Stagnant Scientific Productivity Holding Back Growth (wsj.com) 89
Funding for scientific research has become risk-averse, favoring established researchers pursuing incremental discoveries, critics say. From a report: In August President Biden signed into law a massive boost to scientific research: roughly $200 billion, when fully funded, over the next several years. The bipartisan law's premise is straightforward. In the long run economic growth depends on innovation, which in turn flows from how much we spend on research and development. The problem with that premise is the U.S. already spends plenty on R&D, about 3% of gross domestic product in recent years. That exceeds the peaks of the early 1960s during the space race. But the fruits of that effort have been elusive. Total factor productivity, the best metric for innovation's contribution to growth, grew just 0.5% a year over the past decade, half its rate of the 1960s. Other evidence suggests breakthroughs, such as new drug discoveries, are becoming more expensive and time-consuming, and researchers spend ever more years acquiring training and experience before achieving novel discoveries. In other words, the U.S. is getting progressively less bang for its scientific buck.
Patrick Collison, the Irish-born co-founder of payments technology company Stripe, has spent a lot of the past five years pondering the problem of declining scientific productivity. One popular theory he rejects: the most important discoveries have been made and new insights are more incremental and difficult. That might be true of individual fields, such as physics, but can't be true generally, he argues. "Every discovery opens up new frontiers and new questions and new possible avenues of investigation," he said in an interview. "The surface area of our knowledge is continually expanding. Just like we are not exhausting the creative possibilities of the English language, because words can be combined in an infinite number of ways, it does not seem to me we are running out of possibilities of discovery in computer science."
Research inputs -- dollars and hours spent -- are a lousy measure of innovation, he added. It doesn't require more resources to make a hit movie or bestselling novel than a dud. The most innovative companies aren't necessarily the biggest spenders. Tesla's R&D spending in the past three years is 13% of that of General Motors and Ford Motor combined. Yet Tesla's market value is more than five times its two rivals.' Clearly, scientific productivity has something to do with how research is done, not how much. One culprit, in the view of Mr. Collison and many others, is that the institutions that fund science have become process-oriented, narrow-minded and risk-averse. Wary of failure, they favor established researchers pursuing narrowly focused, incremental ideas over younger scientists with more heterodox agendas.
Patrick Collison, the Irish-born co-founder of payments technology company Stripe, has spent a lot of the past five years pondering the problem of declining scientific productivity. One popular theory he rejects: the most important discoveries have been made and new insights are more incremental and difficult. That might be true of individual fields, such as physics, but can't be true generally, he argues. "Every discovery opens up new frontiers and new questions and new possible avenues of investigation," he said in an interview. "The surface area of our knowledge is continually expanding. Just like we are not exhausting the creative possibilities of the English language, because words can be combined in an infinite number of ways, it does not seem to me we are running out of possibilities of discovery in computer science."
Research inputs -- dollars and hours spent -- are a lousy measure of innovation, he added. It doesn't require more resources to make a hit movie or bestselling novel than a dud. The most innovative companies aren't necessarily the biggest spenders. Tesla's R&D spending in the past three years is 13% of that of General Motors and Ford Motor combined. Yet Tesla's market value is more than five times its two rivals.' Clearly, scientific productivity has something to do with how research is done, not how much. One culprit, in the view of Mr. Collison and many others, is that the institutions that fund science have become process-oriented, narrow-minded and risk-averse. Wary of failure, they favor established researchers pursuing narrowly focused, incremental ideas over younger scientists with more heterodox agendas.
Appeal to the Stock Market is definitely a fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
When a car company has a really great quarter, the market says... "meh"
Tesla is perceived as a tech company because their cars are very slightly higher-tech than other manufacturers' cars. Or they were, anyway; these days, Tesla does not necessarily make the best EV in any segment. It was always wrong, anyway; it takes a lot of technology to make an ICEV work as well as they do now. It's actually a lot easier to control an electric motor than it is to control an ICE.
