Re Is Science Hitting a Wall?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () meetinghouse net>
> Date: April 7, 2018 at 8:45:15 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net, ip <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: Re: [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....
>
> Just read the blog post.  It all seems rather bogus.  The discussion completely ignores:
>
> - the market and regulatory factors that impede actually putting research results into practice
>
> - the observation that an investment in lobbying (to reduce regulation, for example) tends to have a significantly 
> higher ROI than an investment in innovation
>
> - any comment about the shift in R&D funding from public research, that can seed lots of downstream application, to 
> proprietary R&D, that often gets locked up until ROI can be maximized on previous work
>
> - all of the efforts by various interests to stem application of research results 
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>
>
> --
>
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
> This message was sent to the list address and trashed, but can be found online.



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