorard) are doing ground-breaking research on computational models of reality, and it gets largely ignored.
Wolfram seems to be building the foundation for which all ideas and knowledge is based, not any specific phenomenon. I don't think that foundation complete, but he is definitely going in the right direction
It gets largely ignored because it is giving no results, not because he is super duper smart guy who nobody understands.
And that is how scientific discovery works, you form a hypothesis and then show it works or not. Currently it's not working.
@@jacksonvaldez5911 how is this called? What is he working on exactly?
Ground breaking
@@TheDukeGreatNo results are better than fake results.
My take is that science has become a business, complete with counterproductive success metrics. A business guy, Charlie Munger has a helpful quote: Show me the incentives and I'll tell you the outcomes. The field of science has become the servant of business and government and because of that objective truth is much less relevant than support of a narrative.
Indeed!
In that case science should be independent of Governments and Business people. They should finance them self through their patents and achievement and be organized as a non profit foundation. If some churches can be considered foundations why science can't be.
@@user-ek9go3kf2w That's an interesting idea, but I suppose that the funding necessary to carry on new research is too high in the short term for this self-sufficiency to be achievable. It may deliver in a very long time scale, but this doesn't help to pay the bills here and now.
"Science (TM)" ALWAYS was business. Even in times before Galileo, During his time and after those times. And it always will be. You see it even with the "CoVID-Science" (90% lies) and "modern Climate-Science" (~80% lies). Also with the Massmigration (95% lies).
It was always about the fundings from those who want more power and get ahead of everyone else. (look up the binoculars)
But you are right in general that it is just about a narrative.
@@user-ek9go3kf2w This will not work unless you get into the business world yourself. And there are top-engineers who will do what you are doing in the long term anyway. So it actually is very hard to stay on top. It is more complex than this. Scientists always have to rely on the interests of others to fund their works.
Most people over 50 who have worked in the field know this, particularly the last 20 years. From around 1999-2000 onward (the explosion of the internet) the quality has reduced drastically. I look at old papers from the 1930's-1980's and am in awe at their quality.
It's almost hilarious now, with the Chinese flooding the system with papers of very dubious quality.
From where I'm at, ya science is colapseing. We are remodeling our science building and found out no one wants any of our glassware, field equipment, etc. Some of this stuff is new. We tried to give it to high schools and was informed that most schools are not doing chemistry, or any field science. Talked to the chemists on campus and found out student enrollment is way down. Those students that do take any of the sciences, many can not do the math. We have labs that are new, new equipment, and they sit empty. Research is just not being done. Graduate degrees are way down. It is so sad. Our library is trimming their collection of books by having the older books destroyed. There was good information in those books for field scientists to give them baseline information. No one cares.
Its simply not worth the time and money. Chemistry is one of the most horrible things you can study, the work load is insane and you have to do the same math as the physics guys and sleep, piss and have sex with your GF in the lab where you essentially are 24/7. And without a PhD in chemi you are not interesting for the great companies or for research. Meanwhiule, when you get an MBA, you have more options and get more money for FAR less effort and knowledge. it is a general problem, worldwide.
Sure. High schools aren't doing chemistry anymore, lmao.
what are you talking about? in the video sabine mentioned there are more people in research now than ever, not to mention graduate school is getting more difficult to get into every year because the volume of people pursuing research is bigger than what can be supported by institutions
Care to ship these unwanted books and science items to Africa? They will be of great benefit to many students here. We can meet the shipping costs .
I’ve noticed this. A lot of science news channels on UA-cam seem to cover research that doesn’t really go anywhere. A lot of “discoveries” that end up being bad data or require a very long time to commercialize
The last one is irrelevant, since the objective of science is knowledge in itself. How quickly you can commericalize it is never and should never be a factor, and it's not even part of the evaluation criterion used to show progress is slowing down.
Fundamental research is important in itself and its applications are impossible to predict.
-Scientific progress is often driven by military need. There is a reason most successful breakthroughs occur in the USA 1/ Military spending creates a huge engineering and scientific base that trails into higher education but also into highly capable companies and 2/ The USA's way of raising venture capital is vastly more effective.
-There is of course commercially driven progress.
-Ideology. Woke political correctness and partisan journalism creates an environment of sophistry. Philosophers have long warned of the loss of "logos" in the west. That is "reason"the ancient Greeks codified to ascertain truth even if they dd not like it.
-Politics and ideology effects science. When there is military pressure the ideology is cut through.
I agree with @Anakin12 . There are countless instances where obscure or abstract fields of mathematics stay "useless" for decades and suddenly become applicable to new research in physics or some other field.
It would be very short sighted to stop an area of science or (especially) math because it seems useless and abstract at the moment. If this were true, we would be in the dark ages still.
@@Anankin12 commercialization is definitely a factor.
While I agree it shouldn’t be when talking about pure science, research costs money. The government funds some research, but a lot of it is for military purposes. Universities receive research grants from corporations with the hope that they will work on technology that they can profit from in the future. There needs to be incentive.
