Why There Is So Much Bullsh*t in Science

45 snips

Jan 11, 2023

Russell Funk, a Professor at the Carlson School of Management, explores why scientific innovation is on the decline despite advancements in research tools. He discusses the startling findings that research papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. The conversation highlights systemic issues like increased specialization and the pressure to publish, which dampen creativity. Funk emphasizes that a shift in how science is organized could stifle significant breakthroughs, ultimately affecting technological progress and our quality of life.

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INSIGHT

Measuring Progress

Scientific progress is measured indirectly, often through metrics like Nobel Prizes and citation patterns.
These reveal trends like increasing gaps between discovery and award or rising citation age, suggesting a slowdown.

INSIGHT

Recombination's Decline

Scientific innovation often involves combining existing knowledge in new ways ('recombination').
Tracking this reveals a decrease in combining disparate ideas, hindering novel discoveries.

INSIGHT

The Burden of Knowledge

Despite increased resources, scientific progress is slowing, possibly due to the 'burden of knowledge'.
This means the sheer volume of existing knowledge makes it harder to make significant new discoveries.

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We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But as one group of researchers from Stanford put it: “Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find.” Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet another concluded that “new ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.”

As regular listeners of this podcast know, I am obsessed with this topic—why it seems like in industries as different as music and film and physics, new ideas are losing ground. It is harder to sell an original script, harder to make an original hit song, and harder to publish a groundbreaking paper, and while these trends are NOT all the same, they rhyme in a way I can’t stop thinking about. How did we build a world where new ideas are so endangered?

This year, a new study titled “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time” inches us closer to an explanation for why this is happening in science. The upshot is that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper in the same field from several decades ago. Progress is slowing down, not just in one or two places, but across many domains of science and technology.

Today, I speak to one of the study’s coauthors. Russell Funk is a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. We talk about the decline of progress in science, why it matters, and why it’s happening—and we give special attention to a particular theory of mine, which is that the incentive structure of modern science encourages too much research that doesn’t serve any purpose except to get published. In other words, science has a bullsh*t paper problem. And because science is the wellspring from which all progress flows, its crap problem is our problem.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Russell Funk

Producer: Devon Manze

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