How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard | Hacker News Reader

How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard

rootsofprogress.org

179 pointsjasoncrawford31 comments

As one who actively participates in this parlor game, I disagree with the premise. Prior to writing proposals, I would have thought writing proposals was a huge waste of time and effort. However, we have a saying that no good idea goes to waste. When writing, you have to be clear and concise and your idea has to be good to get funding. If you don't get funded, you usually get good, useful feedback. You get better, your ideas get better, and the person reviewing them has learned what many scientist in the field are proposing as the best new directions for research. These are all valuable uses of time that might otherwise be spent learning how to make your ideas better, how to communicate them better, and how better understand what is going on in the field. In other words, things that you would be doing anyway.

I think the biggest problem facing science right now is the scale at which it is occurring. My field does not have this problem, but I can't imagine what it's like trying to stay on top of the literature in e.g. medical sciences. Paper writing and peer review work at much smaller scales - there are order hundreds scientist in my field and I think it's functioning just fine. For fields with thousands and 10s of thousands of active researchers, I think there needs to be a different way to vet and organize information. I don't know what that is exactly but it might look something like twitter (can't believe I'm writing this!). On second thought, maybe it looks more like HN!

The misalignment of incentives can be problematic as well, but arguably, not the biggest problem.

I second this. My field (applied math) isn't super-dependent on having a grant, and writing a proposal once every couple years isn't a chore, and it's a good exercise to put your plans on paper in a coherent way and try to trouble-shoot obvious problems. And I can always opt out if I don't feel like it -- I just have to pay my own way to conferences (no big deal), not have a summer salary (fortunately no big deal for me), and my grad students have to do more teaching and take longer to finish. The travel and student funding, honestly, are the main reasons I bother anymore.

OTOH, life scientists I have talked to or worked with (both in basic & medical research) seem to be writing proposals all the time, and that just seems really unpleasant in all sorts of ways, on top of problems that have been discussed here ad nauseum.

Sounds like the effect of filling up the YCombinator application form.

If you write out an idea that sounds plausible and well-thought-out, it doesn't mean that reality will agree with you, it means you have become a better politician. If you have passed it through a committee, and they agree with your idea, it means you are closer to the zeitgeist, not to reality.

As any one in here knows from troubleshooting complex systems, the first seemingly sensible idea is usually wrong. To understand, you need many ideas, and to systematically update your model and disprove each hypothesis, using the evidence, and the build up in your intuition, to tune your next hypothesis. Science is more about hacking than it is about getting a well-written paper past a committee. The feedback loop shouldn't be slowed down with a political step.

> it doesn't mean that reality will agree with you, it means you have become a better politician

This is true, and we're reliant on the reviewers being in touch with reality, which I gather is not always the case, though in my (limited) experience it has been. Writing proposals does feel different than writing papers and I do worry about getting too divorced from reality. I endeavor to stick to nonfiction!

The slowing of the feedback loop is only necessary if you wish to fund your work from sources that require it. Self funding through other means would have advantages.

I once dealt with a DOE project manager that was excited to be funding biology because he had minored in biology in college. At one of our meetings he asked, "I'm sorry can you explain what a promoter is"?

From my perspective[1], the problem with writing everything you're going to do upfront is that it's a terrible way to develop new ideas.

Outside of academia, where you just do shit to see what happens, you can get through maybe a dozen different "idea iterations" in a month, and within a short span of time you've really got an understanding of what does and doesn't work.

In academia, where everything has to be justified, it seems like it takes decades to reach the same level of understanding that you could get independently in months.

Of course, because your're more methodical and precise you can much more certain that you haven't made as many errors, but as a human being who doesnt know what the hell you're doing you'll almost always learn more from playing with something spontaneously 50 different ways than carefully planning 5 approaches.

I feel like science as a whole would be much more effective if we split it into two separate tasks: trying to wrap our heads around new things, and then only after this has done do we begin to formalise things. The current model of pretending we know how to approach new things from day one just seems to stifle progress and prevent bad paradigms from dying.

[1] I left my PhD due to complete frustration with the system after first year - kept getting pushed towards the goal of "going through the motions" and adding to the pile of polished turds that is decoding algorithms for brain-computer interfaces. Still bitter about it 6 years later, probably will be until the day I die.

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/747-if-we-knew-what-it-was-...

As someone who quit the parlor game for the reasons that Szilard wrote (though this is the first I read szilard) I think it's completely correct. {And it's not like I didn't have papers, I even worked directly under a nobel laureate}.

I happen to think it's actually more insidious. Science kind of requires the personality type that is mentally or emotionally or socially defective in that they will dogmatically stand by the pursuit of truth. By channeling people into playing the parlor game, you either "turn" dogmatic truthseekers or burn them out and kick them into something else where you might have to sell your soul but at least it pays, like writing code that serves ads. The people left at the top are less good at being scientists, and then they're on the review committees, etc.

Szilard is not cynical enough, though. There comes a point where for political reasons you dump too much money into a field where there really isn't enough expertise to effectively spend that money (California institute of regenerative medicine comes to mind). That's when you really get in trouble

Sounds a lot like the effect of venture capital in the present day.

