Across all branches of science, new ideas that reset the paradigms have quietly vanished
The spark never started in the star-ideas that should have shone, and we find ourselves suddenly under a dark sky, looking up at a galaxy of burnt gravy, thinking something is missing. As dominant paradigms became entrenched in every field of science, the great new replacement ideas starved.
Nature might as well have labeled this “A graph of Original Thought at University”
It’s like some sole giant entity infected every area of science and crushed original thinkers.
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
Disruptive science sounds like something impossible to measure, but the researchers found way to test for the arrival of new papers that replace past paradigms. Genius discoveries may still have happened, but no one picked them up.
The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead would cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the CD index, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.
And it’s a wipe-out: The CD Index fell by 90% since World War II. A similar fall occurred in patents, with an 80% decline from 1980 to 2010. The language in the papers also The verbs scientists used changed too — with older papers saying they would produce or determine things, while newer papers just improve and enhance…
It’s happening in every field of science at the same time — almost like a systematic failure
Daniel Lawler and Juliette Collen explain that this is not a case of scientists discovering everything there is to know in one area:
One theory for the decline is that all the “low-hanging fruit” of science has already been plucked. If that were the case, disruptiveness in various scientific fields would have fallen at different speeds, Park said. But instead “the declines are pretty consistent in their speeds and timing across all major fields,” Park said, indicating that the low-hanging fruit theory is not likely to be the culprit.
It’s as if there is something wrong with the incentives across the board?
Looks like the rise of Government funded GroupThink?
Since World War II governments took over the role of funding science from philanthropists. Once upon a time one guy funded another one and great things happened. Now Government funded committees that are spending other people’s money, reject the risky genius and fund the middle-of-the-road instead. New ideas don’t stand a chance against monopoly science.
…when you increasingly have big government money involved in research, following World War II, it becomes more and more difficult to buck the popular trends. Tie that to the growing blacklist culture that now destroys the career of any scientist who dares to say something even slightly different, and no one should be surprised originality is declining in scientific research. The culture will no longer tolerate it. You will tow the line, or you will be gone. Scientists are thus towing the line.
Naturally, Nature, a product made for government funded science, doesn’t know why socialist science is failing:
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
Nature
The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
The average CD index declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010 for research manuscripts (see ‘Disruptive science dwindles’), and by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents. Disruptiveness declined in all of the analysed research fields and patent types, even when factoring in potential differences in factors such as citation practices.
Why the slide?
It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, Walsh says. The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.
So we use group-science, funded by committees, and approved by anonymous pals and get the Science Superhighway to nowhere.
The more the government funds science, the worse it will get.
UPDATE _______________________________
My response to a commenter who effectively said the geniuses are being diluted by the midwits:
It’s far worse than just dilution. Academia is actively driving out the mavericks, the geniuses, and awarding prizes and promotions to the midwits.
The number-guys who dream in fractals and sine curves aren’t the best networkers, or possibly the most appreciated lecturers either. The aspergic personalities are hampered with a compulsion to speak the truth, and when its politically correct it is the perfect excuse for the networking-talker under them to report them for offending some minority group and get them sacked. The end result is a promotion for the politically correct liar.
There is no place any more for the true genius at university.
Those who rock the boat and criticize or expose past paradigms are trouble-makers. Peer review and committee approval makes it easy to neutralize their careers. Anon reviewers can nix a paper that makes the reviewers expertise look stupid, or threatens their own gravy train.
Brilliant people now either gravitate to politically neutral irrelevant topics or they leave university, work for Wall St, or they live off donations.
This paper about disruptions has come up with a clever new way to show how crippled science is. By definition, even if the genius discoveries are somehow made, they are not being cited in papers or patents. Doesn’t that show a very real problem?
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears…
When I started as an independent researcher, NSERC (Natural Science and Engineering Council in Canada) would fund smallish grants to individuals based on productivity for 5 year periods. This guaranteed a base level of funding that permitted one to change direction in midstream on the basis of results.
Long before I finished, the funding model shifted to larger grants to “teams”, preferably teams from different institutions. This was done at the behest of the government, despite scientists pointing out the overall productivity of the old model.
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Great work, as usual Jo.
Equally apt response Fran.
The elephant in the room here is perhaps this! …
The decline has been steady since the ’50’s!!
The more I see of the farce of a “mind-set” (many would say this is a huge compliment) of the so-called “progressives”, the more I think the problem is they’ve had distorted views due to a lack of any real problems.
I.E. The further we get from W.W.I, W.W.II, and the Great Depression, the more people seem to feel the need to invent fictional problems.
I hope something changes in the next few years, I’m starting to lose hope that it will!
Warm regards, reformed warmist of Logan.
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Lindzen talked about the change which occurred post WW2 when gate keepers became involved during his interview with Jordan Peterson. See around the 25 minute to 29 minute mark, and the 1:25 to 1:32 minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVSrTZDopM
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The answer is in the last sentence, more papers are published, more authors on each paper – necessary as academic postings use publication history as the key KPI, along with student satisfaction surveys.
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1) I’m not sure about “student satisfaction surveys”. Firstly, there is no room for independent-thinking students (e.g. conservatives) in modern “universities” so they tend to leave. Secondly, how would the remaining students be satisfied? Probably by an even more dumbed-down syllabus with little work.
2) The very corruption of science by the Left as I commented below.
False beliefs that there is:
“Settled science”.
“Scientific fact is decided by consensus”.