The market rewards tech companies because it is gambling, and some tech companies provide big payouts. But Tesla is massively overvalued even for a tech company because it is failing at the genuinely high-tech stuff it's trying to do. In particular, the so-called full-self-driving technology (which is explicitly not full self driving, it's not level 5) is making really embarrassing mistakes.
A lot of people around here seem to think that it's enough for a self-driving car to just be safer than a human on average, because they are not just nerds, but also seem to have no clue how the average person thinks. It can't just be safer, it has to both be safer and seem safer. If it makes really bad mistakes that almost no human would make, then people will perceive it as being dangerous, whether it's overall creating less collisions or fatalities or whatever.
As such, Tesla is not only overvalued for a car company, it's overvalued for a tech company. Their approach is fundamentally unsuited to reality. And now that other automakers are starting to bring out new and interesting EVs in segments Tesla is underserving (notably pickups and SUVs, Tesla doesn't actually even have either, their supposed SUV is a CUV which absolutely is a different segment seldom even cross-shopped) Tesla has even less reason to exist. They continue to have truly embarrassing safety-related recall rates. Apparently, Elno's plan to do things differently was a bad plan. Not the EV part, but the revolutionizing manufacturing part.
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Putting aside the idiotic Musk fanboi shit
That would require you fucking off, coward.
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It's also not clear that Tesla's approach will result in even Level 3 self-driving cars.
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I love how you decided to go with the "elno" meme at the end. Really adds a ton a credibility to what you are saying.
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I love how you decided to go with the "elno" meme at the end. Really adds a ton a credibility to what you are saying.
The only people offended by that are Elon suckers.
Don't suck off Elon. He will never love you.
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drinkypoo is a dipshit fully steeped in california dipshit culture. He can't help himself.
You mean the same California where Tesla became successful, before Elno ran off to Texas because librulz? The same California that, if it were a nation, would be one of the most successful on the planet? Okey dokey, coward.
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Isn't the Stock Market just a barometer of rich people feelings?
Correct. That's why using it as a measure of anything else is bad.
Some kid just bought a blue check from Twitter and pretended to be Ellie Lillie when they announced the company would sell all insulin for free. The market value dropped 6% as a result.
I know. It's glorious. Couldn't happen to a nicer bag of dicks.
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I'd argue a bit less doom and gloom for Tesla as I think at least for the next 3-4 years they'll stay dominant in the EV market if only because they're one of the only companies making sub $50k EVs that aren't dinky compact cars. If things go right for them in the next 3-4 while the rest of the auto industry catches up that might be enough to cement them in as a major brand which would relieve some of the need for them to always be on the cutting edge.
Right now Tesla's EV competition just isn't all that gre
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Just like we are not exhausting the creative possibilities of the English language, because words can be combined in an infinite number of ways,
Well that's wrong for a start, once we hit "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" there was pretty much nowhere left to go.
science research does not fit a profit motive (Score:5, Insightful)
Most scientific research does not produce marketable products or services. It advances knowledge incrementally. That does not fit a corporate profit motive. The NIH has been trying to turn research into a drug discovery program for some time now, and that is why scientific discoveries are not coming as fast as they could. The NIH needs to start refunding smaller independent labs rather than dumping all their money on a few big labs that do drug discovery. Doing that will increase the pace of new discoveries. Most small labs can't get funding anymore, no matter how good their research projects are.
Re:science research does not fit a profit motive (Score:5, Insightful)
Most scientific research does not produce marketable products or services. It advances knowledge incrementally. That does not fit a corporate profit motive. The NIH has been trying to turn research into a drug discovery program for some time now, and that is why scientific discoveries are not coming as fast as they could. The NIH needs to start refunding smaller independent labs rather than dumping all their money on a few big labs that do drug discovery. Doing that will increase the pace of new discoveries. Most small labs can't get funding anymore, no matter how good their research projects are.