Energy companies have been hesitant about throwing money into fusion research because of the fear that it could be decades before there is a positive R.O.I.
But I guarantee funds will be pouring in the moment a commercially viable fusion reactor hits the grid
@@TaylorFalk21
-electricity was at best a kid's toy. Since it was not understood, it was literally impossible to predict how it could be applied in any way, and thus calculate a ROI. It took centuries from the first scientific work on it (1600) to become something that could be used, and decades after that before it was commercially viable. Now the world would collapse without it.
- the behavior of light was being studied all the way back with Galileo, with the first proper works by Descartes in 1637. It took centuries to get to quantum mechanics and another several decades before we could use it for communication and all the other stuff we do with electromagnetic radiation.
- you don't know, but the properties of matter are entirely described by its Hamiltonian; which means that if you know how a material interacts with light, you can predict every property it has. Which also means that you can theoretically find materials with incredibly useful applications by doing the math without the immediate need for prototypes. This way you save a lot of time and effort in experiments, and you start trying stiff out only when you think you got something.
- diodes had no applications until and now they rule the world in ways impossible to have been predicted by anyone
- MRI machines are the direct result of physics developed to observe extremely far away stars and to measure their chemical composition
The list is endless, basically every major or and most of the minor tech developments are the direct result of decades or centuries of "useless expensive research with no ROI".
Please educate yourself and throw your economic theories in the bin. Take them out again after having acquired actual knowledge about stuff.
Too many scientists under pressure to publish papers finding something to publish a paper about, as opposed to only publishing a paper when they actually find something worth publishing. I think the internet has a part to play in this too, compared to when it was all on physical paper, kind of like how photographs had more value before digital cameras.
thx for your openess and the insights
Sabine you are right! Most gadgest are just that: gadgets, has nothing to do with breakthroughs in either science or egineering.
Revolutionary things would be like: Fusion, Faster than light travel etc..
That graph correlates surprisingly well with economic mobility and the middle class. I wonder how many scientists would challenge the established system but are too financially unstable to risk it.
very good point, i will think about it
Is it surprising or is it a political change that would obviously impact research later? I think, simply put, we are too worried with the tracking of the numbers of papers and generated wealth to do anything but that.
This is a good point. If you go back a couple of hundred years, you find that many fundamental discoveries were made by vicars - they had income security through their "day job", and could devote themselves to "natural philosophy". Now that discovery requires much more money, and is a more collective effort, this possibility has receded.
Personally, I think that the whole problem can be solved, by just introducing some longer-term metrics, by which academic scientists are measured and assessed. E.g. your 10-year or 15-year output. I also think that over the next decade or two, China will outperform the US and European countries in scientific discovery, and force them to get their house in order.
This might be the most important comment of this entire section, shedding light to a possible connection with broader systematic issue. Like how Newton found out a connection between fall of earthy object and heavenly bodies and realized Gravity.
Unfortunately, I also expect this one to be less noticed. Scientists, among all, are the most ignorant of how they don't live in a vacuum and how the society they live in affect them.
My hypothesis is that being creative and innovative paid off well in the past, now scientific world is highly standardized, centralized and competitive. Great minds need more funding programs, less politics and less restrictions.
Exactly. The environment is so burn out prone nowadays 😢
It's not possible to be creative because problems are so complex now. How is anyone supposed to figure something out these days without a ton of advanced equipment.
Being creative and innovative could get you far right up until you say something that pisses off those in power (Galileo comes to mind)
@@roberth721 a little bit of trolling hehe
@@crystalseth97 not really, just a glance at history to possibly modify your initial hypothesis.
Thanks for this video. I would have liked Sabine to talk more about her own vision/opinion on this. By the way: what's the matter with those subtitles??
The prioritization of productivity over usefulness really explains a lot. Not just in science but in many other fields as well.
To have a successful career in science it is more important that you are good in networking, grand application, gaming performance metrics, and so on rather than being good at research.
Serious question from a layperson: If this is the case, does it mean, that Sabine was bad in networking then? My impression always was, that she´s a brilliant communicator, but she failed in sense of an academia career too.
@@Thomas-gk42 she has a video about that as well.
It's almost like you could say that about any industry.
@@destructionman1 True, but science used to be different.
You forgot that you also have to be on Twitter/ X and other social media all the time.
The following innovators lacked formal education in science, physics, math, or engineering: Edison, Tesla, Faraday, Da Vinci, Darwin, Newton, the Wright Brothers, and Henry Ford.
Significant advancements have been made both through formal education and by those outside traditional academic pathways. By embracing diverse perspectives and adhering to first principles, we can enhance our collective potential.
In recent decades, while there has been a decline in patent filings, there has been a rise in open-source technology. This shift suggests a growing recognition that progress is not solely driven by profit. Collaborative efforts in design and innovation often yield far greater results than when individuals seek exclusive financial gain and recognition for foundational ideas.
I think it's more than this, it also suggests a recognition that progress often comes not from isolated individuals but from collaborative efforts.
And most of those had open-ended funding from (i) a king, (ii) a university, (iii) industrial benefactors interested in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than something that must have a direct application.
