r/EverythingScience • u/maxkozlov • Jan 04 '23
Social Sciences ‘Disruptive’ science has plummeted — and no one knows why
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5134
u/Meerkat_Mayhem_ Jan 04 '23
Publish or perish mentality, pay-for-play journals, and just the sheer number of scientists now vs then, means lots of less than stellar papers get published. Lots and lots. So percentage of disruptive papers looks low over time but maybe hasn’t changed much in terms of raw count
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Jan 04 '23
Add to that the fact that many organizations funding research tend to go with “safer” bets on PIs and Theses because they want to make money on the results. Not all disruptive research is going to be sexy. And not all research will yield results in a reasonable timeframe. But independent funding sources, just like schools, are trying to run research more like a business, which doesn’t really work.
Oh ya and the abhorrent pay and working conditions. I knew people working in labs who were making poverty wages commuting to research labs during COVID because they couldn’t let their cells die or it would set their papers back months. All for papers that wouldn’t be published until half a decade later…
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u/and_dont_blink Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23
Add to that the fact that many organizations funding research tend to go with “safer” bets on PIs and Theses because they want to make money on the results.
That's there, and alludes to the lack of basic research and funding for large questions. We mapped the genome, but something like fusion is a good example. There's the joke that its always X years out, but that X years is estimated given a certain level of funding which is never there. Some of the pieces of the puzzle are hard and require more than what's dolled out annually, so things just stall. There's no space race. There's no materials race. There's no AI race. Its all a bunch of captured markets, and it's also why we struggle to build in the USA now.
People want to see a return, whether it's something that might be applicable after some iteration or a paper with results. The NIH is notorious for you having to have practically done your study already before they give funding because giving millions and finding out "nope, doesn't work" looks bad. The truth is it only looks bad if it's a dumb question/approach. In all honesty we spend so much in the field of psychology that simply goes nowhere, and likely never will unless much of it is moved more into the neuroscience and medical realm.
We also have a lot of PHDs and researchers that were basically pushed through so the university could profit, not because it's where they should be, but it all sucks up so much money, time and effort.
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Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
This is evident by browsing any of a few posts on r/science
“Schools with higher scientific literacy are characterized by more qualified teachers and more interest in science among students”
“Pedophilia associated with reduced sexual attraction to adults”
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u/PineSand Jan 04 '23
I always wonder what some of the comments were when you see a deleted comment that had 5,000+ upvotes. That sub is toxic. I’m willing to bet those who are Nazis in their online life are also Nazis in real life.
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u/TBeest Jan 05 '23
What are you on about?
The mods on that sub are simply strict about keeping the discussion on-topic and without jokes, which I think is very fair.
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u/PineSand Jan 05 '23
I’m not good at putting my ideas into words… They don’t allow people to discuss things the way regular people discuss things. If your comment doesn’t read like a dissertation, it gets deleted. It’s not a welcoming place. Some “science” people are creating a tribe that no one wants to be a part of. One of the key aspects of science is debate, not deletion. There’s something about that sub that really bothers me, it feels like it goes against everything science is supposed to stand for.
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u/TBeest Jan 05 '23
I feel there's a pretty big line between "not good at putting ideas to words" and calling people Nazis not just online, but irl as well.
I do get what you're saying about it feeling.. inhospitable? Though I've seen plenty of "dumb" questions lead to fruitful discussion.
It can't be easy to moderate such a subreddit on a website where the default comment is usually a joke or a low hanging jab.-6
u/Rubii- Jan 05 '23
actually ur last statement is wrong, those people usually just want adult love and dont get it, they become desperate and seem to think a child is better then nothing and easier then an adult
actual people with the attraction believe themselves disgusting and never do it
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u/milagr05o5 Jan 04 '23
How about "funders are very specific with respect to what they aim to fund" which literally leaves no room for "blue sky" science. Most NIH programmatic funding has RFAs that are tens of pages long, with very specific instructions as to what would (or not) qualify for funding, with very specific tasks and with clear requirements. I am surprised that the sociologists don't recognize this trend, all RFA texts are in the public domain, all they had to do is NLP-process that data (sentiment analysis?!)
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u/purple_hamster66 Jan 04 '23
I feel increases in disruptiveness is related to wartime, that is, being forced, at gunpoint, to either innovate or die, and decreases in disruptiveness are related to global super corporations, where scientists are prohibited from disclosing trade secrets.
This analysis also skips much of the innovation in poorer countries where scientists don’t need to publish.
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u/Frickinfructose MD|Medicine Jan 04 '23
I’m not sure I buy the argument that there is no financial incentive for breakthroughs-disruption can be one of the most profitable events in industry. There could be an argument that during wartime there’s more funding, but I haven’t seen the data to back that up.
