Science Is Getting Harder

I loved this blog post. I really appreciate an attempt to discuss these trends with data, as it anchors discussion regardless of whether or not you agree with the interpretation.

The breadth of types of trends does support the interpretation of the blog post, but there is an alternate interpretation for many of them that's a slight variant.

The author starts out by clearly stating that his "claim is that science is getting harder, in some sense, not that science is ending or that we are on the verge of running out of ideas... the claim is that discoveries of a given 'size' are harder to bring about than in the past."

I appreciate that the author is being sort of abstract in this claim. However, I think that it's easy to interpret the trends being discussed as supporting a conclusion that properties of the ideas are making them harder to find, rather than something about the current scientific zeitgeist making it harder for scientists to find them.

For instance, at some point the author discusses that topics aren't broadening, or actually are narrowing in some cases. This makes sense if there's an increasing number of researchers being forced to compete with quick output turnover: you would predict they would focus more on narrow topic areas with fast gain, as that would produce more papers, grant applications, and be more differentiating in the job market than large topics that are less differentiating and require more time and thought. Similarly, with more and more papers being published it probably takes longer for certain ideas or papers to manifest in citations across papers in different topic areas than in the past.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that another reading of this is that science is getting harder to do because there are more pressures to produce, period, and so more effort is being spent on smaller issues rather than bigger ones, or at least certain types of research that benefit the researchers primarily. You could read this as suggesting an increase in scientific bikeshedding, or read it as suggesting that career pressures otherwise are starting to manifest in clear ways in scientific publishing trends.

Either way it seems to be a counter to the prevailing wisdom that current academic practices are needed to prevent sloth and laziness. On the other hand, I'm surprised some trends aren't more pronounced despite such dramatic changes in academic social environments. Maybe this just reflects the imperfection of the trends being examined though.