A Defense of Weird Research
25 comments
·February 25, 2025mc_maurer
boplicity
What declining rate of scientific advancement? Do you have a reference to support this claim? Curious.
dguest
I feel like there's some fundamental fallacy in the idea that "a declining rate of scientific advancement" is a sign that the field is somehow being corrupted or rotting out from the inside.
Science isn't like other commodities. In most of recorded history it is only ever produced, never destroyed [1], and the product is basically free to replicate [2]. The result is massive inflation: it might be hard to make a profit growing corn the same way we did 200 years ago, but doing a 200 year old science experiment is utterly pointless outside a classroom demonstration.
So making science that is worth paying for is just always going to get harder. And yet we equate science with other industries when we expect anything less than billion dollar experiments to yield fundamentally interesting results. This doesn't mean science is somehow getting worse, or that the practitioners are to blame, it just means it's evolving to attack much more difficult problems.
All this being said, there are plenty of ways to reform to keep the progress going: reproducibility is theoretically easier than ever, and yet many journals aren't requiring open datasets or public code. We need to keep the pressure on to evolve in a positive way, not just throw up our hands because things are harder than they were when we knew less.
[1]: Ok, there are some examples were lots of information was destroyed, and a bias from what is recorded.
[2]: I don't mean repeating the same experiment, just that the results from one experiment are trivially disseminated to millions of people.
jeaton02
Pretty influential one: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338 "The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find."
oersted
You could argue that those current researchers are doing a lot more than those in the 70s. It is difficult to quantify how much harder the doubling problem becomes every time, and how much more effort it takes to solve. But the fact that, after decades of yearly exponential improvement, costs have consistently grown only linearly. More specifically, only x18 cost for doubling after roughly 40 iterations (2^40 is massive). I mean that’s phenomenal by any standards.
SubiculumCode
1. The incentive is to get grants. Papers, sure...but grants really. The problem is that grants are effectively smaller than they used to be due to inflation, and so you have to have multiple R01 level grants to fund the lab. Grants must be understandable and seem feasible to get funded...the competition is incredibly high....so this limits attempted scope. So to survive, you write grants that are simple and easy to achieve.
2. In general, the problems are harder today than they were 40 years ago. We are constantly delving into problems plagued by noise and heterogeneity. This makes progress much tougher.
3.
NoMoreNicksLeft
All of this is the result of scaling issues. For most of the history of science, it was a endeavor pursued by very few people. Then we started sending everyone to university, eviscerated our economies, and expanded the research workforce a thousandfold. More maybe.
There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful reform is possible.
sfpotter
There's tons of very interesting and rewarding research to pursue. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because so much of the research pursued currently is neither interesting nor rewarding. You have to be brave, creative, and independently minded in order to realize that this research is just around the corner. The current academic system doesn't select for people with these traits (rather, it selects for people who are good at taking tests and following rules).
searine
I don't think it is that pessimistic.
Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those high-quality papers that get cited.
Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is incremental and slow.
techright75
[dead]
jpadkins
good article on the general defense of public funding of science, but does not address the current policy changes that well. It avoids questions like:
- should we borrow money (from future tax payers) to fund basic research now? Given the $2T deficit, it's not clear this optimal strategy for our grandchildren. Especially given how close we are to monetary collapse if we continue to borrow from the future at the rate we have the last 5 years.
- who controls the priorities and agenda of the public funding? In a constitutional republic, the will of the people should be reflected in the agenda of the science funding. We just had a presidential election, and this is democracy in action. It's not clear that science funding is even going down, the executive branch is simply steering research funding away from topics it doesn't think is a priority for the American people.
chrisbrandow
Almost all legitimate scientific research can be accurately described either in a way that sounds weird, possibly useless, or in a way that sounds important and useful.
The former is usually characterized by describing the details of the experiment, which are meaningless to the untrained audience, the latter is characterized by describing its ultimate goal.
This could sound like a blind defense of “trust the experts“, which can be a problematic attitude. The point is that someone you can’t answer the latter question, then any critique should be suspect. If the researcher can’t answer the latter question concisely, then a closer look is definitely warranted.
Herring
To be a conservative is to have great difficulty with change and “weird” things you have never seen before. It’s a core personality trait, and takes years of education/travel/meditation to loosen.
marcosdumay
What value is there in "research" that doesn't do anything weird?
How can it even justify the name on the previous sentence without the quotes?
yjftsjthsd-h
Replication is important but I wouldn't call it weird.
null
KittenInABox
> What value is there in "research" that doesn't do anything weird?
Plenty of value, I think. It's e.g. not weird at all to research very mundane things like "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen". Or something like "let's test if this chemotherapy drug is more effective than this other chemotherapy drug".
Sure there is radical, weird research, like rock licking or maybe some sociological study on fetishes. But I think there's space for both the weird and non-monetizeable research (think: 16th century lacemaking in a european country that doesn't exist anymore) and the monetizeable research (some incrementally improved LLM model probably).
marcosdumay
By the bar people are calling research "weird" right now, no, "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen" doesn't qualify.
What qualifies is "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen by using only the same procedure and data other people have been using for a while so that it has been on the news more than a few times".
And yeah, you still have a point in that it may still be useful. But it's either something people blatantly ignored for some reason, or it's not really research, but product development.
KittenInABox
I think metadata studies are pretty useful actually. Broad questions like "what medical conditions does diabetes cause" can be investigated in that way. It's definitely not weird at all. But when people say "weird" I think people mean things that don't have immediate economic use, for example, a literature phd that is on the depiction of black hair in books from countries with black majorities vs books from countries with black minorities.
SubiculumCode
meanwhile, the in-person NIH study section I was going to serve on was just turned virtual, but the SRO hinted that full cancellation is on the table.
I am sickened at furious at the actions of this administration on science.
SubiculumCode
I just received the "postponement" aka cancellation notice for the NMBH study section.
A whole round of funding opportunities sunk for no damn reason.
slowmovintarget
The first two paragraphs are FUD and can be safely skipped. The second paragraph sets up a straw-man.
After that, however, the rest of the article seems to be a good-faith attempt at defending general public funding of science. It does use the straw-man as a crutch a few times, and it neatly avoids the real problems like the slew of reworded papers on known junk science, or the ideologically targeted wolf-in-science-clothing research that clogs "the pipeline."
It doesn't change my opinion that the pipeline appears to need a hard reset.
Ygg2
In defense of cutting weird research https://youtu.be/shFUDPqVmTg
542354234235
So, she is basically saying that theoretical physics experiments aren’t going to live up to the hype of fundamentally understanding the universe immediately…but they are still advancing our understanding of the most fundamental of fundamental science. Ok, so improved measurements of the gluon are not going to lead to a product on the shelf for me. So what? The whole point of the OP article is that fundamental research yesterday, leads to applied research today, leads to the technology of tomorrow.
SubiculumCode
The world is tired of influencers fucking with things.
I'd even argue that the declining rate of scientific advancement is due to the academic track moving towards the same short-term thinking that plagues parts of the private sector. When the incentive structure is towards pumping out publications, there is way less breathing room for the patient development of good science and novel research. Plus, null results coming from excellent research are treated as useless, so the incentive is towards finding obvious, positive results, especially for early-career scientists.
The total result of the current academic incentive structure is towards the frequent publication of safe, boring positive results, especially pre-tenure. Academic research needs to become LESS like the quarterly return driven private sphere, not MORE like it.