Advances can still be made in areas where:
1. There are other sources of fund, i.e. from tech companies or the wealth of the family.
2. It does not take a lot of money to do experiments. For example open source culture came from the software engineering circle. But it is impossible to do open source in medicine.
..profit (economic) IS when supply is below demand, which grants the supplier wealth as he controls the supply - BY prohibiting / undermining competition from joining in on the supply side - which would increase the supply until it meets demand AT COST and cause the profit to go to ZERO. Anything IP is a means to control the supply of knowledge for the benefit of a few at the cost of the rest - 100% a-natural and societal destructive.
@@SabineHossenfelder Innovators and scientists are two different categories. Innovators invent new things, while scientists just use inventions to perform measurements or observations. Innovators are typically lone wolves who disregarded scientific dogma in their time, while scientists are usually part of establishment science. Both are needed, innovators to create new things and scientists to use new things to make measurements or observations. Innovators are usually ridiculed by establishment science, even Einstein was ridiculed until the eclipse proving his theory is correct. The saddest thing in modern physics is that it progress funeral by funeral and while physicists have made huge progress in collective scientific projects, there were almost none theoretical breakthroughs in last 40 years.
The fundamental issue is that new entrants have a lot more to study than “prescribed” just like antibiotic resistance, this lesser percentage feel the same strong drive cumulatively resulting into more “work-life balance” style choices by the vast exposed (currant) majority.
In our current day Technological advances are more important than scientific knowhow. Mr. X
I worked in "pure science" for 18 years, in two University physics labs. It never paid well. I went to applied science, which pays much better. In Pure Science, it has become too political too. If you come out with "unpopular research" you will find your facility defunded, and in some cases closed. After I left one lab, they came out with unpopular research regarding Fracking and Earthquakes. They were defunded and closed within a year of that paper being released.
Labs which came out with research debunking some of the global warming hysteria, also experienced "funding issues" as well.
Pure research is easier. As long as you apply science to create a profitable product, you will get financially rewarded. You are assured a job as long as you periodically produce another golden egg.
I don't blame any scientists for fleeing pure science and going into (commercial) applied science.
What do you mean by global warming hysteria?
that governments pretend that humans are to blame for an ever changing climate to make them accept a pre planned implementation of tons of laws that will take all individual freedoms and their standard of living away so that they can be held under absolute control.
You must think that you are killing the planet because you can move freely with a car, because only them will you accept laws that effectively make individual transport impossible
@@Adriaticus Probably the hysterical narrative in the media about climate and weather which seems to be less and less based on science.
@@Adriaticus It refers to not the fact that temperatures are rising, but rather the exaggerations associated with those claims.
Al Gore famously published the book "An inconvenient Truth". The book was packed with horrible errors, but yet scientists lined up behind the book to SWEAR it was all truthful. According to the book all the icecaps should be gone by now, and Manhattan should be entirely submerged under rising seas.
This is but ONE example of the Hysteria I speak of. The past couple decades have produced many more similar "bold statements which have proven untruthful".
Just to let me know how informed you are, let me ask one question. If all the ice caps, glaciers, icebergs melt. How much will this raise the ocean levels. If you have to google this, then you are not making an informed decision about global warming.
Now, take that number and apply it to the topological map of the USA. Other than Florida and Louisianna, what states will be impacted significantly (more than 20 percent), by the rising oceans.
Finaly, what is the current rate the oceans are rising? How many years will it take to increase by a single foot?
We need a "Journal of Unpopular Science"... it would make a killing 😂
That was rather abrupt. Seemed like the setup for a big discussion, and then "see you bye".
My brain has been blue-balled.
Blue brained?
@@paulconrad6220 I think that's just called a stroke
That has been her theme since the last few videos
@@tesla4623 Is she teasing a new channel to go deeper into sociology of science and epistemology ? Featuring Dr Fatima ? I'd go for that.
As far as I understood the metrics introduced in the studies mentioned in the video (I may have gotten wrong the second one about the disruptiveness of papers and patents), it seems that their conclusion is that the ratio of novel research and top scientists to 'mediocre' research and scientists is declining. Though it does not follow that the 'absolute ammount of good science' is decreasing. Rather it says that now we allow people to pursue an academic career even if their work is not that innovative, and it does not imply that we actually produce less breakthroughs as what matters is not 'most scientists make a breakthrough' but 'a lot of scientists make a breakthrough'.
True innovation requires the risk of total failure, which is not acceptable in the current landscape of science, so most scientists paly it safe going for pretty standard research that of course will give you pretty standard discoveries, nothing groundbreaking. Because who would give funding to someone who either makes a discovery that will reshape science or most likely will go nowhere (hence becoming a waste of money and time), and because you need many failures before getting the golden ticket, it really is not economically viable. That’s ignoring that society now expects everything to have an immediate use, an economic value, when in reality that is not the goal of science, and in fact, maybe the greatest discovery are not useful in that sense; its repercussions may be, but if you don’t even explore the initial idea you’ll never have the time to find out what you can do with it. The thing is that at least the industry side has no time for that, and it’s the industry side that pays for research.
