Why are modern scientists so dull?
beta.technologyreview.com
beta.technologyreview.com
I am trying to separate myself from this trend. (I am currently studying physics independently.)
I can recall a few conversations with scientists that re-affirm this observation. One time I phoned a certain doctor of physics at the Hebrew University. (His field is something related to building a quantum computer.) We had a friendly chat about some things in physics, he seemed nice. Then we got to the topic of me studying physics independently, without trying to obtain a degree for it. He asked me, "Why are you studying physics then?" I said, "To discover the laws of the universe." He said, "Seriously now, why?"
Your example of the physics professor is fine, in that you actually provided an example, but I'm not sure that is a fair evaluation. I think his question is fairly reasonable. The field of physics is so large and the amount of knowledge and sophistication required in both mathematics and physics to actually "discover laws of the universe" that it would be very difficult to achieve such a level by simply independent study.
Sure, there people like Srinivasa Ramanujan but they are very, very rare. I think there is too much made about autodidactism. There are many autodidacts. However, how many autodidacts take their learning to such a rigorous degree? Now, compare that with how many people read a few books on physics and are very interested in it but never come close to that level of sophistication.
I just don't think we can say "See, academics aren't even interested in learning about the World. They are glorified bureaucrats that can solve differential equations."
I think that is a bridge too far.
I wanted to disagree with your sentence, but now I see it is not grammatically valid. I'll try to guess what you meant and disagree with that.
I heard this argument many times. It's basically, "There's too much physics to do physics!" Just because there's a lot of physical knowledge out there, doesn't mean that you have to be a super-genius to do fundamental work. I don't know exactly how to explain this, but I think I can equate it to the internet business, which is probably more familiar to most HN readers.
What people say about science can also be said about the internet business. There are so many companies working on internet products, so many start-ups and so much money being poured into this, that surely you have to be a genius with a lot of money and connections to do something that will make a difference!
But we know that's not true. And I claim it's not true for science either.
--
it would be very difficult to achieve such a level by simply independent study [...] I think there is too much made about autodidactism.
I think you're dissing autodidactism too much. What do you think about people teaching themselves to program?
Also, just because you're studying independently, doesn't mean you don't consult with other people. I routinely consult with grad students.
Also, when you're doing research, you're being autodidactic by definition.
--
Sure, there people like Srinivasa Ramanujan but they are very, very rare. [...] how many autodidacts take their learning to such a rigorous degree?
How many HN readers actually found a successful start-up, get rich, and live the rest of their lives leisurely working on interesting problems? Probably not too many. But it's not a reason to give up.
--
I just don't think we can say "See, academics aren't even interested in learning about the World. They are glorified bureaucrats that can solve differential equations."
It's a generalization. There are still many fine scientists. But when trying to compare now to the past, this is what now looks like.
Comparing doing an Internet startup doing to the kind of research required to discover new things about the world is a bit ridiculous. No sane person would say it takes the same level of intellectual rigor to do a startup as research physics. This is not to say it is not hard but, well, Twitter is not "rocket science," but rocket science is. Let's strive for intellectual honesty.
Also, I did say autodidactism exists and is great. Sure many people teach themselves to program. I think the issue here is in scale and magnitude. Sure, Ramanujan's are out there but not everyone we chat up with at Borders about string theory is one.
I disagree. I agree that building a start-up involves less rigor than doing research, but rigor is just one variable among many in the success of a research (or a start-up.) I don't think that building a successful start-up is less of an intellectual achievement than doing scientific research.
Rigor is the crux of what?
(To clarify, the reason I was comparing research to starting a startup was to show how, even though a field appears to be immensely popular and having a lot of money and talent being poured into it, it is still possible for a determined person to make a breakthrough in it.)
I strongly disagree. I have the utmost respect for those who have built successful startups, but virtually none are a very significant intellectual achievement. It takes ambition, dedication, determination, courage, talent, skill, tact, vision, luck, and a hundred other attributes to achieve success in building a startup, but very rarely does it require an intense intellectual effort, and almost never is there any fundamental advancement of scientific thought.
Also, having spent time studying computer science, physics, and aeronautical engineering, one major difference I see is the relative maturity and depth of various fields. Computer science is so much newer than physics that there is simply much more unexplored territory at a shallower level -- which doesn't require as much studying to get to -- that it is easier to come up with new ideas there than in physics.
