[anonymousDan]

> Today we have a huge oversupply of scientists, however there's too many of them to allow judging for potential, and many are not actually capable of dramatic impact.

This is a fairly sweeping anti-science statement without any supporting evidence to back it up. Fairly typical of the HN anti-public research hive mind sadly.

[YouWhy]

Proper disclosure,

I have a graduate degree with a thesis in a STEM field from a university that's occasionally ranked worldwide top-100. I appreciate a lot of my former classmates on a personal level, but do think that a lot of them did not make it as high impact researchers.

Would that clarification qualify my opinion as held in good faith?

[eli_gottlieb]

IMHO the problem is that "oversupply" is either a normative statement - it's a surplus relative to some idea of what it should be - or a nearly trivial statement - it's a surplus relative to demand and many scientists are thus underemployed. I agree with the latter as a matter of fact, but it is a trivial claim because financial demand (eg: funding and positions, under whatever structure, industrial or academic) is downstream of normative decisions like the former interpretation, rather than exogenous.

[lo_zamoyski]

Anti-science? Speaking of failing to offer supporting evidence or arguments...

You can claim that dramatic impact is more difficult to attain without being anti-science. There is no iron law that says we must make dramatic impact, whatever that means.

There are a number of potential causes for the recession of progress that one could suggest. For example, someone suggested the absence of low-hanging fruit. This raises the question of what constitutes "dramatic impact". If it means "deepening of the state of knowledge", then I don't quite buy this one, since impact is measured relative to difficulty and the state of knowledge. A refinement or deepening of a good theory may be all you can hope for, which is a testament to the success of the theory. If it means "overturning old theories", then that seems silly. Science isn't about overturning theories. It is about refining our understanding of the world. We might overturn less accurate theories along the way, but that's not the goal. It's a side effect.

Another possibility is that deepening the state of knowledge is becoming more difficult and prohibitive. Still another is that education has become too homogenized, preventing a diversity of fresh perspectives from entering the discussion (Feynman remarked as much; he said he didn't expect any major advanced in science in the near future precisely for this reason).

In any case, none of these positions are "anti-science" or "anti-public research".

[YouWhy]

> This raises the question of what constitutes "dramatic impact"

That's a valid critique. What I had in mind is the overwhelming prevalence of researchers who in my opinion have never even carried out a high risk high reward project, regardless of impact (not every high risk high reward project is going to make impact, and that's fine).

As example of what I have in mind by high risk high reward, I'd like to point at the work of Katalin Karikó and James P. Allison, both highly untypical science practitioners who have been rejected and indeed denigrated during much of their careers.

There are two root causes that for the most part, grad student do not develop into a Karikó or an Allison:

(a) Most grad students are never put in a position where choosing a high risk high reward project is legitimate.

(b) Many grad student in the first place do not have the character such projects (tolerance to sparse rewards and inclination to long term project risk management)

Regardless of the root cause, I observe that a grad student who was never trained to properly manage a big bet project is not likely to succeed doing that after graduating.

To be clear, I do not blame anyone in that situation. The graduate school system selects candidates for being good underlings to the thesis advisor, and down the road for aligning into field/department politics. There's little wonder to me how this system perpetuates a meek research mentality.