There is a fundamental shift in scientific inquiry and is becoming very dogmatic.
There was a time someone would propose something out of the "norm" and the response was "Well, what kind of experiments could prove or disprove this?"
Now, the response is "That's not how it works" and someone's future is ruined.
I think this is how science rarely (but sometimes) made huge breakthroughs.
It feels like this avenue is no longer available.
That pretty much sums it up
It's a thing of all ages to ignore new theories or research by saying "I don't believe this, therefore it's impossible".
Think of a time where germ theory was new and that doctors disagreed to wash their hands between cutting in a dead body and helping deliver a baby. Or that water from the Themes was polluted with microbes and gave people cholera.
Do we actually have data to back up this shift in "acceptance"? I hear people say this a lot, but I've also read about difficulties to accept new, key ideas in the past, so I wonder how much is this down to perception.
Also, "that's not how it works" and "what kind of experiments could prove or disprove this" are not always, necessarily, mutually exclusive. Sometimes a proposal really is just based on a huge misunderstanding of things, and one doesn't need to be dogmatic to point that out.
Factually incorrect
when was that ever the case? new Ideas were always treated unfairly, that is nothing new. Don't get me wrong it's a bad thing but not a new one.
My studies were decades ago and in Biology. I had a great fly on the wall view of much departmental shenanigans and B.S.
My best friend from the time became a Research Director at a very prestigious institute, he came back from his first year there very discouraged about the quality of his grad students, ostensibly the smartest kids in the world. To him they were so micro focused on their tiny little niche that they lacked any kind vision outside of that.
His work was in Photon Shunting in plants which is such a fascinating subject because it’s where quantum mechanics and plant physiology interface.
I'm an electrical engineer, we are hitting physical limits and approaching perfection. You see the display in front of you now? How can it be improved? It has nearly as many if not more pixels than you have photo-receptors in your eye. Do you need more storage? For $11, you can buy an SD Card that will store 2000 hours of high fidelity audio, that will take you a year to listen to, if you listen to it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. For video, it's only like 2 weeks at 1080p.
I know it's been said before but there's little left to do, but this time, it really is true. Your television screen is like 10 times more efficient than a television in 1980. You can talk to literally anybody on the planet for little to no cost. Video games are now often photorealistic. A kid can make an animation film using motion capture with off the shelf software and a phone. Anybody has the equipment to make a film. The cost barrier to entry, pretty much that's over - so now it's just scams. "Oh get an EV, it's better for the environment" - NOT if you go through the math, they are far worse than ICE cars. Green energy that's better - nope, not if you go through the math..
All-in-all, scientific research itself is getting harder while the amount of administration and networking required to perform it is also growing.
As our understanding advances it becomes more and more expensive (in terms of time and/or materiel) to perform even basic research, meaning that any form of truly comprehensive work will take longer and be more expensive.
At the same time, increased competition at most academic institutions and in most fields means that you need to chase publications and citations to stay relevant and stand out amongst your peers.
To top it off, every project that seeks to meaningfully pose and answer a serious question runs several risks:
1. The question may have been asked and answered before without your knowledge, thus rendering your research less noteworthy.
2. The question you pose may be poorly defined, or you methods may turn out to be unsuitable, thus weakening or invalidating your results.
3. You may need to make suppositions about the answers and what they mean for the field or a benefactor in advance to even get any funding or access, thus biasing your research.
Any one of these points can lead to unfavorable outcomes, there is always a risk of failure.
Failure affects your ability to get published, to get seen, to get cited and acclaimed.
This isn't new, but it is getting worse as the "game" of science is getting to be better understood.
More and more players (publishers, funders, tool providers, etc.) are entering the game, adding more resources but also introducing more hurdles and pitfalls.
Everyone has skin in the game, and need to get their piece of the pie somehow.
And nobody wants to back a "failure".
So it's understandable why "groundbreaking" research papers will be fewer and further between.
Any researcher who has spent years studying (and may be in significant debt) and building a name for themselves can be forgiven for not gambling everything on any one big project...
You'd need to be insane, independently wealthy or VERY sure about the question(s) you're asking and what answer(s) you're going to find.
One hypothesis, progress was never linear, when a new revelatory breakthrough comes along there’s a huge number of “how else can we use this?” moments, and once a lot of them have been discovered progress stalls for awhile.
An example (I think) would be something like the car; at first there were a ton of new designs and ideas, but eventually people discovered the ICE, and the progress has been a lot more incremental since then.
Sounds a bit like you’re describing the Kuhn Cycle
I was lucky to study in a department with Nobel prize winners, McArthur Grant Recipients and Smithsonian Fellows. I saw the incredible mind crushing pressure to produce publishable results which led to nervous breakdowns, sabotage and backstabbing.
Some people’s years of research turned to naught while others had many publications in prestigious journals,
My observation was that the fruitful research was done by people truly passionate about the subject while the others were just there because that’s where their ambition got them
Love the word 'passionate' - it's so young people - like teenage young, and silly...and insipid. I use the word 'nutty' instead, sometimes 'mental'.
