Good article, however this entire thesis is reliant on a single assumption - that there *are* radical, paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries left to be uncovered. There might be a few, but number is steadily falling as less and less of the low-hanging fruit is unavailable.
Thus, you might just be drawing the correlation between falling probabilities of radical discoveries to your own (possibly biased) takes regarding research standardization and the internet as a whole.
Yup totally fair point, although I think the point about our creativity being damaged in general still holds if you disregard the whole paradigm-shift thing (like in the arts where this doesn't apply).
I also just don't agree that there are less paradigm-shifting discoveries left to be uncovered but this is really just a matter of faith - I'm more inclined towards the Deutschian perspective that "we are always at the beginning of infinity". To my point it's kind of always seemed this way throughout history, we are just biased towards feeling like we basically have all the big stuff figured out.
"The quote from Albert Michelson was from his address at the dedication ceremony for the Ryerson Physical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1894:
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
> I also just don't agree that there are less paradigm-shifting discoveries left to be uncovered but this is really just a matter of faith
I feel discoveries primarily happen w.r.t models and theories. If we can predict something, then we understand it. There are a few realms where we can't really predict behavior - almost all macro behavior is predictable, and the one which can't be is usually for which we don't have much data... and thus hypotheses can't be tested. And we rigorously understand why certain things just can't be predicted - chaotic systems like the weather for example, which are due to physical limitations.
There are definitely some things we don't understand, take Zipf's law for example - which is present in the brain (in the form of power laws; see artem kirsanov's really lovely video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwLb3XlPCB4&ab_channel=ArtemKirsanov), which are coincidentally the same scaling laws which the entirety of LLM scaling hypothesis and projections run upon. Vsauce has a nice commentary on the Zipf's law too.
But they seem more like strange artifacts of our universe. It happens because.. it just happens. Maybe at some point, we might have conclusive evidence that we're just in a universe with this random set of physical laws that *happen* to have some weird characteristics for no good reason.
Could we really think of a way to unify all of what we know in some masterstroke? I doubt it.
At this point, I would be more attracted to give up my biological faculties and let the machines discover and explain the interesting stuff to use peasants :)
1) still feels like there are many open questions in fundamental physics and biology (consciousness, aging)
2) discoveries beget new phenomenon and open questions.
3) moving beyond just theory, there are surely many "paradigm-shifting" discoveries that will lead to new dynamics and discoveries - e.g. telepathy and linking of human consciousnesses could lead to an entirely new field of study
I don't really believe in materialism either so I think we are deeply confused about the nature of reality but that's my own problem ;)
Jun 7, 2023·edited Jun 7, 2023Liked by Roger’s Bacon
I think it is more likely that we have run out of assumptions that we are willing to question than that the universe has run out of questions that we haven't answered. The problem with science isn't that it has fulfilled its commission of discovery and now needs to be put out to pasture but that it has calcified around a set of assumptions that it supposes to be proven. Einstein recognized relativity as an unsatisfactory kludge, an ad hoc piece of filler to cover the gap left by the Michelson-Morley experiment, we take it as absolute truth.
Nice piece Roger, but I disagree on why science has calcified. The money killed it. 'Scientists' don't sit around and think because they are hounded to produce. Grant money killed science. I used to be asked a fair bit why engineers needed to understand differential equations and such since they never solve them by hand but use Mathematica or some such to do it. My answer was always that the engineer's job is to know when the model is wrong. But we have made our thinkers into technicians, into model trusters rather than model skeptics, and so lost them.
So basically, (groundbreaking) science doesn't scale. Or at least we haven't found a way to make it scale.
I think that the answer will be hobbyists, amateurs, not professional scientists. The internet fortunately allows easy publishing of original research. This new groundbreaking research will of course first be ignored because it doesn't fit socially or intellectually with science today. But in due time, its applicability will be recognized (on average, people don't just ignore solutions to important problems).
Then this Science 2 will start to grow, fall into the exact same traps as Science 1. Which will ultimately give birth to a new generation of hobbyists and amateurs, starting Science 3, and so forever in a circle.