I wish research could also cover why not to do things, as well as the incremental improvements. So much focus on producing PhD students that make new and wonderful improvements, but being an expert in the field should also include understanding (and publishing for others would be nice) why some things do not work.
Re:science research does not fit a profit motive (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran smack into this with my master's thesis. It never got published despite me being at a world leading university for the field. I showed that one of the hotshots of my field was using an algorithm to simulate higher resolution calculations that was computationally equivalent to just running higher resolutions, and which was more complicated and more prone to failing on edge cases. In the idealized case that was the center of his paper it was indeed better than higher resolutions. But nobody is doing research on the idealized case - all the meat lies on the fringes.
"Don't listen to the famous PI on many papers we collaborate on and who shares funding with us" really doesn't fly because of how we fund and assess the quality of research projects. Undermining some of his work at minimum makes it less likely for him to get grants, and that makes it less likely for our group to get a collaborator and funding. At worst he gets pissed off at some upstart grad student and decides not to partner with us at all.
I don't know how you'd take the politics out of research funding, and I don't know how you'd set up a system where it was OK to prove the null case or undermine tons of existing research, which includes the whole careers of individuals. But both need to happen. I don't want to see a lack of accountability for research funding - we need to be sure that it's productively applied. But there needs to be some tolerance for failure, and an acknowledgement that being wrong, producing a null result, or questioning the current meta is ok, at least in moderation.
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Why isn't there a way to release "field notes" for your niche? Why does it have to be formal or nothing? Field notes allow info to be shared withou
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Back in the 1970's I was fired from a job as a TA/RA for a famous professor. He asked me to harshly critique his main project so that he could better answer critics when he finally published. I did an excellent job and proved that his fundamental assertion was incorrect. About a dozen PhD dissertations an a couple of academic appointments aments went down the tube with the project. I was encouraged to leave the university which I did. I've had little to do with academia since (except a couple of years as an
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The Case for Fundamental Research (Score:3)
The problem is that governments have forgotten the need for this fundamental research because the time span from discovery to application is so long. In my own field of particle physi
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imo the problem is that corporation constantly justify high prices of products (pharmaceuticals in particular) as needed to support research and development, then support political parties that fight against government spending and taxes to support basic research
We are spiraling down a rabbit hole designed to put money into the hands of the wealthy few, and we deserve it as long as we put their "small government" lackey politicians into office
I will bet dollars to donuts that the newly minted house republic
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What I want to know is how much of the science funding is spent on the bureaucracy to decide who should get science funding. It feels like that has grown.
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There's the problem. The other examples in the summary are Tesla and GM and Ford.
If you're being generous, Stripe is business model innovation. Tesla/GM/Ford do engineering innovation, to greater and lesser degrees. The scientific innovation that underlies all of them happened a long time ago.
We pour money into people writing chat apps and ad services and call it innovative technology. Meanwhile, a career in science is a great way to be poor and frustrated.
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Too many scientists.
Even worse, too many ``scientists''.
Fewer tenure positions and more actual education.
The problem is a bit wider than mere "scientists".
Greed figured out what was more profitable in education. Sell the idea of the experience to everyone who wanted it, rather than prioritizing an education for a country that could put it to good use.
In the immortal words of a celebrity influencer kicked out of a college Mommy and Daddy scandaled their way into..."I do want the experience I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
When rich little shits who hardly need a degree to s
Is that spending government, or private sector? (Score:2)
"The problem with that premise is the U.S. already spends plenty on R&D, about 3% of gross domestic product in recent years. That exceeds the peaks of the early 1960s during the space race."
Is this figure only government research spending (or even only non-discretionary government research spending), or does it include spending by private corporations? Obviously pharmaceutical and auto companies are going to be spending some amount of their own money, while the 1960s space race was virtually all govern
Terrible Take (Score:5, Insightful)
The GM/Ford and Tesla comparison is beyond comprehension. All three's values are investor driven and those investors want different things. Ford/GM are viewed as reliable, slow moving goliaths. Their investors don't want radical change, they want the new F-150/GMC1500 to sell well every year. Spare funds are used to search for the next big thing. Meanwhile, the Tesla investors want innovation; they want to not compete in the existing market but to become the leader in a new, emerging market.