@@melaniecampbell7055 You're really showing those people who dream of a better future who's boss.
@@melaniecampbell7055 you are an exceptional communicator and eloquent to boot!
@@melaniecampbell7055 thanks for the compliment, I feel young at heart!
@@BluesSky I knew you would. I'm glad you do.
I think this video needed to be longer with more expansion about the causes and the consequences. It seems to have been deliberately cut short !
Development of science and technology are phase shifted. Breakthrough in science gives rise to development of new technologies which enable new measurements methods and lead to dew scientific discoveries. We are in the phase of technology growth. Example: gravitational waves. We don't know what we will discover, using these new methods. It needs time.
Besides that, Sabine is definitely right talking about problems in quantitative evaluation of research.
something I learned while working for telstra was that a lot of progress came because a high corporate profit tax meant that profits had to be spent on the company, leading to company expansion and, importantly, company research departments.
The increased tax income for government science probably didn't hurt either.
bell labs prolific research department was particularly mentioned as a beneficiary of this tax system
once the tax incentive for pushing profits back into the company went away, a lot of companies focussed on a narrower set of saleable inventions, rather than broad research that might, or might not become saleable later.
I don't know whether or not this factoid will be borne out by research, or if it's a mistaken idea from bell labs and telecom australia laboratory gossip.
its true that funding of basic science R&D in the private sector has gone down however I think the more fundamental problem is that if you wish for one person to have all the information necessary to make advancements (which is desirable, since an individual is much better at integrating knowledge or drawing analogies, though there's strong evidence you want your research teams to come from wildly different backgrounds so they can piece things together), they need to not worry about publishing until they're about 40 and their studies need to be actively supported by those around them
I don't know if I got unlucky, but in grad school I had extremely limited guidance upon entry, and I had switched fields in a dramatic fashion from undergraduate to graduate school. I wasted at least a year and a half trying to even orient myself in my new field versus getting proper orientation. Hell, even in my undergraduate I would often find great frustration in the fact that so many things were plainly more teachable than the way they were being taught.
I think there needs to be a larger emphasis placed on the teaching and leadership skills of professors in general, de-emphasize research, and then you would see people taking time to actually pursue an idea they're truly fascinated by.
Currently you hop on the publishing treadmill, writing what are essentially mostly engineering papers since they can be done systematically, and hope you contribute to 3 better papers in your first 10 years to get a professorship, which you leverage into better collaborations and then tenure - technically now you'd be free to pursue your research as you like, but you still have to secure funding ultimately.
Cut the number of students way more aggressively but support them more and for longer
I started work in science in the 1970s and retirded a few years ago. I think the 1970s were more productive because they were more laid back and we had more time to think. Endless demands for papers to keep funding or advance career destroys creativity and originality. I also worry about subjectivity creeping in nowadays. I think we need to get back to a strict Popperian standard for science. If it can't be properly tested with the possibility of it being falsified (and things like modelling climate change on a computer fail that test) then it isn't science. Too much modern science seems to have subjectivity creeping in.
Did you ever read the scientific study that proposed that dogs humping each other is the product human misogyny? It was an award winning study that was originally intended to be discarded as an obvious joke.
Content aside, the presentation in this video was super engaging and I very much enjoyed it. And the content was fascinating as well.
I may not articulate it well enough on what I'm going to write now and I might not have still experienced it much but..
One of the main issue is... there is a sense of discouragement in allowing researchers going on their own crazy path, If anything I feel only very crazy people who are away from all the research world and societal norms would do something beautiful... With this Information world and globalization in every aspect ...the no. of instances of different paths has decreased drastically... there's almost a cycle like phenomenon among researchers ... to put it simply the no. of branches in depth first search tree is narrowing into a single long coconut tree
Even if I read my own comment ... it might look very vague and naive ... but hope I gave 0.001% gist of it
If Brilliant minds are put in isolated rooms and if we have more of those sort of rooms around the world...it is statistically more likely for a broader spectrum of thinking to place.
Chaos is undermined or undervalued.
Collabration should be just a one of the tool, not hinder diversity in thought
This was alluded to in the “My dread died, and now I’m here” video. Follow the money: people are rewarded for getting targeted grants and writing papers not for breakthroughs. I’ve also noticed that a number of engineers are called scientists.
Dentists now call themselves Dr’s: oddly, neither group hold PhDs.
@@tenbear5 That's true for all medical professionals
Base science at universities (which tends to deliver the disruptive break-throughs) was completely undermined in the mid 2000s, when business schoolers were allowed to inject themselves into the scientific process 1) with the demand that only research that had immediate application (and therefore monetizability) should be funded, 2) tried to introduce "free market" like dynamics by setting up the funding system (rather than steady public funding, no matter immediate applicability) and 3) introduced the metric of "number of citations" as the success criterion for receiving that funding (rather than whether the research was truly revolutionizing, which would require the business schoolers to understand the science).