Yup I'm with you - "Science 1" might be coming to a dead end but I think there are potential scientific communities with radically different organizations that could restart the engine. I am working on promoting this "Science 2" that is more amateur-focused, not sure if you've seen these articles/websites but you might find them interesting -
Awesome, delicious. This is the type of mildly scandalous thinking that I'm here for.
Lately I've developed this sense that the internet is creating a sort of fizzling out instead of an explosion; I can imagine a type of dystopia where we're all in something like soma holiday, but instead of cheap and meaningless raw pleasure it's cheap and meaningless thought and ideas... we manage to convince ourselves we're doing Good and Important stuff, but it ends up just melting into trite and comfortable nothingness for eternity. This is the feeling I get from the contemporary internet, social media, and science...
Also, I have long had the sense that you could actually do more interesting stuff by *not* reading everything there is to read about a field, but I pushed it out of my mind as ridiculous... glad to have this validation. Great post!
Thanks dude - haha "mildly scandalous thinking" is definitely what I'm going for. That quote at the beginning is from this - https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over. Really good essay and definitely speaks to what you're getting at.
When something screams "the future is cancelled" it tends to be worrying, but at the same time the internet will not be a fad, but a place turning from being colonized by politics and culture, to being orthogonal from politics and culture. It will correspond to communities in real life, whether it be mainstream (publication culture) or "junk spaces" (imageboard counterculture). Start a zine or journal, not a Twitter account or blog.
If the population boom is coupled with IQ "decreases", the absolute amount of smart people will still be increasing with a labor pool ready for materializing innovation. The theory of middle management still applies, where the gap between middle managers and workers should hover around 18IQ, and the pattern could repeat between different layers of a corporation (or nation).
I enjoyed your article so much I read it twice and took notes, so please consider don't consider these questions the wrong way. If anything, I'm an under-educated simpleton who missed your points and am just trying to understand better:
Are we sure creativity is on the decline? Maybe the center of the normal curve of ideas has ballooned, but are the edges maybe not still there, if not in relative levels compared to 50 years ago or whatever, then at least absolute levels?
What exceptions do you see? i.e., who has made creative breakthroughs in spite of the internet's creativity smothering? Better yet, who's done so thanks to the internet. I wonder what lessons we can try to infer from those anecdotes.
What do you think the problem behind this problem is? My guess: Incentives. Is creativity not as rewarded as it once was? Or incremental gains over-rewarded? Or is creativity riskier or harder to obtain, so the expected reward of going after it less appealing?
Haha thanks! All great questions, I'm not sure I have great answers.
We are definitely not sure if creativity is on the decline. I would suspect that we are probably less creative than in the past, or at least we produce less outliers than we used to. It's impossible to know of course, but I get the sense that if we aren't less creative we are all creative in in the same kind of information/reading overloaded way.
I'm a fan of Erik Hoel, the neuroscientist/author - he strikes me as someone who's done well because of the internet as it's allowed him to blend science and literature in cool ways.
The incentives are definitely a problem, the question is are they downstream of deeper cultural forces such that fiddling with them in a superficial manner won't accomplish much.
The listening-reading distinction feels like another shapelord vs wordcel or lateral thinking vs vertical thinking distinction. The art of hyperlinks and data visualization are inherent to what is missing in science. This might explain why Nicky Case and 3Blue1Brown are both great "content creators".
In the case of metrification, it can be said that we ought to create a kind of platonic "junk" metric. Having a metric that in essence random makes bureaucratization impossible, and frees up space for people to freely think. Alterative would be "multi-objective optimization" or having so many metrics that "A for effort" is justified. Metrification and lack of creative slack is often caused by the drainage of funding paired with "anti-intellectualism" of the fundamentalist masses. Political demands for science to "do real work" or pull funding back into military spending or public welfare.
Egregores, info-bombing, homogenization, and groupthink are now universal constants that cannot be changed, it is now a matter of how we can rely on new techniques to navigate information. I for one think that "second brain" or "knowledge gardens" are good ways to create spaces of philosophical play. (need to figure out a sensible way to publish LogSeq with WIP portions tho, need to grow a pair) The best way to fight against single-mindedness is to become multitudes, to dip your toes in every direction and reconcile the contradictions. And yes be heretical lol.