Energy companies don't want to radically develop new technologies. They have a profitable position and will move to refine their abilities. Let a smaller company shoot their shot; if it works, the existing corps will simply buy them out.
If you want risk, you need to not have risk-adverse investors. You need to have the researchers in the boardroom, not the accountants.
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It's worse than that. They want "innovation" like turning standard features such as heated seats or remote door locks into a recurring subscription revenue stream. In the pharma world, they want "innovation" like reformulating (not improving) a drug that is nearing the end of it's patent protection just to avoid generic competitors. So much corporate R&D effort goes into things that actively make thing
Too many researchers (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also the problem that *every* university wants to have graduate programs and research institutes. There are a lot of PhD students (and professors) who couldn't research their way out of a rat's maze.
With so much competition for research funding, even the good researchers spend more time writing grant proposals than they do researching. At least in my field, the grant proposals have to be so detailed that you basically have completed the research already. Any money you get funds researching and writing the *next* proposal.
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Re:Too many researchers (Score:5, Interesting)
Since 1960, the number of Ph.D.'s awarded in the US has increased by more than a factor of 5, while the total population has increased by less than a factor of 2. In some sense, then, the bar is lower.
Maybe, but you can't tell from the stats whether that is true or not. It could simply be the general devaluation of degrees. Jobs that used to require no degree require an Associate's, jobs that used to require those now require a Bachelor's, etc. If the job a person formerly needed a Masters for now requires a PhD, it stands to reason that more people will seek PhDs. You seem to be assuming to that people avoided getting them because it was hard, but it's at least equally plausible that people didn't get them because they didn't need them. After all, there have long been spectacular idiots with PhDs.
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Many advanced degrees are given to foreign students, so your stats may not tell the whole story. Also, other countries often value higher degrees more, for good or bad. US companies tend to view those with higher degrees as non-team-players or poor communicators, being they are often the Asperger types.
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I can't explain that spike between 1958 and 1970, but it's massive in comparison to the growth in any other period. Booming post-war economy? More students? More schools with Ph.D. programs? Unleaded gasoline?
Aside from that, I would have attributed the growth to new technology making the process easier than ever before. The word processor alone takes a lot of the pain out of the process. Citation managers, instant access to anything you could want online, statistics packages that produce appropriate
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With so much competition for research funding, even the good researchers spend more time writing grant proposals than they do researching.
The corollary to that is that universities want to have research programs so that they can get grant money. It should be the other way around, you have professors who want to do research, have good and novel ideas for research, and so get grant money for that research.
As a result, a *lot* of research coming out of universities these days is absolute garbage. I saw this when I was in college. A professor I knew was doing in-depth studies on the cognitive changes of seniors over time, which is fairly useful.
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His job is to publish and bring in grant money. He's just found an quick, easy, and reliable way to do both. My guess is that he's on the tenure track and sailing smoothly to a full professorship. Jealous?
As a taxpayer, not jealous, but angry. More taxpayer money was being funneled to the professor (full tenure) who farted around in SPSS than the professor (also full tenure) who actually did useful, original research.
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At least in my field, the grant proposals have to be so detailed that you basically have completed the research already.
The Kickstarter of research. Don't fund something that isn't already done, you'll just lose out.
It's not risk aversion (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is profit motivation, but that has always been a factor, the recent change is a motivation towards short term profits rather than long term. E.g. in the 60s a company making a breakthrough in some kind of space-based technology would have gladly licensed their technology to NASA or one of their contractors at a reasonable rate (profitable without gouging) because they knew that just the name recognition for their company ("WE helped USA beat RUSSIA to the MOON") would pay dividends in the long-term futur
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Menlo Park was obsessed with profit.
