This wonderful video by Sabine Hossenfelder explains the slowdown in scientific progress, which also explains the slowdown in technological progress, citing research studies and expert commentaries.
I focus on her reasons for the slowdown because many people are already convinced that a slowdown has occurred. She focuses first on government regulations that require corporate compliance, but also those that involve grants. While corporate labs used to get by with one page, today’s grants are like a book and take forever to assess.
Second, the publish or perish mentality, valuing quantity over quality, has led to millions of papers published a year, and few are useful.
Third, she cites the trend towards more risk averse research because #scientists need to get funding, and the funding agencies want to claim success. She claims that some agencies try to overcome this but end up funding the same old research.
Fourth, she is critical of bullshit boring research, and gives a lot of examples, such as research that concluded noisy planes lead to less sleep near airports. She says just scroll through a #university website to find more such studies. She correctly states that citizens will eventually get angry.
Fifth, surveys show that researchers want to do different research, but they are being held back by funding agencies. She asks: How do we find out which research should be done. She says she doesn’t know but this is a critical question. Most people would merely state the general category they like, probably one they work in, or one that fits their “values.” For me general categories get you into trouble because they force researchers to package their research into those general categories, which then change at each election.
I think she is focusing on the right question. We keep assuming bureaucrats know which #research should be done, when often they don’t. We want #researchers to follow their scientific instincts because they are the closest to the problems that need to be solved. This is what many at Bell Labs were doing fifty years ago when they won 10 Nobel Prizes including ones for transistors and quantum dots. (Might some of today’s researchers choose to do research that is easy to publish?)
I focused on these issues two years ago in my article for American Affairs “Web3, the Metaverse, and the Lack of Useful Innovation.” That article summarized the changes in basic and applied #research that have occurred over the last 70 years. Less corporate research, more academic research, more papers, more esoteric journals, and more bureaucracy. Researchers at bell labs used to spend their time actively talking about ideas, now the academic researchers are administrators writing 100 author papers, applying for grants, and writing letters of recommendation for their lab researchers, their PhD students and post docs, all of whom are part of the 100 author papers
#startups #science
https://lnkd.in/gzJHt4tr
very nice indeed