Even The Woke Say Science Is Petering Out

One of my Inside-The-Academic-Beast contacts told me recently that the new crop of professors hired at a major well known university were unimaginative, nice and, most damning of all, boring. The last word was emphasized. Non-entities is my best one-word summary.

This is not surprising. All the interesting candidates are today weeded out long before the hiring process. The resulting dullness is one reason, and a large one, why scientific research has slowed. Which the far-left political magazine Nature has (again) noticed “Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?” (thanks to RA for the tip; the cover art for their article is hilarious and reminds one of a Google search).

Production of papers is higher than ever, of course, but what is worth reading is lower, and heading south. You’d miss a minor gem or two, but if you went by the rule Read No New Paper, your life would be a lot more pleasant. There are few to no new ideas, which makes it all the more depressing the dreary ones foisted on us are all called by their authors “novel”. Proven by the subtitle of the Nature piece: “Researchers are arguing over whether ‘disruptive’ or ‘novel’ science is waning – and how to remedy the problem.”

What explains this state? Academia.

JM Smith, writing on his retirement from professoring, well worth reading as he begins relating William James’ celebrating his own escape from the academic prison, showing the base problem is far from new, quoted this poem:

Smith published and yet perished,
Some that he wrote is true;
But none of it was cherished,
And so it perished too.

An academic on Twitter said, “A basic question whose answer seems to me to dictate what the near-term future of scientific discovery looks like: is there a lot of attention-bottlenecked low-hanging fruit, or have humans done a reasonably good job finding the easy stuff?”

I replied: The academy squelches new things. The latest crop of hirees are dull, unimaginative, conformity-seeking and unlikely to think of any new thing, they being taught since birth to avoid confrontation and to be nice. We have embarrassments like professors announcing their pronouns. Pronouns forsooth! Anybody who has lost the thread of Reality on such a simple thing as sexual reproduction is scarcely likely to contribute to discovery. The solution must lie outside academia.

The academic I responded to of course had pronouns in his bio.

Nature uses this plot from Funk, Leahey and Park, which we’ve seen before:

There are any number of quibbles with this arbitrary quantification. But it is a nice cartoon that captures the essence of our situation. Missing from the graph are the numbers of papers, which has grown by orders of magnitude since 1950. Here’s one estimate of the number of papers published by year, with, the authors said, a flaw in the database they used at the end. But you get the idea:

The extreme-left Science magazine recently had an article “Scientists are publishing too many papers—and that’s bad for science“. Using a different database of “officially indexed” papers, they say, “In recent years, the number of papers being published has ‘grown exponentially,’ the team explains. In 2016, about 1.92 million papers were indexed by the Scopus and Web of Science publication databases. In 2022, that number had jumped to 2.82 million.”

Also missing is the money spent on science, which follows the Disruptive curve inversely. Here’s one estimate of spending from the left-wing AAAS:

It’s now at about 100 billion-with-a-B bucks each and every year, and growing, but possibly not growing as fast as it used to given the change in administration.

Productivity, facilitated by Great Waves of money, is not the solution to producing innovative science. Indeed, money is to large extent the problem. Money feeds the bodies, of which there are too many writing too many papers.

That brings us to the one thing the graph misses: how many papers are read. Not “cited”, which is a measure of popularity more than anything else. But read. I’ll let you in on an academic secret. Many cite papers they never read, beyond perhaps a glance at the Abstract, just to bulk up their bibliographies, in the belief this makes their own papers look more professional. Citations aren’t an accurate count of what’s read.

It could be that good papers are being written, but are being ignored. The genuinely new is bad at finding money and support inside academia. Scientists grow up telling themselves stories of how brave thinkers were piddled on from a great height by the Consensuses of their day. The lesson they should learn from those ubiquitous stories is that they themselves will be piddlers, and not the inventors they always imagine themselves to be. But they never do learn this, and end up telling each other how stunning and brave they all are for following the Consensuses of our day.

That theory gains weight when we read things like this in the original Nature article: “And other research¹¹ has found that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars of R&D spending, adjusted for inflation, has halved roughly every nine years since 1950.” And:

The most obvious — as researchers told Funk in their e-mails responding to his paper — is that scientists are now so hemmed in by writing grant applications, administrative duties and teaching, that they have little time for original thought. One Dutch study has found that full professors at universities in the Netherlands spend less than 20% of their time on their research¹².

Compared with half a century ago, modern-day researchers have much less freedom to go in unusual directions because of the rigid structures of academic careers and funding, thinks Patricia Fara, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Fix? The obvious. Cut off government funding, shrink numbers of scientists, end publish or perish. But these, of course, won’t happen until the system itself topples. Minute you even suggest slowing spending, weepy white coats take to the streets warning they’ll stop thinking of the cure for cancer. Which they’ll have any day now.

We’ll talk another day about “low-hanging fruit” being plucked and that like.

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