“Dissenting opinions must be suppressed”.
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Isn’t this the inevitable outcome of the Left’s post-modern… post-normal ..truth is malleable…. decades of corruption of education…nothing absolute LW indoctrination instead of education-that inevitably also resulted in students avoiding maths and science en masse?
And what real scientist could have the heart for it when they see people in their profession rewarded enormously for the ‘research’ that produced the ‘97% of scientists agree’ meme…scientists with a penchant for dressing up in Nazi gear and for misrepresenting themselves to universities under the names of world-famous scientists…. who prosper enormously from bringing science and scientists into disrepute?
The ‘science’ of CAGW that has the world in a death spiral..that’s run by airhead activists who control every sector and institution including all of those holding our money…that was designed for and is now in the process of destroying Capitalism and dismantling democracy to install the ‘U’ll own nothing’ regime that describes a Communist future of th AnimalFarm variety….. is so corruption-ridden and friendly to charlatans and perilous for the honest scientist that it’s a miracle there is any real science done in these ridiculous times.
And those foreign despots and dictators that the Left has forced Australia to obey don’t want any pesky scientific breakthroughs and advances anyway…they want us all in our boxes..devoid of dangerous individual aspiration…constrained and under their control…by the energy poverty that was always essential for their holy grail.
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Imagine how Einstein, the Curies, Florey, Newton et al would have fared if subjected to the current regimes!
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I think, therefore I am….irrelevant!!
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This is surely a contributing factor, although not a complete explanation of those graphs.
There is pressure on career scientists, even before completing their Doctorate, to publish as much as possible. It’s a race against time if prospective employers and funders look primarily at publication history vs age. This leads to reworking of the same material to get additional publications, and padding with unnecesary references. The internet and software such as EndNote make it much easier to generate that padding than it was 50 years ago.
Fran also makes a good point about “the funding model shifted to larger grants to “teams”, preferably teams from different institutions.” We see this in papers with long lists of authors; a principal author may find it advantageous to name as co-authors people who made tiny contributions that would have been more appropriately included in the acknowledgements. And these days it’s essential to include “partnering’ in a grant application even if this is merely name-dropping of institutions who are giving in-principle support.
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Think of it this way. Einstein published his papers into a pool of around 1,000 papers (english per year, now we are 1.8 million papers per year. (smithsonian). how are you going to find that one paper like Einstein’s, in 1.8 million. Citations, which was a great way to find the good papers (hence the publication of citation index’s), have dropped on a per paper basis, particularly when you filter self citations (common when you publish multiple papers on the same topic). IN the bad old days, you got tenure, after one or two papers, and you could devote your time to research, without the need to be continually publishing anything to hold your spot. These were the days when universities (and firmly attached to the government teat) were primarily about research, not teaching as they are now. Blame Neoliberalism, which demands that short term goals (number os graduates per dollar per year) take precedence over number of Einsteins per decade.
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“more authors on each paper” etc….
Which, of course, forces group-think, even if any of the individual authors were actually capable of original thought.
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Funny how Jo , at the very end , jumps to conclusions, particularly the evil ‘pal review’, part of the scientific method she can’t/ won’t engage with.
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“Trump”, funny how you didn’t read any of 27 posts on peer review
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In regard to student “satisfaction surveys”:
There are a small number of brilliant lecturers who get high marks for lectures that really are entertaining (and sometimes really educationally challenging.
However, most of the variance in student ratings is down to grades received.
On top of this, for the past 20-odd years, student ratings contributed heavily to performance evaluation for salary. This means that dumbing down pays in terms of annual increases in pay.
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Not politically correct but what about a general fall in IQ and in recent years fallng educational standards.
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Yes. Both IQs are dropping and male testosterone levels.
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Soon there shall be almost zero clever dicks?
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Adellad you write “Soon there shall be almost zero clever dicks?”
Presumably that is due the fall in testosterone rather than the fall in IQ
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Not so much IQs generally, but academic standards required for entrance & to pass courses. I’ve witnessed this personally.
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From years of teaching, my experience is that 115 IQ (1 SD above the mean) is barely into the university range, and when 40% goes to university, a lot of the students are below this.
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I’m not sure I agree. The definition of disruptive isn’t easy to pin down: every year hundreds of ‘disruptive’ papers in physics are published saying that Einstein was wrong, and they are all nonsense. (I am a research physicist and I know what questions to ask that their authors can’t answer.) Conversely, we are in the middle of a white-hot revolution in molecular biology that is clearly in rude health. Perhaps the truth is simply that we know so much today that it’s a lot harder to disrupt science than it used to be.
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Check out the ARC reviewers handbook – a huge swag of “points” are to be gained through “money received for previous ARC funded research”. This is the major part of assessing the likelihood of the research team to make a contribution.
In fact, the actual project proposed has surprisingly little impact on your likelihood of being successful. Even where the project is considered, the major focus is on “likelihood of success” rather than the value of success (or indeed, failure). So really no surprise that radical thinkers, explorers and so on are frozen out.
Against that, literature exploration tools are fare more simple to use and sophisticated in use today – literature reviews can be arbitrarily deep with little extra effort…and reviewers reward “scholarship” so foundational literature (even if only used to show how well read you are) tends to get more use than it necessarily deserves.
Finally, self-referencing is generally frowned upon – and this makes a body of work identifying a radical idea and then exploring its implications somewhat awkward to publish as time goes on…
In essence the message is, stick with the mainstream if you want a career.