Is it really necessary to knock down every straw man one can conceive of?
:)
I was watching the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and there was one scene that stood out as marking this film as truly from another time.
Klaatu is talking to the boy, asking him about who the famous scientists are. And the boy knows! And acts as if everyone in American knows!
I gather there are many interesting contemporary scientists, but they simply get no attention in modern culture.
Most people know of, say, Hawking or Perelman because of their personal stories. But even their lives aren't as near as compelling as the greats of the last generation.
Not to mention the face that 50 years ago, the work being done was much more significant. I hate to say it, but no truly 'ground breaking' work has really been done in the last half century. There are still a lot of open questions - but we just haven't found the answer. We've just been refining our knowledge of the important work done before that.
(Note: I don't mean to say no new work has been done, just nothing major. Name something done in the last 50 years that could compare to the fundamental work done in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Genetics, Computation Theory, etc. before that.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals
All since 1970, is that recent enough? And, ya know, sometimes it does actually take a little time for major achievements to be recognized as such.
I'm not saying the things you list weren't hugely important, I'm just saying that they weren't as fundamental as the entirely new fields that were developed earlier (relativity, quantum mechanics, theory of computation, etc).
And you're being overly reductive when you say the Grand Challenge is a "pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s". I'm pretty sure the physicists that you've mentioned would take exception to the idea that their work didn't have a clear lineage of its own.
I just feel like their were are far fewer (if any) of those truly ground breaking discoveries now than there were in the early 20th century. This might just be perspective bias, but it seems like scientific progress was being made much more quickly from, say, 1850-1950 than any other time in human history.
We still have a lot of big open questions, but progress seems to have slowed down. Hopefully the LHC will change that ...
As for the Grand Challenge, I work in the AI field myself (I'm engaged in some work for DARPA right now, and I know several people who were on Grand Challenge teams), and we're still basically stuck in turing/von-neumann paradigms. In my opinion, most of what we've done in the last 50 years in AI is come up with better search heuristics. It makes AI/ML much more useful - but it's nothing really paradigm shifting.
I will of course grant this could all be in my head, since I haven't, and probably couldn't, define a metric that measures the 'significance' of theory (maybe something about marginal information-theoretic predictive power, but that's difficult to measure and still not quite right).
As for the next big thing? My guess is that the field of high dimensional analysis (encompassing machine learning, compressed sensing, etc) will be comparable in importance to any of the fields you've mentioned.
What?!?
Statistical arbitrage, BS, etc form the fundamental theory of finance. It's certainly as fundamental to finance as DNA is to biology.
In terms of real world impact, financial engineering is definitely greater than knowledge of DNA. So far genetics has gotten us very little in terms practical outcomes.
Maybe you are just making a judgment that finance is less valuable than other fields? If so, I can't really argue with that.
You need some perspective.
As far as I'm aware, all genetic engineering has gotten us is GM crops and a some drugs which only affect a few marginal cases. Hopefully that will change in the future, but I prefaced my statement with "so far".
Feynman traveled to Brazil to learn Bongo drums on whim, he worked in a Strip Club, mastered the art of the pickup, broke into TS safes at the Manhattan Project, was a well known painter under a pseudonym, etc.
Erdos was basically homeless, and would show up at mathematician's doors unannounced looking for a roof - and while under their roof, would collaborate on some of the most ground breaking work of the century. He was a heavy drug user, active libertarian, etc.
I'm sure Hawking can compete in terms of intellect or work (I have no idea - I'm not capable of judging), but he is nowhere near as interesting.
But I still stand by saying that Feynman was more entertaining.
I agree that Feynman is entertaining, and he's something of a legend.
I do feel that Hawking is not just fascinating in his own right but he's AMAZINGLY inspirational. Given the adversity he has faced for much of his life, the fact that he still pursues his love of science should be a lesson to all of us.
To call his story merely "extraordinary" is doing a grave disservice to such an incredible individual.
I say that living mathematicians like John Nash Jr., Shing-tung Yau, and Alexander Grothendieck have much more interesting lives than the examples you mentioned.