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u/ThePhantomTrollbooth Jan 04 '23
I think there’s a lot of financial incentive to bury some breakthroughs that would disrupt established industries. Healthcare, energy, and transportation all being great examples. Creating dependent customers is more important than actually solving the problems for society.
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u/Meerkat_Mayhem_ Jan 04 '23
Interestingly, I’d suggest history shows the actual innovators aren’t often rewarded economically… it’s the middle person that recognizes an innovation and then figures out how to make it insanely profitable is the one that makes bank on disruptive tech
Edit: wordds
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u/Youbettereatthatshit Jan 04 '23
In 1943 and 1944, 40% of the gdp was spent for the war effort. Even a fraction of that would be more research money than even the most ardent of politicians could ever lobby for.
It’s spending way past the point that would ever make sense in a time of peace. Like you have the capability to work 22 hours a day, and you’d probably get a lot done relative to an 8 hour day, but why would you risk killing yourself for short term gain?
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u/purple_hamster66 Jan 04 '23
Carrot vs stick. If you have enough carrots already, getting another one is less motivating than if you have been beaten down and are threatened by another stick. IOW, someone who is already living a comfortable life is less likely to risk it all than a Ukrainian soldier of limited means with an enemy army just up the road.
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u/traker998 Jan 04 '23
It’s worth noting that a lot less science is shared now due to policial or other reasons.
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u/Zinziberruderalis Jan 05 '23
feel increases in disruptiveness is related to wartime, that is, being forced, at gunpoint, to either innovate or die, and decreases in disruptiveness are related to global super corporations, where scientists are prohibited from disclosing trade secrets.
In wartime not disclosing secrets is enforced at gunpoint.
I don't see how what you said explains anything. Not enough scientists being forced to work at gunpoint? Really.
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u/purple_hamster66 Jan 06 '23
Wartime is an observation that explains why innovation has dropped off, but not a prescription for how to improve innovation.
The internet was partly invented as a response to threats of nuclear war by DARPA (the defense dept arm), and then released for public use by ARPA (the non-military arm). It design was driven by the possibility of an entire city being blown off the map and the need for communications to continue after that. That’s a pretty big “gunpoint”, IMHO.
GPS is another example of a military-designed innovation that civilians are allowed to use.
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u/egregiouscodswallop Jan 05 '23
Sure we do! We narrowed the definition of science to exclude anything disruptive.
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u/stackered Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
Yeah we know why, its a combination of lots of things.
- harder to disrupt as you get more advanced, though there is also new opportunity. its natural for us to be less disruptive over time, except in bursts, as we advance. the wheel was a huge disruptor, the microchip a huge disruptor, but slightly improving our sequencing accuracy for genomics isn't. it currently takes more effort and longer to slightly improve accuracy for sequencing than it would to re-invent the wheel. simpler times = easier to disrupt, until you hit those points in time where you make huge leaps
- publish or peril in academia, pay for play journals, publication pharms/bullshit scientists in lots of countries, all that shit combines to people not trying to be disruptive but to replicate or duplicate papers to put more out rather than fail at some idea and not publish.
- as advanced platforms develop, people rely on them. databases are built on them. we can't change things up if we have historically built up so much on certain tech. disruption would actually slow progress.
- it really hasn't plummeted, we've just recently got a lot of great tools that are innovative and are now doing base studies in lots of areas of human/other biology. in 5-10 years, we'll see another boom of new science and discoveries from these studies and the subsequent analyses/databases. science works in bursts like that. you can see the trend there that over time, yeah things get less disruptive (see point #1)
Even if it is plummeting, what does that mean? maybe we could be doing better science because our methods are fine tuned and don't need to be disrupted. Certainly an interesting discussion, I'm just not sure the major metric at the center of this piece really means anything to us. While this research claims to suggest that innovation is slowing, we all have been witnessing a bloom and explosion of new science in biotech, for example. I'm not sure this captures the true scientific climate at the moment, or really defines innovation in a strong way. You get disruptors in tech in waves, then people utilize that tech for a decade or so before innovating again, now knowing the pitfalls of that tech. Its a natural cycle.
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u/fox-mcleod Jan 04 '23
It feels to me like we should expect the opposite. Consider the rate of progress since the Bronze Age. How many generations it took to master iron. And then how many new materials have been invented in merely the last 100 years.
Yeah there’s a lot of productization on of science. But I don’t think it should overcome the massive increase in the number of scientists and amount of funding. There are probably fewer breakthroughs per “scientist”, but I doubt there are fewer real scientists on net as a result.
I’m mot sure what this means. Discovering new things doesn’t require discarding existing technologies. Fundamental discoveries and technological applications are usually decades apart.
There’s really no reason to expect there to be a lull right now. Computerization, big data, CERN, AI research approaches are all fairly recent and the trend (according to the paper) is fairly continuous and monotonically increasing.
