The hierarchy of countries winning Nobels in the sciences is shifting | Hacker News Reader

The hierarchy of countries winning Nobels in the sciences is shifting

economist.com

47 pointssajid33 comments

I think nobels are overrated as an indicator of scientific research, because they don't capture most of the research but only the "super-star" researchers. This is great for figuring out which flagship institutions are attracting the best of the best, but this is not what you want to measure if you think of "research output".

I disagree a bit with you. In today's world we have reached a state where next new research output requires access to advance tools and strong funding which is only available to researchers at flagship institutions. There isn't any real research happening outside of flagship institutions; other institutions may make big claims on research they are doing but they almost never deliver output. In some sense, distribution of nobel prizes per country can be attributed countries research outout.

This, there are experiments that cost millions of dollars just to build and they can fail and need many other costly experiments. Beyond this, it is true that some researchers can find theoretical research using only "pen and pencil... and computers".

OñAnother example about the former case (in computer science) is where a researcher can quickly build a team of a hundred post doc students to help in specific topics.

I don't think there are many (any) academic labs in CS with 100 post-docs.

also post docs arent students.

big engineering research efforts like that DO happen in industry though.

There's a big difference between how much it costs to do research in CS and how much it costs to do research elsewhere. It costs $10^9/year to run the LHC.

the comment I am responding to is talking about computer science

> There isn't any real research happening outside of flagship institutions

Does that really imply research only happens at stanford, MIT and Harvard? Or what are "flagship" institutions?

What I wanted to say is that you can skew you distribution of researchers towards the absolute top by giving the few an enviroment the competitors can't match. I would think that this will probably be revealed if you compare for example nobel-prizes to overall citations a country produced. But that's harder to track.

>Does that really imply research only happens at stanford, MIT and Harvard?

The research that matters, yes. There and in a few others all around the world.

Papers, on the other hand, are written everywhere by the thousands...

> The research that matters, yes. There and in a few others all around the world.

Do you have any basis for this claim?

I've found that (for example) the top research in cosmology and the top in material design and the top in semiconductor physics (as it moves into exploring exotics) are not only different universities (around the world), but that none of them are the three that are mentioned up-thread.

Now, I can sling an anecdote with the best of them, but I am surprised at your claim, so I'm hoping you have better data than I?

>but that none of them are the three that are mentioned up-thread.

Not sure if cosmology is some exception (I guess one could find specialist universities in all kinds of subjects), but overall those three as exactly ranked as the top three, ranked by papers, quality, citations, patents, etc, here, across all kinds of fields:

"To compile the 2017 ranking of the world’s most innovative universities, Clarivate Analytics (formerly the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters) began by identifying more than 600 global organizations – including educational institutions, nonprofit charities and government-funded labs – that publish the most academic research. Then they evaluated each candidate on 10 different metrics, focusing on academic papers (which indicate basic research) and patent filings (which point to an institution’s ability to apply research and commercialize its discoveries), and ranked them based on their performance."

1 Stanford University

2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

3 Harvard University

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amers-reuters-ranking-inn...

I'm curious, in your experience, (and I am curious - not being argumentative), how socially connected do you find the citation graph to be?

A while back, I was mapping innovation diffusion, as indicated by papers and patents and hiring company's R&D budgets and ROI on said investment and the like, and I was surprised at how much innovation spreads through folks that know one another, as opposed to papers that anyone could (in theory) read. I have to guess that people would similarly cite papers of people they know (maybe even of the same lab?). Do you think that has any effect on the score that you are pointing me towards?

Oh come on, everybody can churn out papers and patent filings.

If you go by Nobel prizes, the ranking is different (leaving out non-US contestants):

Physics:

1. MIT

2. Harvard

3. Berkeley

4. Chicago

5. Columbia

Chemistry:

1. Harvard

2. Berkeley

3. Chicago

4. Caltech

5. MIT

Medicine:

1. Harvard

2. Rockefeller

3. Columbia

4. Caltech

5. WashU

Conclusion: Stanford is overrated.

this is exactly what I wanted to criticise by my comment. I don't think these rankings are that important because they don't capture what the (original) article wanted to measure. There's only one stanford, which might be better than every other university out there. But there are a lot, often way smaller, universities out there that produce fantastic research. You have to add them together.

