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Comment by bilsbie | Hacker News Reader

A big part is that science has become very “sanitized”. Work on the wrong issues and you won’t get funding or will even get ridiculed out of a career.

It’s not even just going against headline consensus issues that will get you in trouble. Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

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More than that though. Modern science research is a highly hierarchal and managed enterprise. It's led, or at least its funding is controlled by, the risk averse managerial class who can only think it terms of returns on investment.

9/11 (believe it or not) had a lot to do with that in IT/computer engineering research (and likely other fields) with government funding. After the attacks, the US Federal government moved to stressing development more than blue sky research. That drew all the funding away from fundamental science to projects that could be made into a product in 3-5 years and focused on addressing some issue of the War on Terror.

Alternative theory: we've pretty much nailed the basics and it takes a PhD before people can even understand the frontier of most scientific fields. These frontiers are manifold, highly technical, and extremely boring to the layperson. Number theory is a very clear example of this: go read the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Come back in a decade after you understand the Tate–Shafarevich group. (hahahaha just kidding, if you understood that you'd have proved the conjecture)

I’ve heard this too about number theory. Perhaps in that field, the paradigm shift lies in reducing incidental complexity? Or even managing it in a way that is better for humans?

> it takes a PhD before people can even understand the frontier of most scientific fields

It’s interesting that we have this implicit view that hyper-specialization is the only way to advance. I always thought so too, but why really? If you think about it, specialization is very close to incrementalism. Groundbreaking paradigm-shift stuff can often be written down on a napkin, and rarely does it require a PhD.

That said, to find treasure you have to go down a LOT of wrong paths before you (or someone else) ends up in the right one.

There’s not a lot left that fits on a napkin. All sequences of tokens below length n have been enumerated.

This was considered in the paper: "Some point to a dearth of ‘low-hanging fruit’ as the readily available productivity-enhancing innovations have already been made19,27. Others emphasize the increasing burden of knowledge; scientists and inventors require ever more training to reach the frontiers of their fields, leaving less time to push those frontiers forward18,28. "

Would you say this is a natural consecuence of human emotions (e.g ego), economic interests, powerful players that have corrupted the game etc? I'm genuintely curious. As an ignorant on science and its processes in academia or markets, I cannot feel nothing other than dissapointment and loss of hope everytime I heard this kind of things about a matter I've always considered quite rational and focused on pursuing the truth over anything else. Naive me, I guess...

Good questions.

It’s always been a problem but I’d say these factors make it worse:

1. It’s harder for individuals or small groups to make breakthroughs. We need larger groups and more expertise as well as expensive equipment to continue making discoveries. More hands in the pie make more gatekeepers and less risk taking.

2. In general our entire society is “circling the wagons”. I’m not sure why but we’re more tribal than normal. Science isn’t immune from the trend.

I could go on. It’s a big topic.

This is a very natural consequence of the higher difficulty of maintaining one's career in academia. What is a natural consequence of the increased competition for those jobs.

The grant/funding process itself slows down science.

How to slow down scientific progress According to Leo Szilard

https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science

Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264436

Is there any evidence that this has gotten any worse over time? Planck's principle[0] is nothing new.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle?wprov=sfl...

> Any findings that overturn what a large group of scientists have spent their careers working on won’t be well received.

Hasn't that always been the case? It's said science advances one grave at a time.

I suspect that there isn't a single cause but a cluster of them.

One possible issue is that high level science needs more and more energy (like LHC) and more and more intelligence to crack (most science prizes are teams).

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