Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

170 点作者 bhaprayan大约 3 年前

16 条评论

tempnow987大约 3 年前

This primarily I think applies to ACADEMIC science.The funding game in academic science is kind of miserable. Researchers eager to maintain positions for their post docs and grad students etc pay high levels of attention to which way the funding story is going -> ie, telling funders what they want to hear is the key skill. This is not always focused on new ideas. That's because it is pretty horrible not to get funded, so getting funding is a top priority?Adding to this there is a major push now on DEI and other types of policy work which are not always directly scientific idea focused. Then there are compliance costs (you need to train your researches on project costing / job codes for payroll, procurement processes with federal funds etc) and ideally get them the NIH training (see below for a reading list).<pre><code> me and white supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, Layla F. Saad The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander United States and Racism Systemic: Explicate the systemic nature of institutionalized racism, Steven Turam How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin </code></pre> <a href="https://www.training.nih.gov/2020_inclusion_anti-racism_and_wellness_resources" rel="nofollow">https://www.training.nih.gov/2020_inclusion_anti-racism_and_...</a>So you have a lot on your plate - not that this is a bad thing, but just to be aware of it.

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tmoertel大约 3 年前

Physicist and Bayesian pioneer E. T. Janes had a pithy take on this theme:In any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in possession of it.From Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, E.T. Jaynes, 2003.

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tigerlily大约 3 年前

My former academic supervisor’s former academic supervisor died in 2009. He was big name in his field.When I offered my condolences, my professor said “It’s ok. When a mighty tree falls, it can be sad, but it means the light can reach all the little saplings down below”.

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joe_the_user大约 3 年前

The thing about this article is it seems to make the implicit assumption that hostility to novelty is a bad thing. I don't think that's justified. Obviously, allow no new ideas into a field and it will die but allow too many new ideas into a field and you have a recipe for the field becoming a pseudo-science.Before you propose changes to allow more ideas in, it would be appropriate to have some measure of whether a field is too tight or too in the amount of ideas it allow now.

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beloch大约 3 年前

The notion that established field leaders, like large trees, stifle the undergrowth of new ideas, is not new. It is a partially self-correcting problem. Leaders die. However, there's no telling what some of the undergrowth that sprouted at the wrong time might have grown into were it given more light. Asking how we can do better is worthwhile.A worse problem manifests when fields come to be dominated and policed by a commonly accepted orthodox dogma.A less controversial example might be the common perception in Physics during the late 19th century that all the big things had been sorted out, and what remained was to fill in increasingly small blanks. This was a terrible sort of dogma to grip an entire discipline since it actively encouraged ambitious new minds to look elsewhere for discovery. Who knows what discoveries might have been made earlier if this kind of fatigue hadn't gripped all of Physics?Modern examples are bound to be more controversial. e.g. Anyone looking for a silver lining in climate change is going to run into outrage and difficulty getting publications or funding. However, common sense tells us that huge, complex changes to massively complex global systems are bound to be, themselves, complex and mixed. Of course there will be good aspects, and taking advantage of them may be the key to dealing with the bad. Just suggesting this is enough to make you a pariah in many circles though. What kind of valuable and beneficial work simply isn't being done because of this?

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fabian2k大约 3 年前

I don't find the measure of novelty in the article convincing. This seems more like a proxy for how inter-disciplinary the work is.It also isn't necessarily a bad thing if most research aims to be somewhat safe, though of course this should not be taken too far. "Safe" research means there is a good chance of obtaining useful results. Usually we know this because we're using e.g. a known and established method on a somewhat unknown, but focused problem.More risky research is also needed, but even then it might be possible to split it into parts that still have value on their own. There is certainly a problem here for younger scientists as they need results to advance their career. That usually means that somewhat safer, but not too safe research is in the best interest of those researchers.

ncmncm大约 3 年前

For fields especially resistant to new ideas, Egyptology takes the prize.Thus far surface luminescence has been used only once, and produced results only just barely acceptable. A chip from a facing stone of one of the Giza pyramids, and from the Valley Temple showed an age of 5000 years, +/- 500 years, where the officially assumed age is 4500 years. That was enough of that!

