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Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

I do not disagree that things feel slower to some degree, but I'd also bet absolutely anything that 100 years from now people will look at our time and say "Can you believe they didn't understand X? There was so much low hanging fruit in 2015."

The issue is that what appears simple, 100 years from now, takes a significant shift in how we're currently thinking. The problems are complex and the prior knowledge needed to get to a breakthrough is always growing, but I really do believe its self defeating to look at 100 years ago and think they had it easy as I believe people will undoubtedly say the same thing about us 100 years from now.

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I agree with you but not with respect to Physics. I believe it is very likely that in 100 years we will think "Can you believe they didn't understand X" in things like psychology and all of the new emerging cross disciplinary fields that have emerged from it.

Economics is a good example as well I believe... Up until the second half of the 20th century many economists were not basing their theories on data but rather under assumptions that we are all "rational" actors. I will concede that the 'data' was not really available until the last 50yrs anyway but the 'behavioral' movement has hopefully set Economics as a whole on a 'straight' path and no doubt the next 100yrs will show the low hanging fruit which now dangle above us.

How poetic.

EDIT - The economics example I gave was very sweeping. Just an example.

Your belief about economics indicates that you are part of a minority paradigm that has produced interesting data but not managed to transform economics yet. If it does succeed, then your hope for it will be perfectly justified. But most such movements do not succeed.

The problem is that success has to be so compelling that people who are working within different paradigms (economics have many) generally figure out that they are thinking about it wrong and need to restructure everything in terms of behavioral economics, rather than looking at behavioral economics as a low order correction term to their own way of understanding them.

I think that my original comment wasn't specific enough and that we are in agreement. I do see it as a 'low order correction' but one that will (and has already) added a lot to the field.

Richard Thaler puts it much better than me when he roughly says that the best economics work in the last decade is by classic economists doing good empirical work. Which, at least in my understanding, is the real 'gift' of the 'behavioral' approach.

I think it's very unlikely that we will see in psychology or economics any kind of progress like what we saw in physics. In physics anything new that we learn doesn't change the experiments at all, that is we can't ignore physical laws just because we are aware of them.

But in psychology or economics as soon as you learn something new, that new knowledge is going to be a new variable to account for, for example as soon as you are made aware of the Bystander effect[1] it is trivial to avoid it, but you can't really predict what will come out of it. You can as well find ways to game any economic prediction by being aware of it, I guess you can find stable models that sort of work until something like the 2008 financial crisis happens and they don't anymore.

So either the investigators stay out of the economy/society or they will mess with their own results by making them public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

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