A similar solution to this in STEM is how we need more engineers (artists) and less "scientists". Engineering training IS anxiety inoculation, and most of the bloggers out there are very theory-driven rather than data-driven or experiment-driven. These theorists are more apt in becoming liberal arts writers (midlist or midwit types) than being a real innovator. When LARPing as an innovator is lucrative and midwit writing are being swamped by spammers, the whole ecosystem collapses. A good tell is if they sound like a "theater kid", a performer rather than a maker. Oh look there is a *writer strike* AND an *actor strike* while the EA and X-Risk theorists run wild. https://archive.fo/pgFdQ
Good article, however this entire thesis is reliant on a single assumption - that there *are* radical, paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries left to be uncovered. There might be a few, but number is steadily falling as less and less of the low-hanging fruit is unavailable.
Thus, you might just be drawing the correlation between falling probabilities of radical discoveries to your own (possibly biased) takes regarding research standardization and the internet as a whole.
Yup totally fair point, although I think the point about our creativity being damaged in general still holds if you disregard the whole paradigm-shift thing (like in the arts where this doesn't apply).
I also just don't agree that there are less paradigm-shifting discoveries left to be uncovered but this is really just a matter of faith - I'm more inclined towards the Deutschian perspective that "we are always at the beginning of infinity". To my point it's kind of always seemed this way throughout history, we are just biased towards feeling like we basically have all the big stuff figured out.
"The quote from Albert Michelson was from his address at the dedication ceremony for the Ryerson Physical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1894:
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
> I also just don't agree that there are less paradigm-shifting discoveries left to be uncovered but this is really just a matter of faith
I feel discoveries primarily happen w.r.t models and theories. If we can predict something, then we understand it. There are a few realms where we can't really predict behavior - almost all macro behavior is predictable, and the one which can't be is usually for which we don't have much data... and thus hypotheses can't be tested. And we rigorously understand why certain things just can't be predicted - chaotic systems like the weather for example, which are due to physical limitations.
There are definitely some things we don't understand, take Zipf's law for example - which is present in the brain (in the form of power laws; see artem kirsanov's really lovely video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwLb3XlPCB4&ab_channel=ArtemKirsanov), which are coincidentally the same scaling laws which the entirety of LLM scaling hypothesis and projections run upon. Vsauce has a nice commentary on the Zipf's law too.
But they seem more like strange artifacts of our universe. It happens because.. it just happens. Maybe at some point, we might have conclusive evidence that we're just in a universe with this random set of physical laws that *happen* to have some weird characteristics for no good reason.
Could we really think of a way to unify all of what we know in some masterstroke? I doubt it.
At this point, I would be more attracted to give up my biological faculties and let the machines discover and explain the interesting stuff to use peasants :)
All good points but I would add
1) still feels like there are many open questions in fundamental physics and biology (consciousness, aging)
2) discoveries beget new phenomenon and open questions.
3) moving beyond just theory, there are surely many "paradigm-shifting" discoveries that will lead to new dynamics and discoveries - e.g. telepathy and linking of human consciousnesses could lead to an entirely new field of study
I don't really believe in materialism either so I think we are deeply confused about the nature of reality but that's my own problem ;)
I think it is more likely that we have run out of assumptions that we are willing to question than that the universe has run out of questions that we haven't answered. The problem with science isn't that it has fulfilled its commission of discovery and now needs to be put out to pasture but that it has calcified around a set of assumptions that it supposes to be proven. Einstein recognized relativity as an unsatisfactory kludge, an ad hoc piece of filler to cover the gap left by the Michelson-Morley experiment, we take it as absolute truth.
Nice piece Roger, but I disagree on why science has calcified. The money killed it. 'Scientists' don't sit around and think because they are hounded to produce. Grant money killed science. I used to be asked a fair bit why engineers needed to understand differential equations and such since they never solve them by hand but use Mathematica or some such to do it. My answer was always that the engineer's job is to know when the model is wrong. But we have made our thinkers into technicians, into model trusters rather than model skeptics, and so lost them.
