In his book Zero to One, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel argues that modern scientific innovation is no longer groundbreaking.
I wasted a click.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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I'd argue that venture capitalists are the cause of lack of scientific breakthroughs.
Are we going to hear about enshittification in academia, too? Ugh.
Enshittification is pump-and-dump for companies over years instead of stocks over days/months.
Academia's problems with replication and funding for null/negative results have been known about for a while and are a separate problem. I guess it could be argued that they're related in that maybe an academic's career shouldn't be based on the profit cycle of their institution.
And yet you saved me one; that's zero to one at least!
I still wasted a click after reading this because I thought, "no way is this article on science dedicated to that Lizard Person".
And I was right, but only because it's not really an article, much less about science. It's more like a business experiment to find out if this particular LLM "author", which generates disconnected gobblygook, can save them significant CapEx over a more expensive AI model that would output articles with something more closely resembling a coherent thought process, or being written by a human.
Researchers need to be able to publish negative results or failures. They need to be encouraged to do that. Funding needs to support that.
Right now it doesn't. Mostly only "successes" are published and that's what gets further funding.
Yeah, we need to celebrate negative results, it’s still good scientific work. Hold the “grounding” scientists up in esteem next to the “groundbreaking” ones. All of the people who do scientific work are necessary for further scientific discovery and in the search for truth.
I'm not convinced by the premise of this statement
Scientific innovations should make ‘zero to one’ breakthroughs, such as the mobile phone or the combustion engine, but are instead making ‘one to many’ improvements to existing innovations
Maybe we are simply past the curve where a few people can innovate a breakthrough and now it has to come from a lot of data gathered from existing implementations? In order to invent a cellphone a lot of technologies had to be improved compared to their first introduction. And get cheap enough to enable experimentation
Agreed, modern inventions are orders of magnitude more complex than anything in the past. Of course they require teams.
Like you said, “the mobile phone” isn’t a single invention anyway, it’s thousands or millions of inventions packed into one device.
modern inventions are orders of magnitude more complex than anything in the past
Well, in a way that's always the case with inventions. I think when the first modern submarine (it's just an example) was built it also was a marvel of alloy purity and manufacturing precision compared to anything in the past. It's just that in the last century we observed a lot of technological progress because we started doing research in a lot more directions and in much higher volume. We caught up to our technological and theoretical knowledge and now the progress will slow down. Only to explode again after another breakthrough, as we often move in sinusoids, but that will be in one field + how it can help other fields, not a bunch of fields developing all at once in a short timeframe
Yeah, the low-hanging fruit has been picked already.
i think what they are trying to say is... because of bureaucratization of research the current method is stuck on improving rather than take risks and thinking outside the box.
I get that. But my point is: are we really sure that this is the problem?
One of the bases of our scientific method is repeatability of experiment. But at some point, when we can produce a lot of experiments, comes a problem: we can run out of people with time and resources that allow to repeat it. And one of the ways to mitigate it is to strengthen the requirements on the data gathering. So when you do find something weird, you can analyze how the parameters differ from other similar runs and if someone else is able to repeat it, you might have easier time finding which variable makes it so. Without consistent "we measured X after setting that to Y" it's hard to repeat the experiment or even recognize if you really are observing something new.
Take a look at that error a few months ago that resulted in us thinking that a new superconductor that can work in +- room conditions was found. If we didn't have precise description of what they did and what they measured, we could be still trying to reproduce their observations
The number of per capita patents taken out by inventors is decreasing, suggesting that ideas have become harder to find.
A metric they use for measuring scientific progress is how innovation is bureaucratically represented, which these god damn geniuses ~~follow to the conclusion~~ conclude alongside the idea that science has
“become bureaucratic, with too many inputs and too much process required to reach success".
Man economists are all fucking stupid and you'll never convince me otherwise
Edit: Skimmed the paper, the metric of per capita patents had its own claims and was discrete from the source that led to the claim about bureaucracy. It's still stupid that the paper is at odds with itself.
The theoretical motivation of the paper was actually so dumb. It was all bullshit quotes from entrepreneurs and other economists, not researchers whose jobs revolve around actually creating the innovations that these losers go around parading.
When you start with certain assumptions about the supremacy of market forces you're bound to miss a few human elements along the way
US funding for basic research--the type that will lead to the truly paradigm-shifting breakthroughs--has also been in decline for 50+ years as a proportion of GDP. While bureacracy could be an obstacle, the much larger one is insufficient resources to fund a lot of moonshots that may fizzle or may result in 'zero to one's innovation, as the author states
Is capitalism good for scientific progress?
The opposite, in fact.
Modern movies, tv, music, and gaming prove pretty decisively that putting hyper-greedy capitalist shareholder proxies in charge of said industries turns their creativity to shit. It also turns healthcare, education, and more core societal functions to shit, but that's another story.
Why take a risk on a bold, original, visionary script that might succeed or fail spectacularly, a risk your industry exists to take, when you can make another derivative established IP sequel with a mass appeal formula applied to the story resulting in a highly predictable revenue stream?
Capitalism eats itself in the quest for infinite growth in a finite system. When it runs out of room to grow, it starts eating itself and calling it maximizing efficiency.
*edit sorry I replied to the person's top question instead of their followup of whether capitalism increases creativity, still applies though.
Not to mention stuff like patents and being secretive for profit, hiding knowledge instead of it being used for the good of all and allowed to be iterated upon. Also monopolizing, undermining others, intentionally sabotaging innovations for profit, wasting a ton of resources and effort on things useless on the grand scheme of things, such as how to manipulate people into buying more of your product.. etc.
Also not seeking the most logical option/investing in the logical technologies, such as intentionally sabotaging climate change/renewable energy efforts in order to earn more from oil sales and so on, and so forth. Capitalism/competition does not breed innovation. Cooperation does. And it shows, because research is very much based on cooperation.. at least researchers love to cooperate in the quest for more knowledge.
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.
Of course not. Capitalism is only good for a very tiny subset of the population's bank accounts.
what about creativity? does it promote creativity?
It promotes money. If creativity happens to align with that, then yes.