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karpierz大约 3 年前

This article needs Wittgenstein to edit it. The empirical claim is:"Science" "blocks" "new ideas"I add quotes because these words aren't well defined as is. The article presents the following as evidence:When a researcher dies, another takes their places and starts a different stream of research. The issue with this as evidence is that it takes a very generous definition of "blocks". If I get hired for a job instead of you, have I "blocked" you from taking the job? It's also trying to imply that the now-dead researcher was stifling innovation, but fails to show that the new line of work is more novel than the existing work that the deceased researcher was working on.The next piece of evidence is that work that cites unique pairs of journals will be more cited outside of the journal its published than within. But this stretches the definition of "new ideas". Interdisciplinary work isn't necessarily novel. Often, it will simply involve the application of known techniques from one field to the domain of another.The third is an experiment where they condition on the novelty of papers according to keywords, and measure the likelihood of getting a grant. This also stretches the definition of "new ideas" into a new dimension, where unfocused work is considered more novel. They also claim that it's concerning that having cited the authors work previously increases the likelihood of the author getting a grant; as though knowing that someone produces quality work shouldn't improve the odds of funding for more work.In summary, the issue with writing like this is it never bothers to actually define the thing its measuring ("novelty"), and instead borrows multiple other definitions ("novelty is interdisciplinary", "novelty doesn't cite popular works in the field", "novelty means having more keywords"). In doing so, it says nothing about novelty itself (instead talking about "novelty") and so doesn't provide any insight as to whether there is sufficient novelty within academic science.Edit: A more concise way to make this point - <a href="https://xkcd.com/2610/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2610/</a>

DoreenMichele大约 3 年前

I will suggest genuinely new ideas are inherently hard to effectively express. It's like you want to speak Russian but everyone else speaks something else and Russian is a language you must invent on the fly while everyone assumes you are saying something else in some other language and that something else sounds like gibberish.

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8bitsrule大约 3 年前

So long as significant new evidence is allowed into the light, evidence that must eventually be accounted for, all's well. But to the extent that there are those who'd prefer to hide it, or disallow, hand-wave away, or use ad hominem attacks against those who present that evidence, there's a problem.

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photochemsyn大约 3 年前

On this, I think you'd want to look more broadly at whether the superstar's university had people on the grant committee at the respective funding institution:> "Well, we can say it’s not simply a case of these dominant researchers vetoing grant proposals and publication from rival researchers. Only a tiny fraction of them were in positions of formal academic power, such as sitting on NIH grant review committees or serving as journal editors, when they passed away. So what else could it be?"That's not really how those clubs work; they get their old friends and pals to do the dirty work.

narrator大约 3 年前

Perhaps the FSF could work on some sort of open patent license that says if you use this patent in an invention you are not allowed to use it with any other unexpired patent unless it is also under the same license. That way, a culture of open source could be created in the non-software world that would move innovation into the private sector and out of academia by letting private companies more easily share their engineering with each other.

ketanmaheshwari大约 3 年前

[PLUG] We are addressing some of this by providing a platform to discuss and publish negative results as part of the ERROR Workshop: <a href="https://error-workshop.org/" rel="nofollow">https://error-workshop.org/</a>

YeGoblynQueenne大约 3 年前

>> To measure the novelty of a paper, they rely on the notion that novelty is about combining pre-existing ideas in new and unexpected ways. They use the references cited as a proxy for the sources of ideas that a paper grapples with, and look for papers that cite pairs of journals that have not previously been jointly cited. The 11.5% of papers with at least one pair of journals never previously cited together in the same paper are called “moderately” novel in their paper."If I assign numbers to each of these things then it becomes data and I can do maths on it!"<a href="https://xkcd.com/2610" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2610</a>Also see: ad-hoc assumptions that become axioms of a theory without any attempt to justify them ("novelty is about combining pre-existing ideas in new and unexpected ways"... the Lego Brick Theory of Novelty, I presume).