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Yes Angus, I agree with that. The problem is partly professionalisation of research within universities. But you can’t do experiments like CERN which found the Higgs particle, or above-the-atmosphere space telescopes, on the cheap. As I said, the low-hanging fruit has been plucked.
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That’s partially true, but not all research requires $billion equipment.
As a case in point, reflect that the IT revolutions (eg Apple/Microsoft) and later Google/Facebook/Twitter each wave of which really did radically change the world we’re self-funded out of garages.
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According to the official narrative, that is.
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Anton, as someone who studied molecular biology and gave conference speeches on the medical revolution coming in 1999, things look so much slower than they should be.
Remember, most of the speed in molecular biology research is coming from private players. On the human genome project (1990 – 2003) the government sector said it would take 15 years and cost $3 billion and Craig Ventner from Celera ended up doing a lot of it in a few years for a tenth of the budget.
Opportunity cost is nearly invisible. How many lives could have been saved if molecular biology research was run better?
The public sector could be trying to understand and undo aging itself, which would slow nearly every major chronic disease (because they are almost all associated with aging). Instead the pharmaceutical industry controls research and there is little incentive for them to get at the root cause. Treatments for symptoms are so much more profitable. Treatments for causes only reduce the customer base.
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Big Pharma is very keen to get into genetically tailored medicines designed for each individual patient, which both makes money and helps people – the combination that is characteristic of capitalism working as it should. I regard Big Pharma as a mixed blessing: without Big Pharma we wouldn’t have had ivermectin, a wonder drug that is now out of patent and cheap, even if Big Pharma uses its influence to make governments look the other way. We need politicians who are more courageous.
Read the chapter on John Sulston in Francis Spufford’s book Backroom Boys to see that the Human Genome Project (HGP) actually beat Craig Venter. I’ll admit that Venter galvanised the HGP into working faster and often publishing only a few hours ahead of him. Their motivation was disgust that a commercial concern was going to patent the human genome, which Sulston believed should be free knowledge available to all humans.
Plenty of research into ageing goes on but it is a difficult problem. See the chapter on it in Prof Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution and, for a thrilling report from almost beyond the research frontier, his new book Transformer, about the role of the Krebs cycle which he argues is how life moved from self-replicating chemicals to living cells, in specific environments found in the early earth. He suggests that the reverse Krebs cycle came first, and it changed direction once enough oxygen was in the earth’s atmosphere. The reverse Krebs cycle is what produces precursors to DNA, and the forward Krebs cycle is what gives cells energy by metabolising sugars and therby turbocharges life. We therefore need both cycles, and our bodies maintain different localised chemical environments within ourselves to achieve this. But the maintenance of these environments degrades with ageing and you can get logjams in the cycle, which is why energy diminishes with age and arguably why cancer is more common in the elderly – due to the buildup of certain chemicals produced from the cycle hanging around too long in too high concentrations before use. Brilliant stuff.
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Jo, have you been following the E5 research? Your equivalent on this is Josh Mittledorf (https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/) The pro aging/anti aging model (like insulin/glucagon) has been independently verified. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.01.518747v1
Rats only (I guess lawyers are next), so far. A human skin trial has been started a few weeks ago, in India.
Hasn’t really increased the lifespan much, 10% or so, in the first rat trial, but dramatically increased the “healthspan” of the rats (rejuvenated them).
Science is still going on, but privately and funded privately. Just like it was before 1900. There is still lots of low hanging fruit, you just have to look for it.
Red
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It’s true that a new idea is had initially by a single individual, one who is both smart and well-trained, not by a committee. But often science is at the point where the same idea would be had within a short time by multiple persons. Einstein’s special theory of relativity would have been conceived within a very short time after 1905 if he hadn’t got there first. Essentially all of the equations involved had already been written down by others and he put them together and said that one should *start* from the observational fact that lightspeed is frame-independent. It is his general theory of relativity (of gravity), finalised a decade later, that was decades ahead of the game and a staggering achievement.
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Anton,
If you try to discuss anything but approved group think , even when the data indicates otherwise can and often does get you cancelled (Peter Ridd springs to mind). When you refer to “Molecular Biology” would we be discussing the Vaccine ? White hot revolutionary indeed . We make progress in science by discovering things that disrupt our theoretical system not by refining what we already know .
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No, Old Goat, I am not thinking of the vaccine. The vaccine is an example of moneyed interests getting in the way of truth. Please see my replies to other respondents.
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Anton, ……this probably sounds harsh, but when you say “Perhaps the truth is simply that we know so much today that it’s a lot harder to disrupt science than it used to be.”, I think that maybe you aren’t trying hard enough.
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Do you, Gerry? You know nothing about my and my research career. For several decades I have held to a minority view within probability theory, and I believe in hidden variables underlying quantum mechanics. I have had plenty of papers knocked back for these reasons. Yet I stand by what I say: perhaps we now know so much that it is harder to disrupt, while molecular biology is in the middle of a revolution in knowledge.
What is your firsthand knowledge of the situation at the forefront of scientific research?
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Anton, I don’t claim to be a research physicist. My firsthand knowledge of the situation at the forefront of scientific research is meagre.
What I know is I need to be able to reflect on what I do and see if I can do better. And I’m learning more and more every day that believing isn’t good enough.
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Anton,
I agree that that “disruptive” is a slippery thing. I’m pretty confident that it can’t be tied down to some pattern of citations.
