Interesting People mailing list archives
Re Is Science Hitting a Wall?
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2018 00:47:29 -0400
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From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com> Date: April 7, 2018 at 10:39:18 PM EDT To: dave () farber net, " 'ip'" <ip () listbox com> Cc: "'John Horgan'" <jhorgan () stevens edu> Subject: RE: [IP] Is Science Hitting a Wall? I agree – beware of economists carrying old measures. Too bad there is an attitude that research should be produce a measurable result rather than appreciating failure is the norm and the few success make up for it. The Moore’s law question is what inspired me to write https://rmf.vc/BeyondLimits 20 years ago. The problem is typically in the measures as old veins get tapped out and we need new ways of thinking, new paradigms, for fresh measures. We tend to think of science and innovation as a path of looking for solutions. I argue that the reality is more looking back and finding what solutions are already available. The standard history of the Internet is about progressive improvement of telecom when it was more about discovering the power of best efforts which was a complete break from the tradition of carrying meaning messages. To use another example – transport of goods by runners hasn’t improved that much in thousands of years. We did get a huge boost in transporting packages by air. But in order to appreciate the change in transport you have to forget about transporting physical goods and recognize that in many cases we don’t have to move goods at all. We just ship the part number and the goods ship from a nearby store. But that instantaneous transfer of goods is cheating by old measures. Bob Frankston http://Frankston.com @BobFrankston From: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 17:44 To: ip <ip () listbox com> Subject: [IP] Is Science Hitting a Wall? Begin forwarded message: From: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu> Date: April 7, 2018 at 5:20:24 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> Cc: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu> Subject: Is Science Hitting a Wall? Dave, thought your list might finding this interesting. John Is Science Hitting a Wall? Economists show that increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns. Once again, I’m brooding over science’s limits. I recently posted Q&As with three physicists with strong opinions on the topic--David Deutsch, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees--as well as this column: “Is Science Infinite?” Then in March I attended a two-day brainstorming session--which I’ll call “The Session”--with 20 or so science-y folks over whether science is slowing down and what we can do about it. The Session was inspired in part by research suggesting that scientific progress is stagnating. In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” The economists are Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb, all from Stanford, and John Van Reenen of MIT. As an counter-intuitive example, they cite Moore’s Law, noting that the “number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s.” The researchers found similar trends in research related to agriculture and medicine. More and more research on cancer and other illnesses has produced fewer and fewer lives saved.... Continue reading at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall/ Archives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now
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- Re Is Science Hitting a Wall? Dave Farber (Apr 07)
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- Re Is Science Hitting a Wall? Dave Farber (Apr 07)
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