Put another way, I think one of the author’s arguments is “what if we’re pouring more and more effort into research in an area, because our primary abstraction is wrong?” That would make it harder and harder to continue to roll the ball up an increasingly steep hill. And I think in some fields, they may be right. It’s akin to how in math some problems are very difficult in Cartesian coordinates but trivial in polar coordinates. For instance, it seems to me that the existence of the “wave-particle duality” in physics and our inability to explain quantum-scale phenomena in a way that makes intuitive or logical sense to people is the canary in the coal mine that we took a wrong turn a while back. That’s not to say it’s true in every field, but that’s one that has stood out to me for a while.

I think another cause could be bureaucratic. From what I understand, several hundred years ago, research was funded by rich patrons who wanted some credit in relation to discoveries. Nowadays there is a giant, lurking, centrally planned grant machine that distributes money to researchers. And as we know from economics, central planning becomes increasingly untenable as the system becomes larger. Results get worse as the complexity skyrockets.

Additionally, if we are going to blame the “burden of knowledge” in any capacity, we have to acknowledge the abysmal education system (in the US). An anecdote which I will never forget is, in 6th grade we had a student who had recently immigrated from India. By his own telling, he was an average student there. But compared to native students, he was light years ahead in math. We learned multiplication in third grade, division in fourth grade, long division and fractions in fifth grade, or something like that. He had learned multiplication in first grade, and all of division in second grade. While our smartest students in sixth grade were grappling with pre algebra, he was bored in classes with the eighth grade algebra students. Our education system has, since experiencing that, seemed to me deeply flawed; there really is no reason an efficient and effective public education system should take 12+ years to be able to have a child ready for college and then another 4+ in college to have them ready to contribute to an isolated field.