Not so keen on your last statement that we already know so much. There’s still plenty to be discovered. A straightforward explanation is:
1. brilliant people *always* tended to gravitate to their field;
2. more people than ever are engaged in every field;
3. therefore, brilliant people are a smaller minority in each field than they used to be.
No surprise that the average paper in each field should be nothing special. IMO that would include this paper about disruptive papers.
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Robert,
No — it’s far worse than just dilution. Academia is driving out the mavericks, the geniuses, and awarding prizes and promotions to the midwits.
The number-guys who dream in fractals and sine curves aren’t the best networkers, or possibly the most appreciated lecturers either. The aspergic personalities are hampered with a compulsion to speak the truth, and when it’s politically correct that is the perfect excuse for the networking talker to report them for offending some minority group and get them sacked. The end result is a promotion for the politically correct liar.
There is no place any more for the true genius at university.
Those who rock the boat and criticize or expose past paradigms are trouble-makers. Peer review and committee approval makes it easy to neutralize their careers. Anon reviewers can nix a paper that makes the reviewers expertise look stupid, or threatens their own gravy train.
Brilliant people now either gravitate to politically neutral irrelevant topics or they leave university, work for Wall St, or they live off donations.
This paper about disruptions comes up with a clever new way to show how crippled science is. By definition, even if the genius discoveries are somehow made, they are not being cited in papers or patents. Doesn’t that show a very real problem?
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears?
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I’ve often read that the purpose of ‘peer review’ isn’t a quality check before publication, but a gate to prevent publication of anything that looks like ‘wrong think’. I think that this explains a large part of the rapid deterioration in academic thought that’s been observed.
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I think Peter Ridd was one of those who called out some PC liars and it was the liars who were bringing in the big grants so it was Peter who was shown the door. Truth is no longer a requisite for good science apparently.
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In maths and theoretical physics they can’t silence dissenting views because although we can’t publish in mainstream journals due to bland thick referees we can still upload our stuff to the internet repository known as arXiv. I’ve always seen arXiv as the first step in getting out from under the big publishing houses who screw the academic profession, rather than a way to beat peer review.
And as Einstein said, if you have had an idea and you are sure you are right, you want a job as a lighthouse keeper, not a lectureship.
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I’m not surprised. Having worked in higher education (tech support) in the UK I watched, around 20 years ago, as grant bodies quite deliberately decided they would no longer fund independent research that did not directly seek to build on established thinking and theories. No grants = no published papers = no promotion for the academics = a closing down of research into new areas. It’s quite depressing.
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WOKE Science.
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Confounding factors: population of scientists growth and number of papers per researcher growth, the publish or perish effect. If there is a constant production of ‘disruptive’ ideas per researcher of a nominal brilliance then the increasing publication rate per researcher and a decreasing quality of the researchers will produce a decay like observed, while the total number of paradigm shifts per generation may remain the same. The impending end of science may just be a sampling artefact, an illusion.
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Or to be blunt, increasing money available increases the number of scientists employed. But the supply of ‘disruptive’ researchers is limited and indeed discouraged so the overall standard drops.
Mediocracy to the right of them,
Mediocracy to the left of them,
Into the valley of conformity…
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Science is increasingly funded to conduct ‘confirmation,’ studies designed to produce a predetermined outcome. I.e. ‘Go find the ‘evidence,’ that x is true.’ Where ‘evidence,’ is anything that complies with the predetermined outcome and any refutational material is ignored, discarded, ‘cancelled,’ and otherwise hushed up.
Disruptive science proceeds by demonstrating that a previously accepted hypothesis is false, a process of refutation where ‘Measurable and Reproducible evidence demonstrates that y is false, (especially when compared with the measurable predictions of a new and novel hypothesis).
As a culture, we are well down the path of losing the art of refutation.
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Funding is controlled by people who do not want disruption. Perhaps the best example is the creation of Monty Python where it was approved for 13 episodes without a clear idea of what it was. And it was very disruptive. A new Monty Python would not be approved today. Stan wanting to be a woman.
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And with the explosive growth of ‘administration’ in universities and government including councils, there are endless unqualified people deciding on what is funded.
I have heard that in some universities the total administrative numbers now exceeds the total of students and academic staff. A sort of administrative metastasis.
In the 20th century, universities used to be run largely by academic staff with assistance. And councils used to be run by councillors and people who worked for them. They are now run by unelected managers. And the vast proportion of staff do nothing except stop everything and spend the cash on their own pet projects, Land rights for Gay Whales. Or declaring suburbs nuclear weapons free.
So when physicist Professor Peter Ridd dared suggest that there was obviously fake research at James Cook University, he was fired for telling the truth, nothing less. It was ‘uncollegiate’. Peter believed being fired and punished for telling the truth was likely illegal, so he went to courts for justice and the public in Australia donated a million dollars to assist his cause. He lost.
The law does not work when your persecutors have infinite cash and are determined that research keeps the hundreds of millions keeps flowing to ‘save’ the Great Barrier Reef. So while Dr Ridd told the truth, the court agreed it was improper to do so in the terms of his employment contract. And he lost his superannuation too.
No one is allowed to rock the boat. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. It’s a Green political fact. Ask UNESCO. Send billions and we will prove it is caused by Climate Change and Carbon Dioxide. As is Ocean Acidification. And pollutants from thoughtless farmers a thousand kilometers away. Farmers are also evil. Telling people there is nothing wrong would wreck the place.
