[mc_maurer]

I'd even argue that the declining rate of scientific advancement is due to the academic track moving towards the same short-term thinking that plagues parts of the private sector. When the incentive structure is towards pumping out publications, there is way less breathing room for the patient development of good science and novel research. Plus, null results coming from excellent research are treated as useless, so the incentive is towards finding obvious, positive results, especially for early-career scientists.

The total result of the current academic incentive structure is towards the frequent publication of safe, boring positive results, especially pre-tenure. Academic research needs to become LESS like the quarterly return driven private sphere, not MORE like it.

[SubiculumCode]

1. The incentive is to get grants. Papers, sure...but grants really. The problem is that grants are effectively smaller than they used to be due to inflation, and so you have to have multiple R01 level grants to fund the lab. Grants must be understandable and seem feasible to get funded...the competition is incredibly high....so this limits attempted scope. So to survive, you write grants that are simple and easy to achieve.

2. In general, the problems are harder today than they were 40 years ago. We are constantly delving into problems plagued by noise and heterogeneity. This makes progress much tougher.

3.

[boplicity]

What declining rate of scientific advancement? Do you have a reference to support this claim? Curious.

[dguest]

I feel like there's some fundamental fallacy in the idea that "a declining rate of scientific advancement" is a sign that the field is somehow being corrupted or rotting out from the inside.

Science isn't like other commodities. In most of recorded history it is only ever produced, never destroyed [1], and the product is basically free to replicate [2]. The result is massive inflation: it might be hard to make a profit growing corn the same way we did 200 years ago, but doing a 200 year old science experiment is utterly pointless outside a classroom demonstration.

So making science that is worth paying for is just always going to get harder. And yet we equate science with other industries when we expect anything less than billion dollar experiments to yield fundamentally interesting results. This doesn't mean science is somehow getting worse, or that the practitioners are to blame, it just means it's evolving to attack much more difficult problems.

All this being said, there are plenty of ways to reform to keep the progress going: reproducibility is theoretically easier than ever, and yet many journals aren't requiring open datasets or public code. We need to keep the pressure on to evolve in a positive way, not just throw up our hands because things are harder than they were when we knew less.

[1]: Ok, there are some examples were lots of information was destroyed, and a bias from what is recorded.

[2]: I don't mean repeating the same experiment, just that the results from one experiment are trivially disseminated to millions of people.

[rightbyte]

You got really good points.

Could we blame the "industrialisation" of PhDs on that we should expect less impact from each researcher and thus the obvious policy the keep interesting research happen is more researchers?

[jeaton02]

Pretty influential one: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338 "The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find."

[not2b]

That one, though, is because we are running into physical limits: if we want to build things out of atoms, we can't make features that are half an atom thick. Even above that scale, physical effects that used to be ignorable, like quantum tunneling, no longer are.

From the late 70s through about 2005, scaling semiconductor generations was easy. MOSFET scaling followed rules formulated by Dennard, which provided a fairly easy method of scaling semiconductor designs from one generation to the next, keeping power density roughly constant and continually improving performance. The problem is that by around 2005, if you did it that way, your gates were no longer switches, they were dimmers, and leakage power started to dominate, and that meant that chip architectures had to change radically to keep on scaling.

So, we can no longer just scale designs from one generation to the next, we have to come up with completely new approaches. That's much harder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

[oersted]

You could argue that those current researchers are doing a lot more than those in the 70s. It is difficult to quantify how much harder the doubling problem becomes every time, and how much more effort it takes to solve. But the fact that, after decades of yearly exponential improvement, costs have consistently grown only linearly. More specifically, only x18 cost for doubling after roughly 40 iterations (2^40 is massive). I mean that’s phenomenal by any standards.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

All of this is the result of scaling issues. For most of the history of science, it was a endeavor pursued by very few people. Then we started sending everyone to university, eviscerated our economies, and expanded the research workforce a thousandfold. More maybe.

There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful reform is possible.

[sfpotter]

There's tons of very interesting and rewarding research to pursue. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because so much of the research pursued currently is neither interesting nor rewarding. You have to be brave, creative, and independently minded in order to realize that this research is just around the corner. The current academic system doesn't select for people with these traits (rather, it selects for people who are good at taking tests and following rules).

[searine]

I don't think it is that pessimistic.

Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those high-quality papers that get cited.

Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is incremental and slow.