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Bullshit. That's just research conducted with public largesse, which is still alive and well:
https://www.cagw.org/reporting... [cagw.org]
Plenty of "research" earmarks in there. Also it's extremely rare for anyone to actually cut spending in Washington.
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it's profit motivation.
I remember a particular social media platform going public a few years ago. Stated in their IPO filing that they were suffering hundreds of millions in losses every year, had never made a profit, and will likely not make a profit in the future.
The end result of that was of course a grand IPO for a company "worth" billions of dollars.
When utter dogshit like that can attract investors, I'd love to hear the valid anti-motive again in science. Do we need like a shitload more "influencers" in STEM to manufactu
The obvious deterrant for Innovation... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is patent hoarding.
Also known as that elephant in the room shitting all over Innovation's shoes creating a stifling stench, while Greed pretends "war chests" full of patents not authorized for use are a valued commodity for human progress under the guise of "business".
We sure know how to put the ass, in assets.
Not a new complaint (Score:4, Interesting)
Federal funding agencies have tended to fund the work you have done rather than the work you propose in a grant application for a long, long time.
This makes it very difficult to investigate new ideas that may be outside of your published work by even a small amount.
True innovation is risky and if a project fails and there are no publications, the grant is considered a failure. Grant managers want
to show off their portfolio of grants with many publications.
There have been many initiatives to fund innovative research and younger investigators, but these grant application are reviewed
by the same people with the same ideas and prejudices on how applications should be reviewed.
This has been happening for 20+ years. (Score:3, Insightful)
So much (maybe too much) of research is focused towards what might be publishable, patentable, and saleable to the exclusion of just about everything else. This places a large incentive on the risk-averse and incremental. Even in the places where the most basic research is done such as universities, there's a been a large push towards only approving and funding experiments and studies that might more easily lead to discoveries that can be marketed and sold as a product vs anything else.
Dogma (Score:4, Insightful)
Tesla's market value (Score:2)
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Is too much is coming down and will come down further. Either TSLA has to kick out the top ten players in the automotive market or the stock price has to come down
Kick out the top players, eh?
Well, that might have happened already if not for said players gaming the system claiming they were Too Big To Fail, setting a Capitalist precedent that gilded the fucking road for Greed to walk and abuse.
Don't even be remotely surprised if Too Big To Fail turns into an FTX recovery plan.
Science is not immune to diminishing returns (Score:2)
And why would it be?
Even more so when rightly or wrongly a good bit of society is afraid of at least some parts of technology whether it be nuclear power, GMO food, or mRNA vaccines.
All the data leaks and ransomware on the Internet aren't helping either. And FTK going poof didn't help either.
A good part of the population wants a time out on large changes for a decade to assimilate what we've already got, even more so since the governments want to retool the entire economy.
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A good part of the population wants a time out on large changes for a decade to assimilate what we've already got, even more so since the governments want to retool the entire economy.
A good part of the population, fails to realize a good part of the population, includes business investors.
Freezing stagnation feeding perpetual quarterly layoffs, isn't exactly a great "time out" plan.
It DOES require more resources to make a âoeh (Score:1)
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I'm gonna separate that into most profitable vs most impactful. Sure there's a lot of overlap but I think cost generally coincides with at least revenue but depending on your definition of impact, I'm nowhere near convinced there's a strong relationship with cost.
measured how? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Total factor productivity, the best metric for innovation's contribution to growth, grew just 0.5% a year over the past decade"
I don't know how this is measured, but it has the smell of a business-school buzzword, pretending to measure things that are not actually measurable.
Given that scientific research typically takes between twenty and thirty years to move from innovation to the marketplace, if there's a lack of research results improving the economy today, we apparently need to fund more research twenty and thirty years ago.