Science research is no longer about seeking the truth. Truth is decided by administrators. And they are funded by politicians. And politicians get votes from Greens. And Greens detest democracy and facts. In their post modernist world, facts are the enemy.
The new species which modern universities protect are the exploding numbers of rent seeking ecologists and climate scientists, huge new industry displacing traditional fact based scientists. Who needs science when you have government funded druids? And the CSIRO, BOM, ABC, NOAA, NASA, The Royal Society and more.
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All summed up in the last line by Cleese “our struggle against reality”
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In science, inductive reasoning is used to draw general conclusions from evidence
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So it looks like President Eisenhower was correct when he warned us about govt funded science and the possible problems for the future.
But their so called Climate Science has to be the greatest fraud and con trick ever.
The data/evidence proves they are wrong and their disastrous Mickey Mouse solutions like unreliable, TOXIC S & W are a trillion(s) $ sick joke forever.
There are many Scientist who have been warning us for 30 years about their con tricks, yet we don’t seem to wake up? Why is that the case?
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Sorry for OT, but seems interesting enough to post:
LKAB hails Per Geijer near Kiruna as the largest known rare earths deposit in Europe
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The “not-so-rare” Earths were discovered in Sweden.
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Taxpayer-funded science is part of the problem, as alluded to by President Eisenhower in his farewell speech , 17th January, 1961.
Even though he is mainly talking and warning about the military industrial complex, and the US Government, the general idea is universal.
Today, the main way to get a research grant is to mention “climate change” or “covid” as long as the research proposal follows the official narrative to the letter, no departure from the narrative permitted.
Similarly, in the social(ist) “sciences” (sic) it has to be some invented Marxist nonsense like “gender studies”, “critical race theory” or “intersectionality” or some similar absurdity devoid of intellectualism and scholarly rigour.
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It isn’t just science that is distorted by government (taxpayer) funding. So many grants are up for grabs by our local Council every year – they are expert at applying for them and quite often are successful. But they don’t waste time in the first place considering if they SHOULD do the thing they have asked to be funded – just that they might be able to get that money. Then they build useless towers or water-wasting ski parks in the outback or vastly over designed and over priced visitor centres, or whatever.
Same for schools, museums, hospitals – the system is broken, and is getting worse every year.
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I’m surprised you cant see what’s going on. Its quite clear from the graph that we know everything now, the science is settled and there is no need to research anything. I thought we may have gone further but there you have it.
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Put another way- we’re going to learn more and more about less and less. Until we know everything about nothing.
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That’s the old difference between a specialist and a generalist.
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“..Until we know everything about nothing.”
Which must be where everything came from. Either that, or everything always was, and so everything has no cause.
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The corruption of science by the Left is what’s behind the anthropogenic global warming fraud and the covid vaccine disaster and the general trend to do “safe” science and research in other areas.
Plus, “research” (sic) outputs from “universties” tends to conform with the ideology wanted by government.
The following dogmatic conformity is required to get government research grants but apart from that, this is what seems to be actually taught in the universties, which were once places of learning, not indoctrination, back in the day.
1) Scientific fact is decided by “consensus”. FALSE
2) There is such a thing as “settled science”. FALSE
3) Dissenting opinions must be repressed. FALSE
Anyone who knows a student who has a dissenting i.e. conservative, opinion in university these days will know of the trauma of such a student and that they won’t get far. In fact, most end up leaving because of severe discrimination against independent thinkers.
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It’s all false. Just too silly.
Most science is settled. e.g. water runs downhill.
If you want a more detailed analysis go right ahead. But water still runs downhill.
The problem is that so many of these statements are lies. e.g. Barack Obama’s declaration that “the science is settled.” It’s not just false. It’s a lie.
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Don’t forget that Lomborg quoted UN data that found that unmitigated Climate change would cost everyone about 0.1 of personal wealth in 50 years.
Or from about 3.6 times to just 3.5 times and yet he wasn’t allowed to talk about this at Duke uni at that time. IOW just a rounding error.
So why are we wasting TRILLIONs of $ on this FRAUD and corruption?
Here’s Jo’s article from March 2021.
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/03/lomborg-50-years-of-unmitigated-climate-change-might-leave-us-only-356-richer-instead-of-363/
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That’s how business works. And it is in business that most scientists work.
Which means that most of their work goes to maintaining confirmation of the status quo.
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Even though The Guardian is Leftist, this is an opinion piece and not too bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/09/science-funding-creativ-philip-ball
The critical scientist
Science funding tends to favour mediocrity over grand ideas
Philip Ball
It’s a good job Einstein didn’t need a grant
Fri 9 Dec 2011 15.59 EST
SEE LINK FOR REST
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The great thing about theoretical physics is that you do not need money, except to live. Experimental physics, accelerators, laboratories, equipment take an enormous amount of money. And unqualified public servants decide whether the money is justified. So nothing happens. They need the money for their own wages.
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1) In the US today -everything is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Professors are hired to the extent they totally buy into this garbage. So ideology trmps science.
2) Gen Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 in the US are tied to their smart phones like umbilical cords. They have no pride in the United States as only 13% are proud to be Americans vs. 76% for Baby Boomers. Gen Z females are the most suicidal and nutty cohort on America.
3) Meanwhile public schools insist on grooming all young people into changing their sex while not reporting anything of this to the parents should the child actually start to change sexes. The teachers have a large portion of Pedo’s among them and the teachers unions have no problem with this arrangement.
Prediction – You think there are few breakthroughs now in science? Just wait.
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Wwll said John Galt III.