Compare non-fiction books of the 70s to non-fiction books today. With the exception of a couple people like Ray Kurzweil, our books today aren't a tenth as creative or brilliant. I'd argue that in most fields today scientists are just refining models created between the 60s and early 80s. Linguistics, educational theory, psychology, and organization behavior are all good examples of this.
1. Past research (including published papers) 2. Recommendation letters
GRE scores are a pre-filter (not set too high, I think, and certainly the CS subject GRE is ignored, even when it is required), grades matter only slightly, and the admission essays are basically a chance to disqualify yourself by saying something stupid.
To do anything interesting means reducing or delaying your paper output (which your supervisor will not appreciate), and to get the results published requires you to write so as to persuade people with no vested interest in publishing novel output to agree with you... but without being able to have a dialogue.
I recall one amusing paper review by three reviewers which was essentially
1. "the treatment of X is great, but I'd like to see more Y", 2. "too much Y, not enough X", 3. "both X and Y are fine, but I'd have been really interested in seeing Z instead", where Z was entirely unrelated.
How on earth could an author anticipate the preferences of those authors and get three recommendations? Well, picking a non-controversial subject would be a good start.
Multiply this anecdote up to the size of the academic and industrial systems, and it's no wonder that so many people decide that academia is not for them. These people tend to be lumped in with the people "not cut out for it", but I think a significant percentage simply realize that academia has a different value system, and don't want to participate. Some of those people go on to do interesting or revolutionary things in corporate research, or even in mainstream industry.
Would the world be better if they were in universities instead? Probably not... but we'd have our interesting scientists back.
Yes, in academics, professors X,Y and Z will usually try to get you to introduce their pet subjects in review. You also later find out that getting a paper approved has a lot to do with who you know (as opposed to what you know), and that getting the choice talks, collaborations and grants has a lot more to do with schmoozing and networking than anyone likes to admit. It's a social problem.
But you know what? That's life. Humans are fundamentally just a bunch of howler monkeys, flinging poo at the cage walls and trying to steal the shiny rock (or the girl) from the alpha. Put more than a few people together in any activity, and you'll get competition, preening, back-biting and politics.
In academics, powerful professors demand that you brown-nose and compete for favor; in industry, powerful rich people do the same. In academics, you find that most days are spent managing mundane chaos, with real research advancements happening only a few times a year; in industry, most of your time is spent appeasing people, reacting to short-term crises, and coordinating with your co-workers. When you really think about how chaotic humans are in groups, it's amazing that forward momentum happens at all.
Point is, I don't think it's fair to imply that "interesting" scientists migrate to industry because of some fundamental difference in values. Personally, I made the migration because the monetary up-side is much better in industry. Otherwise, I think the bullshit-to-accomplishment ratio is roughly the same.
But this is because they no longer get "credit" for writing books, which is exactly the point the article was making. Scientists used to write books all the time.
Books contained calcified knowledge that can be disseminated by someone familiar with the field; a non-scientist as it were. This is the point of publications of popular science.
Original research that leads to new insights into a field are more difficult to obtain, require a higher level of skill and ability and therefore should be more important to a scientific reputation.
The reason scientists write papers is because science is fun, but writing is boring (compare: coding vs documentation). Research papers represent the bare minimum level of documentation you can get away with but still keep your job.
Similarly, there's more $$ in working in industry with a PhD rather than academia. And the tenure/grant game requires those in academia to have political and social skills that might be off-putting to the smart/driven set being talked about.
Finally, it's possible we're just not that interested in scientists/engineers (as in the 50's and 60's). Better to know what Lindsay Lohan's up to... There's like an hour of entertainment news EVERY DAY, and maybe a science article or two per quarter.
Followup: Rephrasing my Lohan comment - there might be all sorts of interesting scientists out there, but how would any of us know unless they're in the field? Rock stars, nowadays, aren't big-name scientists like they used to be. They're just rock stars...
But that word "great" is important.
As a general rule, when you compare the best things in one category with the average things in another, the first category tends to come out looking better.
See also various comparisons in music, literature, etc., etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
zkz: Maybe you are boring.
(note: The wikipedia articles linked to don't generally tell you why the subject isn't dull. In some cases the stories may need to be heard from people who knew the scientist in question, as there doesn't seem to be any written record to link to.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.h...