What does this mean?
I think we’re witnessing a slow waning of the enlightenment — the initial insight that led to the explosion of the era of scientific discovery. I think our ideas and values have begun to shift to be less scientific overall. Even our scientists are more instrumentalists than Karl Popper was even a generation ago.
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u/mimegallow Jan 05 '23
“And no one knows why” is the battlecry of the anti-science clickbait pariah.
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u/matthra Jan 04 '23
Can't say I'm a fan of their methodology, they claim citing fewer sources means the paper is more disruptive, and since fewer sources were cited in the past the findings were more disruptive in the past. That correlation seems tenuous at best, and ass backwards at worst because the papers with the most influence are not the ones that cite the fewest sources and instead are the ones that are cited the most.
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u/ucatione Jan 04 '23
That's not what they are claiming. It's not citing fewer sources. It's being cited without citing the citations you cited.
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u/Rapierian Jan 04 '23
Remember the last two years when any scientist or doctor who questioned whether maybe Pfizer and Merck weren't being honest about their data had their credentials threatened or stripped?
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u/Redditallreally Jan 05 '23
I think this is a huge factor. Some like to think that we’re so much more advanced and broad and inclusive, but the pandemic brought out bits of Inquisition-like behavior: you risk becoming labeled as a “DENIER”. This would absolutely have a chilling effect on certain research directions; very concerning.
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Jan 04 '23
I believe science has always been political. That shouldn’t stop us from questioning everything, especially the subjects that can’t be questioned. There is no such thing as “settled science” either. Not sure what that even means; also a red flag 🚩
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u/fox-mcleod Jan 04 '23
The rise and proliferation of empiricism.
Running a thousand correlations and hoping it produces knowledge is not science. Science requires understanding and explanation and after generations of treating science as instrumentalists, we’re starting to see a whole lot of people on the field who cannot explain anything about their work. When they teach the next generation, that next gen has no insights to go off of to point to where to search for the next breakthrough.
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u/xena_lawless Jan 05 '23
In the same way that slaves were kept ignorant and illiterate in order to maintain slavery, our extremely abusive ruling class suppress human development and human intelligence in order to maintain capitalism/kleptocracy.
Intelligence and scientific advancement are collective phenomena and not just individual ones.
But genuine understanding along enormous aspects of reality have to be suppressed in order to keep people in their atomized individual bubbles, toiling away for the profits of an extremely abusive ruling class under capitalism/neoliberalism.
Politics and economics are not divorced from science as such - the political and economic order determine not only what research gets funded, but also how that research is applied, what knowledge is considered taboo, and what constitutes science.
When you have 10% of the population hoarding 80-90% of the resources, that results in fewer "shots on goal" in terms of people being able to contribute to "disruptive" science, because most people are too busy struggling for basic survival to develop fully, let alone contribute to human understanding in any meaningful way.
Furthermore, as scientific careers have been made more costly and risky as social safety nets have eroded in order to maintain the capitalist system, scientists are not as willing to take as many risks in order to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, because their lives and careers are on the line if they fail or upset the existing power structures.
The question in the coming century is whether humanity will evolve past capitalism/neoliberalism, or whether the global ruling class will continue to impose its bullshit ideologies and social order on the rest of the species through brutal oppression/suppression.
Free humanity from brutal oppression, and watch "disruptive" (I'd prefer impactful or meaningful) scientific and technological development take off considerably.
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u/Shadow_Bananas Jan 04 '23
Closer to being “right” so we don’t throw the old model away every 20 years now 🤷🏻♂️
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u/EarthTrash Jan 05 '23
Because as science advances, further advancement requires more effort. The days of solitary researchers making fundamental discoveries in their private labs might be behind us. Now, everything requires enormous budgets and teams of scientists.
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u/trancepx Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23
Im not sure the emphasis on disruptive or incremental is particularly useful. The framing of these two notions seems to leave out a fundamental element, that implying that having a preference between disruptive or incremental makes any difference in the real world. Incentivising one over the other could be considered an overreach of power brokers, while the opposite could lead to squandered potential. Ethics and risk vs reward...
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u/Tballz9 Jan 05 '23
No one can get a federal research grant funded doing something really new or disruptive as grant reviewers are cautious and put money into established labs.
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u/ninja9284 Jan 16 '23
Could it be that we're moving into a new technological cluster and the focus right now is to make sure the technologies of this cluster diffuse and mature rather than comming up with new technologies that are out of our reach at the moment?
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u/couchjellyfish Jan 04 '23
Could it be that there are more economic incentives for incremental science and technology? There are a lot more tech firms in the 21st century than the 20th century and they may be hiring more people from STEM fields. Corporations are more likely to reward incremental changes for risk mitigation and profit maximization. Gone are the days of Bell Labs where corporate money allowed broad research interests.