Much the same applies in Australia and other Western countries as well.
And in Australia, our Leftist anti-Australian globalist government wants to make things even worse by proposing to reduce the voting age from 18 to 16.
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How can they be groundbreaking when don’t use shovels but rakes instead where it is part of the drive to publish regardless of whether it drives new direction in research that would open up fields to explore.
Warmist/alarmists publish drivel a lot now such as the one about short people better for the environment or latest stupid attack on Exxon and more.
They are in it for the grant money more while real scientists who shockingly are often Climate realists tends to post good papers such as this one recently:
A Glaring Inconsistency In The Claimed Forcing Values Driving Past Versus Present Climate
LINK
Based on the Diamond et al 2021 paper.
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We no wlive in a world where we want to ban gas stoves……lets be honest the human race is too stupid to come up with new ideas
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Maybe they can flog all that saved gas to the EU for a profit. Hint. 😎
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Just my point about Lomborg’s UN data about the average person being 3.6 times richer or 3.5 times richer by 2070s at 10.
If the average Australian wage today was about 90,000 $ a year we should understand that by 2070s we would be making 3.6 times that or about 324,000 $ a year in today’s $.
Or because of our UNMITIGATED Climate change that ( 3.6 to 3.5) would be reduced to about 315,000 $ a year.
All I can say about their future UN guesstimate by 2070 is SHOCK, HORROR- sarc.
30
Not to be obtuse, but won’t the graph of that particular question always result in that same run-off ending no matter whether you chart it in 1850 or the present or 2525 ( . . . if man is still alive . . )?
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The turning point for science was when funding discovery was almost entirely replaced by funding validation of existing. Research funding is spread to thin and even big CRC projects mostly fall flat trying to do too much to keep too many mouths fed.
So it becomes self-fulfilling because less risky projects are easier to justify to the ARC.
Also,
It’s spread thin to feed the academic flame of university staff who are +90% teaching.
CSIRO and other non-uni institutions still largely rely on the uni,s to do a lot of the work.
Most industries have given up hope thinking something useful will come so just give a token of funding.
The astronomers and medical/pharma have a different model and are much better at the discovery point. These should be separated out in this analysis for a clearer picture.
There is the odd retired professor here or there that now untied to the system is perusing some weakly funded breakthrough work but mostly small bickies.
Solution is for industry associations to get their act together and for a strategy to influence the ARC through their bureaucratic and political masters.
Not talking about just think tanks.
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Why is it a mystery?
The Science is settled, so everyone can go to the pub.
Maybe we’ve found all we can for now, except for those science-shaking discoveries that pop up regularly. 😎
50
You will
towthe line, or you will be gone. Scientists are thus towing the line.That would be toe the line.
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Thank you Lee, they always get it wrong for some strange reason.
00
The worry for me was that this finding was actually reported in mainstream media and got some traction. I think a lot people would read a report on this finding and conclude that the “science is settled”. Which means they would be more likely to believe the climate change pseudoscience now being pushed by MSM, governments and many other institutions.
50
There are plenty of people doing research at Cochlear and CSL. Not too sure about the CSIRO. They seem to be Taxpayer Funded Greenies…………….
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Once you get leftist bureaucrats in charge, eg CSIRO, BoM… you are bound to head downwards fast… on a very slippery never-ending slope. !
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Following from Anton’s comments at #4 – I also wonder if the analysis is missing the real picture. That time period has seen a lot of change in the culture of science and publishing practices, some good and some a bit meh. First there is a lot more publishing so that disruptive research is published in increments.
I’ve got a lot of examples that might cause the CD number to shift over time without it meaning a change in disruption. An example, there are a lot more citations/paper. This could have the effect of continual citing of the disrupted early papers which scales down “CD” for the same level of disruption.
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While it is wet, gray, and cold here in central Washington State I have been reading some “history of science”, especially physics and chemistry.
The discoveries of the late 1800s to about 1930 came fast and were amazingly disruptive. People traveled by ships and trains.
Modern technology builds on those findings – things such as smart phones, LEDs, the intra-aortic balloon Helium pump, and many more. Helium was isolated in 1895.
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Hence the use of the definite article. When it’s “the” science, it’s only the government/mainstream version.
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Seems to track with science morphing into a religion.
Religions demand orthodoxy.
‘Science’ started out as a verb and has become a noun.
Hence the preceding ‘the’.
The is not friendly to questions.
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I’m glad that Jo brought this study up for discussion.
Firstly, I agree that government funding of science is a major problem. Just like major movie studios running back to remakes of old stories or pumping dollars into “sequels”, the quest for safety in investment leads to mediocrity and political bias.
But the problem is bigger than that.
That the funding of scientific advancement is now primarily government controlled, leads inevitably to research conducted within the framework of government funded academic institutions being subject to “Epistemological viciousness” (H/T Gonzalo Lira.)
“Low Hanging Fruit” issue? It’s real. (Just not to old gay furries with a tighty whitey fetish who avoided it.) It’s the old 80/20 rule. 80% technological improvement costs you 20%. The further 20% costs you 80%..
But the problem, the big problem, is human nature.
,
Humans have highly adaptive brains. Infrequently, we use them.
Several years ago I wrote an online essay “Tools of the Hand, Tools of the Mind”. In this I expressed that our latest “Tool of the Mind”, the discipline of the scientific method, was fragile and under constant threat.
Why?
The human primate hates the scientific method. Sure, they love the results, but it utterly undermines traditional tribal hierarchies including “Great man” worship and pedestalisation.