Here's why it didn't and never could've worked:
1) Nobody knows the future, hence, nobody knows what research will deliver the next break-through... hence, "monetizability" leads to researchers just going into greater detail with whatever is already considered "valuable" (more of the same) - 2) the funding system not only leads to constant insecurity for researchers, meaning less willingness to do new research, but the funding application process itself eats up an insane amount of the researchers' time (something like 80-90%)... meaning much less time to do fundamental thinking, therefore (again) favoring much less demanding "more of the same" research - and 3) the citation metric itself is wide open to manipulation (especially to researchers with an average IQ of probably 150+), meaning researchers who are willing to actively bolster their citation numbers to get more funding will win, e.g. by engaging in mutual citation, sticking only to already popular topics and (especially) diluting the amount of actual real innovative research per article in order to get most citations per drop of new science... which in turn means other researchers have to read ever more fluff articles in order to get just a few specks of gold dust.
This is what happens when you let average IQ business schoolers set the rules for high IQ natural science. Effing stupid. 😑👈
when publications become the key, the base ideas form upon existing contents, and then if you come up again with something novel, the problem exists, you need to convince enough reviewers, but then even if it does get published it doesn't get cited. the sad truth publication focus is killing novelty
(commenting before watching the video) from following various science channels my idea is that we simply need someone to come up with new models for physics (aka the theory of everything)
pretty much like many discoveries and inventions we have today couldn't have been made with the "old physicics" before relativity and quantum physics were explored,we are now "stuck" again needing a new more accurate model because we pushed our current one to its limits which makes new progress harder to archieve
“In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes." -Philipp von Jolly, 1878.
People like to say that because they don't want dissatisfaction of not knowing we obviously don't know most of science we know extremely little bits and pieces .like if he said it before Einstein that tells us a lot of that time's mentality too they also use to think Newton already told us about most things now little things are left then comes Einstein and tells even length of an object or time or volume are not absolute at all , gravity theory is wrong 😂 except Newton's mathematics we still use it to an extent.we are I think at halt because we don't want to accept that we know extremely little like we don't even know what this dark energy or dark matter is it's just a made up thing to fill the gaps for satisfaction just they used to do in explanation light behaving as a wave so it goes through ether medium which is invisible.
@@macrofrommicro6241 I'm not even convinced that "dark matter" is real. All of a sudden, a few years ago, it turns out that we only know about 5% of the universe, and now most of it is invisible and ubiquitous. I would have thought that would have thrown off all the calculations made about distances of galaxies, and standard candles, and the Hubble constant, and we'd be starting from scratch. It's not an elegant theory and elegance is something that can indicate truth. We're missing something.
@@tenrec we are definitely missing something that's for sure but throwing out everything and starting from scratch would be extremely hard so we have to take some of the bases like Einstein did to take light as bases(axioms) as constant from there he started from scratch so maybe we should critically analyse every theory we need so that we can trust it and if we doubt any theory we shouldn't accept it .
@@tenrec "My Model doesn't work, so let's invent a thing that makes it work, then get my buddies who are also on the same research dead end to cosign on it."
@@madprophetus For most of my life, I felt I could follow the theories and progress of cosmology. But starting with the introduction of dark matter theories, it seems like everything we thought we knew was wrong, and the new theories didn't make sense to me. For what it's worth, I get the sense that Sabine doesn't find the current theories convincing, either.
being listed as in research and development is not the same as actually doing science. in my company we have thousands listed in R&D but most are in non science fields such project managers , administrative assistants etc.
A PhD candidate from IIT India (Top most institute in the country) was researching on effects of rain on telecom signals like 2G 3G in 2010, I was a RF engineer and I told him its a waste of time as the effects don't even matter because its been regularly raining on Earth everywhere and his research is just for a his doctarate degree, he got mad at me and screamed to me this research has never been done before.
I trust science, not scientists. From the chaos of scientific studies, elegance will emerge.
The whole process of funding and peer review has become tainted by hubris. Disruptive being the operative opposition. Then there is the problem of profit driven corporations reducing or even eliminating R&D.
Corporations spending almost all their profits on stock buybacks kills R&D. Forbid stockbuy backs. They used to be illegal because it is stock price manipulation on behalf of a small group of insiders.
Genius CEO just flush R&D department and increase company productivity the following year. Take their bonus and run. And they get highly rewarded. This is an MBA fundamental principle. Take action on your own interest and this will benefit the many. Well...
An awesome analysis!! We cannot expect more and more breakthroughs. About Patents, there now are 236 Patents on methods for cutting an egg. ... some did not work
Hilarious!
i am negatively impressed
The standard model is a box which only allows small changes where the whole system cannot be changed. Decline is normal in such circumstances. Until the whole model can be challenged no significant changes are likely.
Sabine, pls make a video about increasing mistakes in math papers
The problem could go away once proof assistants like Lean become the standard or requirement for publishing math papers.
We've been modeling scientific progress as SP(x)~=e^x but in the case where Frontinus' Limit is non infinite, it's more accurate to say SP(x)~=L/(1+e^-x).