Well, then I have to vehemently disagree with you. The bulk of interesting papers I read are not from MIT or Harvard, but from a quite diverse group of interesting universities and non-university research institutions, from Canada to France to Switzerland. There are a lot of places where real and important research is done.

I would even say the opposite. I think a lot of papers from the top-institutions are quite boring and, i think, heavily profit from the name of the institution.

There are quite a few countries with many strong universities, for example, the UK, where I regularly enouncter universities (I think) I have never heard of before. Right now, I have a paper open from the University of Strathclyde, I can't prononounce the name and it's definitly not MIT, but it's definitly research that matters.

Expensive experiments are needed only in physics and medicine, unless I have wrong notions about chemistry, out of the six Nobel prize categories.

> Nobel-prize data suggest the productivity of American science has fallen

Nope, it could also be that suddenly the rest of the world is starting to catch up. There is a fixed number of Nobel-prizes, it's not a measure of productivity -- unless you figure research is fixed sum game.

This is exactly what’s happening. I despise these headlines that are couched with a mildly anti-American sentiment. You could easily re-write it to convey the fact that many parts of the world are experiencing great prosperity and development and thus scientific achievement. But no, let’s write as America is circling the drain.

Edit: looks like the title was updated

Well, a lot about America itself experiencing great prosperity and development was based on other parts of the world circling the drain (and thus sending immigrants there by the tons).

Take out a lot of the motives for European scientists to go to the US in the mid/late 19th and early-mid 20th century for example, and how many scientific achievements would be left there?

There really is a long-term productivity problem in the USA though. Edward Luce wrote a good book on the subject a couple of years back, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent". He's a journalist at the FT. That and his "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" are very well researched and readable.

The book speaks to exactly these trends of decreasing productivity, loss of manufacturing and a decline in educational attainment of the US population as a whole.

The book is not anti-American but a warning by someone who is concerned about the decline of America and the social and geo-political implications that implies.

meh my prior on british nationals writing about american decline is not very high...even if he did work for larry summers

One has to consider history though. European top researchers crossed the Atlantic due to the war and later because it was more stable than Iron-curtained Europe, but now that a lot of factors have settled there’s probably less brain-drain into the US from around the world.

The social problems mounting up in the US affect all this too. Granted, not noble laureates, but anecdotally I know a couple of Europeans in the sciences who decided to move back to their home country because they found life in the US stressful

Why does this graph show only 4 countries as if they are the top 4?

Per capita, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Norway all have more Nobel prizes per capita than UK.

https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Their statement "Accounting for population, it is the British who have accumulated the most Nobel prizes" is wrong.

I'm not sure I find those statistics compelling. I'd like to see the numerical method used to compute the first derivative. Was it just a finite difference? The Nobel prizes are lumpy and so they smoothed the function as well.

I'd be much more interested in a comparison between the European union and the USA, which are similar in GDP and population.

Would be very interesting to see the aggregate and slope of China and India as well. Are they gaining? My perception has been that they are not, but the data is so lumpy, and the nobel such a lagging indicator, that I'm not sure it has meaning.

I had the same reaction. It looks like they fit a spline to the data, and then took the analytical derivative of the spline. But there are other ways to do it like locally weighted regression. In general estimating derivatives from real world data is noisy, ill conditioned, should be treated carefully.

From the numbers it looks like Nobel per capita in western countries should be even out over long term, but things like immigration and wars, and economics produces temporary (even century long) disruptions.

Of course. It's common sense. As the rest of the world gets more industrialized, wealthier and better educated, it's inevitable the awards will be less concentrated in one place. It's keep spreading out as time goes on.

It's not just nobel prizes in science. It's billionaires list, chess rankings, supercomputers list, top polluters list, top colleges, everything.

China by itself has more people than US and Europe combined. India by itself has more people than the US and Europe combined. ASEAN has more people than europe. If they are able to continue to develop and contribute, it's inevitable that their share of the prizes will increases sooner or later.

What's tragic is that the opportunity costs for them being so underdeveloped. How many geniuses and entrepreneurs were wasted because of lack of development and opportunity? How much human progress have we left of the table as a result? It's sad to think about.

Nobel prices come in lumps, as Feynman would say. Missing out on a just one lump can skew that graph significantly.

Going back in time, both the German and UK graphs have points where one could've come to the same conclusion, except they quickly recovered.

https://archive.st/archive/2018/9/www.economist.com/l9to/

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