This is the scientific issue we really need to address.: human nature. Our innate instincts embedded in our ancient DNA. And why these act against the scientific method.
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As a true science advocate, I think we should be asking Nature about the pre-WW2 side of their CD index graph.
Never take Nature data or graphs as proper science – their “data” are always being used to promote some loonie agenda.
In this case, they are simply attempting to collectively extort more g’ment funding … tell me I’m wrong.
It sort of reminds me how BOM don’t want to use temperature data before 1910.
I’d like to go back to, at least, early 1700s when John Harrison was trying to get Longitude rewards for his marine clocks.
How many other disruptive thinkers across that time frame have been subject to political/religious “belief” interference?
“The Longitude Act offered a series of rewards, rather than a single prize. The rewards increased with the accuracy achieved…”
Now that’s a test I’d like to apply to a few climate change programs.
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Nature magazine has indeed lost its way.
SEE LINK FOR REST
30
Gravity does not depend upon mass, despite Newton and Einstein.
Galileo proved it hundreds of years ago. Two similar balls dropped over and over again, landed at the same time from the Tower in Pisa. One weighed much more than the other!
Can’t guess the weight of stars planets etc …..
As the force varies as the square of the distance, it is an area effect: each object blocks the aether, a repulsive force, aka universe pressure.
Lyellism created false science.
Too much control was being lost by TPTB and investments ruined by progress. People were being freed from labour and becoming nuisances to those who ruled.
32
Relative to the earth, they were identical. Is there less gravity on the moon?
00
Well, as Asimov wrote in his Foundation series, as the galaxy became darker and the human race fell from the greatness of its forebears-
“Why not go to Arcturus and study the remains for yourself?”
Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly.
“Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow? It seem an uncommonly wound-about and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anyweahs. Look heah now, I’ve got the works of all the old mastahs- the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah decide which is pwobably cowwect- and come to a conclusion.
That is the scientific method. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus and blunder about when the old mastahs have covahed the gwounds so much moah effectively than we could possibly hope to do..”
30
Prime directive in applying for academic funding,,,,, Do Not “Rocka Da Boat”.
40
Nah.
The real reason is that “Stupidity is Contagious”.
Look around.
The truly stupid ideas start first in Urban Areas.
And spread like unstoppable vermin.
Of course there are no disruptive advances in “the Science”,Universities and government Bureaus (often one and the same) are toxic concentrations of the Stupidity Plague.
Stupidity (I suggest you read the 5 laws of human stupidity)is an unstoppable force.
Only separating yourself from the mass of those infected can save you.
The non stupid will have to resort to banishments of the infected or cease to prosper.
I would include a sarc tag,but I am no longer sure that I am being sarcastic.
“As men go mad in crowds,but return to sanity one at a time”.
And immunity to Stupidity is gained with pain,impoverishment and bitter experience.
So back to the top.
As we have abandoned the Scientific Method,we are ignorant of what is real..Meaning we are about to gain a real expensive education,from the only true school.
The School of hard Knocks.
40
Please, can I suggest that understanding this important observation presented by Jo is made easier if you study, think about and learn from this lengthy conversation between Dr Jordan Peterson and Dr Richard Lindzen. Each has made important original contributions to his field and each discusses why the rate of advance of important topics has slowed. Geoff S
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVSrTZDopM&t=977s
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Woo Hoo!!!!!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thank you, Geoff. That’s one I had but lost track of.
I think Lindzen has described the role of administrators in the bourgeoning costs and the declining quality of advanced education elsewhere, but I’ve been unable to find it. As important as it is, everyone who’s concerned about what’s wrong with higher education needs to know that it’s no longer dedicated to a pursuit of knowledge, but has become a for profit enterprise, in which education takes a back seat to $$$$$, and style to substance.
Kudos for finding and posting and thanks again.
10
Wonder how they rate “relative” disruption at the time period from the “absolute” disruption over all time.
The Sony Walkman was a pretty disruptive thing in it’s day but measured by today’s streaming tech it would not be seen very important.
How do the judges of this index calibrate themselves back to those times?
00
Science has deteriorated to the point where the medical profession cannot explain what a woman is.
Members of the same profession tell us that men can get pregnant.
I think we are long overdue for some ground-breaking scientific papers before the statements above become part of the Australian national curriculum.
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The cover of Scientific American shows something has gone very wrong; social justice, rights, equality, resilience….
https://images.app.goo.gl/LMroU9W415NCfYpWA
30
DNA scientist James Watson stripped of honors over views on race. That is your reason right there, a scientist’s political views and subservience to authority count more than his life’s work or his brains. What’s left is garbage, hence the state of science today.
50
Bigness of everything may be the answer- big government, big media, big corporate, big academic, big deep state… the bigger the apple cart is the more it can’t be overturned.
10
Disconcerting. Reasons given are everything between Era of the Mid Wits to Govt Control (Group Think).
I’d lean to the later but the former is not ruled out as it’s part of the process of the later. Since much of new research happens in public & private institutions (edu and biz) one has to assume the big player here is WEF since it has it’s totalitarian mitts in both pots and thus the era of free thinking has been squashed and is coming to an end, meaning stagnation of innovation across the board. Instead of moving into the Diamond Age we move into a Dumber Darker Brittle Age. [snip] I’d go further to suggest there will be a further claw back of existing innovations from the masses which will include everything from books on up and unless it feeds WEF’s purposes it doesn’t happen.