The thing that's new is we've finally reached the point where these two functions are starting to diverge from each other in a meaningful way.
"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments." -- Julius Sextus Frontinus, in a paper dated 10 AD.
It's safe to say he drastically underestimated L, but the existence of a limit was his idea.
Perhaps we have reached the Great Filter, and now have our answer to the question "where is everybody?" It turns out L is not large enough for anyone to achieve interstellar travel.
Well if it’s dated 10 AD, that would actually serve against the premise of this video. Perhaps people always think progress is slowing to a limit. But it doesn’t really.
@@TheCynicalPhilosopher not with space ships, no. Space ships are like trying to get from one corner of the world to another per foot. it CAn be done, but it takes a lifetime. Better to fly. We have to find the airplane for space travel, space ships are just trying to go by foot. Can´t be done.
When you limit the freedom of speech, the good ideas cannot make it to the top, and the bad ideas, never make it to the bottom.
Do tell us who's limited your freedom of speech and gives as an example.
exactly
True since my professors would often go berserk to anyone who challenged einstein who confused mass with momentum so only at MIT did anyone challenge sacred dogma.
@@user-jc2we4sn1iI also think it, in my videos I also talk about it
Yep. The belief in truth is the enemy of revelation.
This sounds like us editing and reviewing humanity and what we have produced. It's a necessary step. Just producing ideas all the time won't provide tangible results as much as incorporating the results you have and that takes time.
Universities are unfortunately often run like businesses and academics are forced to jump into the hamster wheel and play the numbers game. That said, I also believe that it is more difficult to improve something that has already taken lifetimes of geniuses to create. Just look of how long it took to prove Fermat's last theorem (~358 years). Of course we nowadays learn at school what was cutting edge when Leibniz and Newton developed calculus, but this kind of compression should have a natural limit, unless we manage to a) become smarter, or b) revolutionize the way we learn mathematics, physics, etc. Furthermore, it is easier to take big strides, e.g., in understanding electromagnetism, when one starts by essentially knowing nothing. Since the days of Faraday, we have learned a massive amount and adding to that isn't as easy as making the first breakthroughs. Also, sometimes some ponder about the "unreasonable efficiency of mathematics [in explaining the world]"; well, perhaps it has only been "unreasonably effective" so far, perhaps we have started to enter the asymptotic part of the learning curve. Having said all that, there are still advancements made today, it wouldn't be adequate to diagnose a "stand still".
Peer review became common practice in the mid 70s, and that is often cited as the major inflection point in science progress.
Is it possible that ‘peers’ don’t want to see their fields disrupted as that may disrupt their work?
Also worth researching who was responsible for the shift to peer review….
Peer review is one of the main problems. So much work is lost because of idoitic and unqualified reviews.
That's unlikely. Correlation isn't causation.
If research is truly useful/groundbreaking, a researcher can shop it around and find a journal that will publish it.
Financialization. De-educating the West. Censorship. Oligarchy. It’s a recipe for stagnation.
Do some new technologies get folded into the military; "we can't let our enemies get this"?
@@alexanderpettit2969 No. There just aren't any new technologies.
@@alexanderpettit2969 There might be some but idk how much.
Your capsule comment is perceptive.
No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! Sabine, please do something about this! My team and I write sci0fi stories, but we want to see the ideas becoming a reality!
Bitte, bitte, bitte, Sabine, machen Sie etwas dagegen! Wir möchten wirklich die Zukunft sehen! Ich gehe jetzt weinen.
I think it's some mixture of 2 and 3. Not only is there less reward, but it may even be harder to find new discoveries due to the breadth of knowledge we already have. For example, in mathematics, the individual researches even in similar fields may have very little clue about what another researcher is discussing. This higher degree of specialization may very well make collaboration more difficult. There is also the idea that the easy stuff has already been found. However, 3 is also an obvious factor.
The MBAs running corporate education have managed to monetize our understanding of brilliant thinking and limit the pathways that get truly new approaches to deep scientific issues funded. Stifling ideas that have no short term tech payoff in favor of those have market viability within the space of a decade. The corporatization of higher education and the pressures the financial overlords of finance impose on our most innovative thinkers will be the death of us all ,,, or at least most of us.
For sure, this is one of the main issues: the MBA-ideation of the thing. Why science? The seek of truth. And now, we are thinking all the time in terms of science system, scientific process, science production and other managerialism shit
I love your presentations, Sabine, and your wit and humor too. Keep it up! Tell it like it is!
I would say option 3 combined with growing complexity.
Compare the effort & costs to prove relativity theory vs effort and cost to prove existence of f.e. Higgs boson.
personally i believe that the level of indepth research that needs to be done currently is of such difficulty that actual practical evidence for anything is very difficult to discover, it's just that weve already discovered a lot of the more obvious stuff and now we are trying to find out about the less obvious stuff.
although the amount of government funding being put into science has gone down percentage wise in at least the western world.
