Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck (2018)

I wonder if "publish or perish" may be counterproductive.

It incentivizes people to look for topics that reliably produce papers, it incentivizes grant system to reward people that produce papers, and given that we have a replication crisis on our hands, it seems that quantity beats rigor.

I think the Nobel prize data can be explained quite simply: The Nobel prizes are only awarded in fields that were established early in the 20th century. Because they are long-established, we are seeing diminishing returns as the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. The latter half of the 20th century saw rapid development of new fields such as computer science ... and Nobel prizes are not awarded in these fields.

The article mentions the methodology is unsound but says “it’s the best we can do”. It then discusses implications and conclusions based on unfounded claims.

Prove that the number of Nobel Prizes is a good indicator of scientific process. It doesn’t even sound right when said aloud.

To refine the point:

The number of Nobel Prizes establishes a lower bound on the number of “Nobel Prize worthy discoveries”. That bar is ill-defined and constantly moving. What’s more is that many Nobel Prize worthy discoveries may not be awarded for a very long time. If prizes stopped being given to current discoveries and are all given to discoveries in the 70s and 80s then does that say anything about the rate of scientific progress or even large discoveries? No. We don’t know, with the information presented, if it is from changes in the community. What drives Nobel Prizes being awarded? None of this is seriously looked at. It’s the most important part of the article.

Anecdotally, here's a lot more 'ancillary bloat' in academia now. You can't just buy a microscope, it has to go through a purchasing department. You can't buy your own conference tickets, there's a dedicated buyer. Money trickles down through multiple layers, each with their own beaurocracy. On top of your core science costs, you need to budget for public engagement etc. This has meant that there are more incremental studies being approved (that are closer to patient care), but fewer moonshots, which are harder to demonstrate outcomes.

Could it be that having more scientists not only does not give more great results, but also actually hinders great results? Is the size of the scientific community in itself a problem? Things like bureaucracy, ideological performance, and simply social distance between excellent scientists may play a role, no?

If getting as many as possible and as big as possible grants is incentivised, that isn’t a surprise.

More permanent positions, longer funding (like for 10 years), funding good people, letting them do risky projects without penalising them for failures, and relying less on underpaid PhD students and postdocs would probably lead to more explorations. Nowadays , funding incentives are placed in such way, that incremental discoveries of known/expected things for largest possible amount of money are expected and praised.

this article seems to ignore that the modern scientist in addition to having more complex problems to solve also has a much more complex bureaucracy to navigate to get what they want.

It's also the case that if you get a UK EPSRC grant, more than 50% of that grant goes to university "infrastructure". That infrastructure in computer science consists of a heated room you can work in (with three other people), and an old computer I never used (I rather used my own MacBook Pro). Also admin people, who book flights for you.

Why is it that infinite growth is always assumed possible and desirable? Can anybody enlighten me?

The difficulty of assessing the value of the work being done is indeed great. One way to look at this difficulty is as a significantly higher order phenomenon. What I mean is that if science is the discovery of regularities in nature, technology is the application of scientific knowledge to discover replicable tools, and engineering is the application of technology to solve problems at hand, the last is easiest seen, the one before a bit harder to appreciate as it can look a bit frivolous even at the start, and science is even harder to appreciate (what's the economic value of general relativity?).

And if you want to step one level more, there is mathematics.

Well science is hard, that's nothing new. It seems like it is assumed that a great scientific breakthrough is made overnight by seemingly one person, in reality it's the culmination on decades of previous research and observations made by several people.

What we should be really questioning is whether the current system of academia is making things harder or easier to get this groundbreaking discoveries.

If Einstein was born to day and went to the BSc -> masters -> PhD -> postdoc route that's currently on place would he still come up with the relativity theory? Would it take him more time, maybe less?

This article leads to an obvious question: does Eroom’s Law apply as much to the sciences as a whole as it does to pharmaceutical drug discovery? Are we seeing the same dynamics play out in both cases?

Then we should be rewarding good engineering.

The basic principles of human-applicable science have been mostly solved the last century according to the standard model.

The hard part is building difficult things, i.e. precision engineering, computer and sensor architecture, etc.

Why don’t we have robots picking all of our fruit? solve that.

Why can’t we image every cell in your hand? solve that.

Why can’t we make high quality low cost modular homes? solve that.

Many colleges and universities have replaced recently retired faculty with adjunct professors instead of tenured positions.

Affirmative action in many STEM-related fields continues to play an important role in the fewer number of tenure appointments that are still being made.

In which case, it's no wonder that in the United States, the finance industry has siphoned off much of the country's best talent.

For the more "passive aggressive" types, there are always positions available at the richly funded defense contracting labs, which in many instances today are giving essentially "no bang" for the taxpayer's buck.

One of the best books in this area I've read is "Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization"

I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics.

Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of thing[0]. Obviously there are many problems with the sociology and incentive systems for physics departments; affirmative action, papers with 1000 "coauthors," infrastructure fees for grants involving giving a grad student a pencil, political witch hunts, difficulties in family formation, herding behavior in subjects, byzantine political games, overcrowded winner take all credit. Frankly you'd have to be kind of a combination masochist moron to want to do it these days outside of the rare person whose career is assured post PhD; masochistic morons probably don't make good scientists.

But nobody talks about the fact that an awful lot of "physics" these days is unfalsifiable piffle. Phenomenology, network theory, cosmology, noodle theory, "quantum computing," black hole physics, neural net fiddlers, nanotechnologists, cosmologists, numskulls babbling about "muh multiverse" and "muh simulation hypothesis" -the world let alone the average physics department has entirely too many of these. Nobody in the physics department can make fun of these cranks for entirely political reasons. And at this point the lunatics outnumber the actual scientists, who, you know, can make predictions that can be checked, rather than generating piffle suited for press releases and late night bong sessions.

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/06/the-end-of-science/

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