Good news for Blues singers though.
[Email coming para59r – J]
00
Interesting. Why is politics, wokness, conservative, liberal, included in science? Is it another way to not listen to their noise? To define their specialty? Remember how science has changed since we were kids, first it was, chew on a blade of grass, good, chew on a rock, bad. Then came others and put a little salt on the grass, better, salt on a rock, not as good. Now we are at salting lithium to create batteries, and producing fire hotter then the sun in a ball in a back yard. And studying parts of atoms not found on earth. Each one was a minor step that had to be taught, verified, and investigated by someone else whose shoulders we had to stand on to do what we just did. But, did it depend on their politics, or their dream?
00
One cannot be educated to be an Einstein, but one can be educated not to.
20
This is a very interesting discussion and one where I wanted to sleep on a response. Then Joanne added an update.
Before I read the update, I was thinking that the breakthroughs are the strong heartbeats that keeps the blood flowing to the brain to keep science’s thinking clear. People in cardiac arrest often experience ventricle fibrillation or flutter where the heart beats rapidly but it doesn’t pump the life blood effectively. Science managed and directed by administrators, both in the government and “corporate” academia, have pushed the process over results. You end up funding a lot of people and not getting results which won’t move the science forward because the administrators are so constrained by their processes and planning, just like fibrillation.
Nowhere is this more evident than it was in NASA’s rocket programs for the last 30 years. Nearly everything they did was derivative of work done back in the 70’s. So when billionaires Paul Allen, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos suddenly had more money to make hardware than NASA did, they could work on the elephant in the room problem which was how do you reduce launch costs? Each of them basically knew that you could not afford to throw away $50 million worth of hardware to put a few thousand pounds into orbit. I’m sure NASA knew this but since they had a reputation to maintain (meaning they could not afford any more spectacular failures with a reusable vehicle like they had with the shuttle) they didn’t pursue this avenue.
Our billionaire boys club were not so constrained nor did they have to design rockets where the pieces could be built in 250 congressional districts and 30 separate states to get funding. Paul Allen, using a massive plane to carry a rocket to the upper atmosphere has not been able to scale, Jeff Bezos has been able to re-use rockets but not get payload to orbit but Musk, after 3 launch failures then nearly a dozen tries to recover his rockets found the key. And with that the cost to put hardware in space is now a function of how many times SpaceX can use their boosters. It looks like that could be an 80% savings if the boosters can be reused nine times and Musk/SpaceX will make a fortune saving NASA money.
The fact that real talent leaves academia and seeks fortune elsewhere is not the end of the world and perhaps a very healthy state of affairs in the long run.
40
Without having read through this entire thread….perhaps the reduction in breakthrough papers is because humanity already knows so much?
Where are these breakthroughs supposed to come from when so much R&D has already been done? Logic suggests it MUST be harder to find a breakthrough discovery that has evaded hundreds or thousands (and decades worth) of previous studies.
If you compare the above graph with the ECS data, it falls in a very similar way. They started with a broad range for ECS which included some very high numbers, 4C, 5C and even 6 or 7C, but as more research showed those higher numbers were evidence-free fiction. Now the direction of travel is unmistakable (assuming we allow for yet more data-manipulating).
Real world evidence for high ECS is all-but non-existent precisely because every type of research and observation has been done by now. I suspect it’s a similar story with breakthrough science.
11
As a young engineering student I was taught it is hard to come up with a new idea or innovative piece of equipment. My first port of call for any new idea was a patent search. Pretty truthful words. I had thought of ways of making a device to stop aeroplanes getting turned over in storms. A wing will fly if it reaches enough airspeed. Anyway, checked the patents and no less than four different entries for a number of devices over four decades was found. A friend came up with the idea of using a refrigerant based intercooler for his race engine. Wags would stir him about having an AC compressor hanging off his engine and telling him was going soft. Bigger power gains than lost driving the compressor. Innovative but at the same time as he was submitting a patent another guy had entered the same patent for diesel engines in the US. I tell that story so I never stop looking for ideas myself. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Having said that. We know little of our environment, our planet and ourselves. Why is it that the common cold cannot be understood why and where it mutates? Why is it that we don’t understand why our body eats itself with cancer and why we share this trait with other mammals? Why we do not produce our own vitamin C compared to most all mammals? very topical for me..why we do not understand why the body goes into septic shock and why medicine has zero idea except bombard the body with every strong antibiotic in the hope of countering whatever it is causing the shock..to the point of almost killing the person they are trying to save? And why is it that there is always a doctor on the team telling the next of kin at is really bad and we should just let them go? These characters cannot tell septic shock from a simple biotic attack. Dad got a stomach living organism in his bloodstream that gave him larry dooly with his blood pressure. The simple fact the one medicine that controlled his blood pressure could only be administered in ED or ICU and there were no beds meant the doctors were trying to stabilise every other way until they finally administered the drug and Dad was stabilised so quick it was like hitting a switch and bringing him back to life. Medicine thrives on our ignorance. Indeed, the establishment thrives on our ignorance, so much so, it is deliberately dumbing the generations down through poorer education to arrive at that very outcome. I have a passing interest in fire management. The new doctrine I call “Run Away” is taking hold. It is like we have forgotten, if you include the aboriginies, over sixty thousand years…sic…of expertise. All manner of environmental hazard from high temperature to flooding the advice is ..”Run Away”! Keeping us scared means it is easier to manipulate an outcome that is not based on any form of fact.
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