So many possible explanations and dimensions to this problem that it's hard to know which ones are the bigger factors. Fundamental breakthroughs are harder to come by because the underlying science is more mature, universities and Industry reward quantity over over quality, and the really interesting scientific Frontiers exploring the three great nested mysteries (emergence of the universe, within that the emergence of life, and within that the emergence of mind) appear to be stuck. Whether that's stuckness is due to lack of creativity or simply how staggeringly difficult the problems are remains to be seen, but the latter seems like the bigger part of the answer, at least in my humble opinion from years of struggling with the third of those Mysteries.
I think a bigger problem frankly is that Science education, present company excepted, strips out curiosity and wonder, turning off young students and what would otherwise be eager young minds from the scientific exploration of nature. That in my book is the bigger tragedy that can only impoverish science and slow real and creative solutions to the remaining huge problems on the table.
I also wonder about the metrics used. A shift in top scientists might well be a shift in "concentration", a shift in citations might have to do, among other things, with culture, complexity and scope, for example.
I'm sure the papers go into more details on their metrics, but this sounds pretty hard to quantify, let alone disentangle the causes.
I'm totally with you on the Science education thing tho
I have another couple: 1 - research could be directed inside a totally wrong path, with false theories and ad hoc adjusted results; 2 - the capitalistic system of production make it difficult to invest in long term, not immediately marketable projects, and punishes researchers inside academia and corporations to emerge with alterative views if they challenge the established channels of financing, careers and fame.
Here in Canada, a large chunk of the academic grants are prioritised for any research that touches on issues relevant to women, indigenous people, disabilities, and a few other social issues.
This may well be good or neutral or bad, but most of the major discoveries are based on applications of fundamental or hybridized research - but fundamental research doesn't get much funding because it doesn't (yet) benefit any key topics the government wants to promote.
The funding models are broken, basically, especially with regards to exploratory and fundamental experimental research. The "we don't even know what we're looking for, but we're just looking to see what there is to see" type of research has essentially evaporated. Or at least... that was the in-house narrative when I was doing a PhD.
What about the Perimeter Institute? It looks really good to me with public lectures and international fellows tossing ideas around with friends like John Wheeler liked to do. It is supporting independent research and mentoring the next generation.
What about the Perimeter Institute? It looks really good to me with public lectures and international fellows tossing ideas around with friends like John Wheeler liked to do. It is supporting independent research and mentoring the next generation.
Most discoveries are coming from material science which is prone to Trademark imprisonment.
However, when those trademarks time out we'll have a flood of advancements beyond profit models.
To be a science person you used to be able to discover that leaches do not cure demon possessions and that the sun does not go bye bye at night. How you have to work harder.
Well, at those times you have to be brave to discover those things and still people ended up on burning stakes. Today, they don't.
Can't speak for physics but in my field, computational mathematics, there are tons of discoveries to make. The problem is more the collapse in scientific process and the drop of quality in the new students. 20 years ago, when I was a postgrad, we found undergrad exam papers from decades earlier and even we struggled with their content. It was clear that standards had dropped. When we discussed it with one of the profs, they confirmed that standards were dropping most of the world.
I got a very good postgrad science education. I am horrified when I see some of the papers being published now because the methodology is so bad.
as a grad student and a part time teacher. Its not the students that are worse quality its the education
There are always spots of human creativity and phases of stagnation in history. What are the causes? I have no clue, but perhaps the starting points are guided by a challenge we have to face and then it becomes a self-starter.
Yes, indeed, I think a lot could be learned by analysing how these phases of stagnation were broken in the past.
@@SabineHossenfelderOften by a war either hot or cold.
Advances generally come along with better instruments to see the very small and the very large. However once you get to the atomic scale, or the scale of the universe, is there anything else to see?
@martynspooner5822 it would be interesting to see a study on that. Whether war is the horse or cart. Or if the overwhelming sense of suffering from such events spurs us collectively to look to better was to spend our time.
Or they are not such things at all. The perception of progress is not linear. But the work behind the scene need to be. You can backlink all discovery to "small work" , "small Idea", "not encouraging Idea". Small part by small part at a certain point you will get a shift. The most important part previously that we lack is that scientist was less accountable, giving them more freedom to follow their interest and the liberty to cross field.
But overall it just a question of time.
Under the hood i think new math or at least math concept, are the most impactfull because it increase in a way the langage of scientist ( mg our modelisation abilities).
And math concept and mostly new math are slow to be spread. And creating new one take time
There are many reasons why the discoveries slow down. First is comfort. When we are surrounded by comfort, we become lazy and not willing to work so hard in order to discover new breakthrough tecknology. Secondly, we have almost everything we need and desire and that is killing the will to change the world or bring something truly amazing to the world. Another reason is believe it or we are getting closer the what we can texhnically descover. There is a threshold when we can't surpass due to our understanding limitation and the phisics around us. I am sure there are a lot to descover and I think we have most of the ideas and fomulas to create everything we can imagine.
You must also realize its similar to evolution, the process of elimination has taken out most of the easy stuff to invent or discover & now we are only left with the harder stuff, & harder stuff takes longer to deal with.