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No - it's a valid measure in economics. It records how much more is now being produced in marketable value for the same level of inputs as in the past. I.e given the amount of people and capital used in a making a product, how much of that product is being produced now compared with the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yes, it's clutzy, but it does reflect something real; if the new machine produces twice as many widgets for the same effort by the workers, then the new technology of the machine has dou
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It has more faults than that. You can't measure the inputs required to produce something that previously did not exist. What did it require to cure some rare diseases that were incurable but can now be cured due to a new drug or procedure?
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No - it's a valid measure in economics. It records how much more is now being produced in marketable value
Measured how?
Statistics do measure a lot (Score:2)
The actual number of items produced are recorded by state statisticians in almost all countries.
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No - it's a valid measure in economics. It records how much more is now being produced in marketable value
Measured how?
The actual number of items produced are recorded by state statisticians in almost all countries.
Here's the GDP per capita. You are going to tell me part of this is due to technical innovation just how, exactly?
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Read the wikipedia article; it explains reasonably well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Read the wikipedia article; it explains reasonably well
Wow. Adept use of equations to hide complete reliance on dubious assumptions.
That's Economics (Score:2)
Economics is ALL about using simplistic models to draw conclusions. On a good day it works well, and the history of the past 70 years compared to the 100 before demonstrates that economics is doing a relatively good job. The trick is to know which assumptions are valid enough, and, for bonus points, to spot when assumptions that are usually valid are breaking down.
Could be a blessing in disguise (Score:2)
Not long ago there was a story here about faking research results, presumably to keep the "publish or perish" grav(e)y(ard) train rolling. That might have a lot to do with the decreasing "bang for the buck" TFS mentions. So maybe the cheaters will stop getting funds and will have to earn an honest living.
Clearly, we need original research to remain viable. But as a society, we've tied research funding to short-term monetizable "results". This leads to siloing, and a lot of potential fruitful ground is never
Yep, completely stupid. (Score:2)
But not a new problem. I applied for PhD funding about 20 years back in the CS/IT field. The only way to actually get some space for research was to trick the funding body into thinking the development part takes way more time than it actually does. And then you get punished by not having published a lot of meaningless incremental stuff, but some (much fewer) actual research result. The whole system is broken and does not work anymore. Actual research is mostly done by accident these days as most of the inc
bureaucracy and mediocracy (Score:3)
He may want to reconsider the argument he ignored (Score:1)
Maybe science is getting harder (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there reason to believe this doesn't apply to most fields? For some newer fields, we may not be as far down the path of complexity, but presumably all are moving that direction. A hundred years ago important discoveries by an individual or small team were common, but recently it almost never happens. The media my assign credit to some individual, but almost always that person is backed by a huge team in order to make the experiment work.
There are additional effects: The increasing complexity of science makes it more difficult to manage - very broad and very deep knowledge is needed to make good decisions, and its rare to find people with that range. Experiment costs are so high that the public (reasonably) demands a lot of oversight - do we really want a 10B experiment to run open-loop? But at the same time oversigt largely prevents fraud, it can do little to determine if experiments are overall a good place to spend research $
Finally there are a lot of new constraints on science that largely didn't exist decades ago: Safety, environment, diversity, cultural sensitivity, privacy. These are completely valid issues, but each adds extra expense and delay even if in the long term they may have strong positive benefits. Note that the inefficiencies are rarely due to the actual issues, but rather are due to the cost of the bureaucracies that are required to enforce those requirements.
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Yep. My first thoughts too. He said it wasnt that the most important discoveries had been made but I'd argue that the easiest discoveries have been made (to some degree). Can you make significant progress in aviation now given only what Orville and Wilbur had available?
No, It's because of monetization (Score:2)
Scientists do not share their work because the universities they work for and the scientists themselves are allowed to patent their discoveries and make money off of them. Doesn't sound bad at first, but much of the money comes from government grants; from the public who don't share the patents!. This leads to Balkanization of the work, no sharing among colleagues across academicia. The collaboration that allowed big discoveries no longer exists. This reduces the biggest possible return the public could hav
Not just science... (Score:4, Interesting)
My anecdotal observation is that it's not just science that has become more risk averse. In business, technology, politics (within the confines of the same party), even videogames- it seems to me everything has become more uniform in thought and more risk averse over the past few decades.
