Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Time, money, and attention are finite, yet output keeps growing. Hence the need for a lot of filtering. I wish there was an alternative, but I don't see any. Do journals reject quality work? Are geniuses passed up for promotion? Sure, but just giving some examples like Peter Higgs is hindsight bias.

e’ve got loads more scientists, and they publish way more papers. And yet science is less disruptive than ever, scientific productivity has been falling for decades, and scientists rate the discoveries of decades ago as worthier than the discoveries of today. (Reminder, if you want to blame this on ideas getting harder to find, I will fight you.

This can probably also be explained by low hanging fruit having been picked

View on HN

The "I will fight you" text links to https://www.experimental-history.com/p/ideas-arent-getting-h...

Which is another huge essay to read and does not adequately answer the objection. There are for example four fundamental forces. Are we going to find another four? Maybe we can find a fifth, but that is pushing the frontier. if such a force exists, its obviously going to be much harder to find than the others. Same for fundamental particles. There are 16 of them, plus Higgs. Are we going to find another 17? Or 3 battery types. I think psychology is different because you can always find new permutations of experiments.

I read the essay, and my takeaway to "There are for example four fundamental forces. Are we going to find another four?" would be:

Maybe not, but we could find out that the model of fundamental forces wasn't really the final answer, and explain the universe much better with some alternative theory. In your comment you assume that science is more or less settled, and all there is to do is to tweak the present understanding a bit and fill some gaps. The same sentiment was shared by many prominent physicists already in the end of 1800s, who were obviously proved wrong by Einstein and others in the 1900s.

I tend to agree that rumors of the end of discovery have been greatly exaggerated, however in the case of theoretical physics, we have the unsatisfying problem of having several alternative theories, but severely constrained access to the energy/technology required to test them.

The low hanging fruit theory assumes there is only one tree and all fruit on it was visible from the beginning. Science has an exploration component that makes more low-hanging fruit visible and scaffolding component that makes existing fruit more accessible.

not to mention there's always the possibility of what's roughly described in _End of Science_, at least for physics anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com