Current Events > Scientists are actually doing work so rapidly that it is slowing progress

(+) Yeah! (+)

What a world we live in.

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To be a scientist you need to be hyperproductive to even have a chance at a job. But that hyperproductivity is actively harming science (along with making people miserable). You can't make this shit up.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

You can't make this s*** up.

You underestimate my imagination. I could easily make up a focus on productivity coming at the expense of the actual product and people's wellbeing.

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I mean. Science is competitive for some reason. Or just imbricated with education in too weird a way.

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Intro2Logic posted...

You underestimate my imagination. I could easily make up a focus on productivity coming at the expense of the actual product and people's wellbeing.

Tbf, what I'm referencing here is a bit different than increased number decreases the overall quality of each product (this is almost certainly the case, but not necessarily what I'm talking about). Just the sheer magnitude of articles being written means that nobody can possibly keep up, which produces the need for shortcuts, which tends to be "look primarily at those highly cited", which leads to a stagnation of information, where novel information simply doesn't produce any impact because it doesn't diffuse through the network.

Like, just doing a whole bunch of really good work is actually...bad.

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Yep I was in school to be a wildlife biologist and then came the politics

The universities require you to put out like 10 papers a year. So all of the important years+decades long research is worthless and the two week long study on which mouse had longer hair is somehow more relevant

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The whole publish or perish thing significantly contributes to this issue and it sucks

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Mr Hangman posted...

Seems like you just did.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/41/e2021636118

One of the differences between you and I is that when I talk about things, I usually don't intuit, I'm referencing actual results.

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Speaking as someone in academia, it's fairly obvious that policy greatly affects what kinds of papers get written. And it's not an especially controversial thing to say.

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Kind of makes me question if I even want to commit to graduate school physics. I just wanted to study and learn about a field I deeply enjoy, and make some contributions to it. Going through that grind of churning out papers just because sounds like I'd end up hating it instead

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Gwynevere posted...

Kind of makes me question if I even want to commit to graduate school physics. I just wanted to study and learn about a field I deeply enjoy, and make some contributions to it. Going through that grind of churning out papers just because sounds like I'd end up hating it instead

There are good and bad sides to it. And it'll also vary a lot depending on where you end up.

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Mr Hangman posted...

This article makes so many weird conclusions. It reeks of having started with the conclusion and then having gone fishing for some sort of evidence to support it, but I don't see any real link. Ossification of canon is not slowed progress. It means the field has fundamentals which are true and remain relevant as you keep expanding the perimeter of the unknown.

It's probably true that discoveries that are both novel and significant are slowing down over time (although it would be difficult to measure that in any objective way), but that's not a product of policy or some paradoxical "progressing so rapidly it's slowing down", it's just the nature of discovery. After an initial snowballing period of discovery of the fundamentals, of course new discoveries to follow would be either slower or more niche.

Maybe if you want to try to be critical of it you should try to read it.

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WeeWeiWiiWie posted...

You can't make this shit up.

Then how did you do it?

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Gwynevere posted...

Kind of makes me question if I even want to commit to graduate school physics. I just wanted to study and learn about a field I deeply enjoy, and make some contributions to it. Going through that grind of churning out papers just because sounds like I'd end up hating it instead

It's definitely something you need to consider, the reality of what is involved. I think we're not allowed the appropriate amount of time to stop and think, and make sure all the science is as careful as it could be.

But one thing it does do is encourage collaborations, to lighten the load, which can be very intellectually satisfying.

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Gwynevere posted...

Kind of makes me question if I even want to commit to graduate school physics. I just wanted to study and learn about a field I deeply enjoy, and make some contributions to it. Going through that grind of churning out papers just because sounds like I'd end up hating it instead

I've started feeling similarly in all honesty. Just replace physics with chemical engineering
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Up.

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Some people probably should be scientists. Unless I am too delusion to function.

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Wut?

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