I find it totally bizarre that the 80s and 90s had so many more original and unique ideas for what a videogame could be. Nowadays even among indie developers, most games use the same underlying engines and pick one of a handful of similar art styles. Most games are carbon copies of existing games with slight tweaks around the edges.
Political parties these days in the US pretty much require fealty to the orthodoxy with any deviation or independent thought punished as absolute heresy.
Orthodoxy? (Score:2)
'Political parties these days in the US pretty much require fealty to the orthodoxy with any deviation or independent thought punished as absolute heresy.'
The Blessed Maggie Thatcher coined the phrase 'There is no alternative'. The massive success of mainstream economics over the past 30 years in reducing poverty across the world, as well as the reality that no alternative has been found that actually works, makes it very hard to justify anything radically different, at least in economics. Is economics perf
It's way worst than "risk-averse funding"... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, IP law? (Score:2)
One man's trash is another man's treasure. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think there is a productivity problem in science. If you follow science you realize it's moving at astonishing speed, albeit in a "blink and you'll miss it" manner. You never see it *move* very much, but if you compare almost any field to where it was forty years ago, the science of 1980 looks hopelessly antiquated.
What I think there is is a lack of realism in expectations. People think of science as being like Indiana Jones -- you go out seeking the Holy Grail and the search is actually pretty straightforward, you just have to piece together a few clues and answer a couple of riddles. Basic science is exemplified by real archaeology: you never go looking for a specific treasure, you dig in an interesting place and turn up potsherds. The real art is figuring out the significance of what looks to a layman like worthless trash.
Basic science sucks at producing what businessmen would consider "results" -- that is to say specific, desirable outcomes, like obtaining the Holy Grail to display in our museum. In contrast applied science is very good at producing results, as long as they're not too much of a stretch. So applied science also sucks at Holy Grail questions like "how to cure cancer".
If solving Holy Grail type problems is your yardstick then there's a productivity problem and there always will be. But if you look a question like curing cancer, you'll realize that there will never be a single discovery that unlocks the answer. Instead progress depends on both pure and applied research. Chemotherapy was discovered by research into chemical warfare agents, which in turn were discovered through basic experimentation in organic chemistry. When the applications of mechlorethamine to chemotherapy were discovered in the 1940s, we didn't know about immune system T cells -- that discovery wouldn't be until the 1960s, and practical application of that knowledge to cancer treatment would take forty more years.
It's a glass half empty/full scenario. We are not quantifiably closer to "a cure for cancer" today than we were in 1990, but you're a heck of a lot likely to survive and make a full recovery from cancer today.
Pretty sure that (Score:2)
The lack of actual science and the abuse of publication process muddying the waters is what ACTUALLY holding back growth.
Not to mention the intrusion of political shenanigans.
Genetic engineer humans to be smarter (Score:2)
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If you don't like genetic engineering then you've got Musk's neuralink. A lot of progress these days is combining deeplearning AI with your field of study. Great, now you need to basically be a computer scientist...
Uh, with that whole neuralink gimmick, I think what you meant to say is now you need to basically be the computer.
...in addition to your chosen field which is already complex enough.
Well don't worry. Most of those fields are gifted with the expectation that those in them are merely "practicing" their craft while ironically demanding the title and compensation of "expert".
Max Planck (Score:2)
I'm going with Max Planck on this one. This is all caused by scientists living longer.
Science IS incrementalism (Score:2)
Anyone who says otherwise is suspect.
Ebb and Flow Cyclic? (Score:2)
It could be that the low-hanging-fruit is already picked. Sometimes that happens until other breakthroughs trigger a "land rush" into new areas. To use an old example, astronomy became relatively stagnant until the telescope was invented, and then a rush of new discoveries poured in. Fo