| 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. |
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?