[dahak27]

>Scientific progress is amazing today, far faster today than at any point in history

What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas

[light_hue_1]

> What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas

One kind of metric to look at are published papers, patents filed, money invested into science, total citations. All of them are increasing a lot. But these are terrible and unconvincing, you could see the numbers go up if we were spinning our wheels.

The value of science and engineering should really be measured in terms of how much easier they make our lives. If you look at that, it's hard to find a metric that doesn't show that scientific progress is healthy and increasing. Moore's law is still going. The cost of solar per Watt is down like 100x in 30 years. The cost of batteries is down 50x in 30 years. The cost of sequencing a genome is down 10,000x in 20 years. Productivity per worker doubled in 30 years. 30 years ago digital cameras were super low resolution, now they're amazing. 20 years ago computer vision could barely detect a person walking in front of car, it was state of the art research; it's now so reliable the new infrastructure bill makes it mandatory for new cars.

I picked examples from all sorts of areas of the economy and human life for a reason: none of these are down to one discovery. They required countless advances from material science, to basic physics, even the mathematics, engineering, etc.

Everything is far cheaper to make today and people are far more productive compared to 30 years ago, and it's just incomparable compared to 60 years ago.

But I get it. It doesn't feel that way. That's not a science problem. That's a politics problem. The gains from all of these improvements at a societal level are mostly going to the ultra-rich sadly, because people vote against their own best interests routinely.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.

Digital cameras and batteries aren't in the same league as game changing concepts like quantum theory and relativity.

Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.

Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.

And so on.

The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.

[light_hue_1]

> You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.

This pretty much gives away that you aren't a scientist. The vast majority of fundamental research opens up new ground in highly specialized areas. It slowly trickles out as improvements that you don't seem like "game changing concepts" but they required game changing concepts at a low level to get things done. That's scientific progress and that's the game changer.

> Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.

And I don't think you've ever dealt with transitioning science from the lab to industry. The game changer is the cost and availability. There are plenty of amazing things that don't matter in real life because they aren't practical. They aren't game changers.

> Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.

You definitely don't need computability to invent a computer. And you've got the discovery of the battery exactly backward. First Volta made a battery by trying to replace frog parts with paper and brine. Then we could go back and understand electricity; that was Volta's real lasting contribution. Before we had batteries electricity wasn't understood at all.

> The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.

This is nonsense. Who are you to decide what is or isn't fundamental? Why are scientists and engineers supposed to bow to your aesthetic sense?

No. All that matters is results. And the result is, 3x productivity increase in 50 years. And all of those other things I showed you, hundreds of x improvements in all sorts of practical engineering areas that make daily life far better. What matters are all of the incremental gains because they enable technological revolutions.