> First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds

Convince talented technical innovators that the best way they can apply themselves is to become a 'business person'"; then, talk to VCs and feel important by spending a lot of money instead of building something

> Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results

Do whatever VCs think is hot

> For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output

The last 15 years?

> There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.

Yep.

Except VCs lose all their money pretty quick if they never get it right, and don't get rewarded (to the same extent) for following along with whatever is in fashion. So, there is another, more fundamental, factor there- one that drives VCs to invest in things that are thought to be under-funded but have potential.

Honestly, it seems like trends for VCs cycle at around the same frequency as paradigms in most academic fields (on the order of around a decade). Unless the VC gets caught with their pants down right at the end of the transition, they'll probably turn a profit.

> Unless the VC gets caught with their pants down right at the end of the transition, they'll probably turn a profit.

Sure, it's like investing in stocks. But the incentives for VCs and academics are totally different. In academia, volume is a big part of prestige (not for everyone, of course, and to many people's dismay), whereas for VCs they're looking for that one huge disruptor, and are often willing to miss on hundreds to hit it.

Lots of conflicting views held by the scientific community:

* Science is progressing too fast * Science is progressing too slow with not enough breakthroughs * The barrier to publish is too high and is wrought with politics * There's too many papers published and we need a higher bar as not everyone is a genius * My research is important and deserves funding * Others research is trivial and they don't deserve funding * Committees suck, they do nothing, just gate-keep who gets money and there's politics involved * X research is trivial, shouldn't receive funding, someone has to stop this * The public should understand what we're doing research on * A lot of the research being published is being exaggerated in quality, difficulty and correctness

I guess it's no different than the conflicting views of any community. If there's no conflict, things get stale.

there are many researches on going, so all of these opinions can be valid at the same time

Reminds me of this 1944 field manual from the CIA[0] about how to sabotage organizations.

[0]: https://www.hsdl.org/c/view?docid=750070

We can see that after the establishment of the National Science Foundation is that many companies have had organizations that have also accelerated scientific research. Also before the national Science Foundation most people that participated in Science already had money to begin with considering the great amount of money required to not be working in a factory. Also the companies are self sustaining.

I read this story in my teens and was fascinated. Those who remember it will be horrified by some of the postulated advances, especially in the field of dentistry. I don't wish to comment on the truth of various popular ideas, but the selective way in which research is funded on on matters such as global warming, fusion, and Alzheimer's is strikingly similar to those suggested in the story, and, I believe, observed by that author. It's interesting to note that this sort of thing is quickly internalized - people are not just quick to follow the money, they're quick to believe what they have to in order to get it. I think this has led to a creeping belief that while science is important, it can properly be done in an atmosphere where the truth has been received before the facts are at all clear. I hope it's obvious that this isn't true.

> Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.

Have fashions taken over? What was science like before fashions took over?

It was what Szilard, von Neumann, Feynman, and others were doing.

not an insider, but apparently it's almost impossible to get funding in (theoretical?) physics outside outside of quantum mechanics.

I assume that what you're trying to say is that it's almost impossible to get funding in fundamental physics outside of string theory, which at least might be true. There are lots of people with funding in theoretical (or at least computational) physics who aren't doing quantum mechanics, like nearly all of astrophysics, much of acoustics and fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, etc.

String theory has been out of fashion for at least a decade.

What part of modern theoretical physics is "outside" quantum mechanics? General relativity, sure, but arguably the most interesting problem there is how to make it compatible with quantum mechanics.

> What was science like?

The tyranny of the tenured elderly:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

Recent and related:

Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858 - Jan 2023 (139 comments)

Its an interesting notion. If you can control the sum of all scientific sponsorships surely you will be able to control the subjects of research. And yes in 1940 30 million would surely go a long way to do this but it is 2023 and there are thousands of bodies offering research grants, usually chaired by senior members of academia that mostly tend to contribute indirectly any way.

I think the slowdown in physics we are witnessing today has not much to do with this effect and more to do with pragmatic aspects like capitalism and the next order of magnitude in complexity that we need to master to make headway.

EDIT: clarity

Szilard certainly nailed it with this piece.

Wow, Szilard was not only a futurist, but uncannily accurate!

For those that accept the author's premise and thought experiment. What's the recommended alternative?

Let's take a humanist approach and say the biggest problems humanity need to solve right now that we aren't doing enough on are life extension and energy generation/storage/distribution. Even 5 years ago, "AI" might've been on the list, but that seems to be booming with progress, and between CRISPR/mRNA we also seem to be making incredible progress on disease cure/prevention. Meanwhile, with longer lifespans, and cheap available energy who knows what other advances we might unlock.

OK, how do you proceed with maximizing scientific progress?

Focus on the problem, not the solution.

If the problem is that our civilization is using too much energy, the solution may not be fusion power. It might be redesigning suburbs (a design problem) or making people adaptable enough to live with one another in close quarters (a social problem) or making it easier to switch houses and move close to where they work (an economic problem).

The best spur to innovation is when you are getting results. Redefining the problem you solve is one way to get that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com