Well said and in full agreement, but would just add that none of these hypotheses for science's calcification are mutually exclusive
So basically, (groundbreaking) science doesn't scale. Or at least we haven't found a way to make it scale.
I think that the answer will be hobbyists, amateurs, not professional scientists. The internet fortunately allows easy publishing of original research. This new groundbreaking research will of course first be ignored because it doesn't fit socially or intellectually with science today. But in due time, its applicability will be recognized (on average, people don't just ignore solutions to important problems).
Then this Science 2 will start to grow, fall into the exact same traps as Science 1. Which will ultimately give birth to a new generation of hobbyists and amateurs, starting Science 3, and so forever in a circle.
Yup I'm with you - "Science 1" might be coming to a dead end but I think there are potential scientific communities with radically different organizations that could restart the engine. I am working on promoting this "Science 2" that is more amateur-focused, not sure if you've seen these articles/websites but you might find them interesting -
https://gwern.net/doc/history/1988-brightman.pdf (I'm one of the co-authors)
https://www.secretorum.life/p/born-again-disconnected-psychology
and a scientific journal I run dedicated to speculation and designed to be more accessible to amateurs/independent researchers - theseedsofscience.org
Awesome, delicious. This is the type of mildly scandalous thinking that I'm here for.
Lately I've developed this sense that the internet is creating a sort of fizzling out instead of an explosion; I can imagine a type of dystopia where we're all in something like soma holiday, but instead of cheap and meaningless raw pleasure it's cheap and meaningless thought and ideas... we manage to convince ourselves we're doing Good and Important stuff, but it ends up just melting into trite and comfortable nothingness for eternity. This is the feeling I get from the contemporary internet, social media, and science...
Also, I have long had the sense that you could actually do more interesting stuff by *not* reading everything there is to read about a field, but I pushed it out of my mind as ridiculous... glad to have this validation. Great post!
Thanks dude - haha "mildly scandalous thinking" is definitely what I'm going for. That quote at the beginning is from this - https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over. Really good essay and definitely speaks to what you're getting at.
When something screams "the future is cancelled" it tends to be worrying, but at the same time the internet will not be a fad, but a place turning from being colonized by politics and culture, to being orthogonal from politics and culture. It will correspond to communities in real life, whether it be mainstream (publication culture) or "junk spaces" (imageboard counterculture). Start a zine or journal, not a Twitter account or blog.
I think you are on to something
This is awesome.
Apollonian: Sean Carroll, Steven Pinker.
Dionysian (at least in spirit): Lee Smolin, Nassim Taleb.
We can think of Insider/Outsider as defined by Auren Hoffman as analog categories in the entrepreneurial world
https://open.substack.com/pub/auren/p/a-nirav-or-a-naval-that-is-the-question?r=kmgnh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
IQ has been decreasing by 1.2 points per decade since the Victorian Era. It's just that people are dumber.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470
If the population boom is coupled with IQ "decreases", the absolute amount of smart people will still be increasing with a labor pool ready for materializing innovation. The theory of middle management still applies, where the gap between middle managers and workers should hover around 18IQ, and the pattern could repeat between different layers of a corporation (or nation).
I enjoyed your article so much I read it twice and took notes, so please consider don't consider these questions the wrong way. If anything, I'm an under-educated simpleton who missed your points and am just trying to understand better:
Are we sure creativity is on the decline? Maybe the center of the normal curve of ideas has ballooned, but are the edges maybe not still there, if not in relative levels compared to 50 years ago or whatever, then at least absolute levels?
What exceptions do you see? i.e., who has made creative breakthroughs in spite of the internet's creativity smothering? Better yet, who's done so thanks to the internet. I wonder what lessons we can try to infer from those anecdotes.
What do you think the problem behind this problem is? My guess: Incentives. Is creativity not as rewarded as it once was? Or incremental gains over-rewarded? Or is creativity riskier or harder to obtain, so the expected reward of going after it less appealing?
Haha thanks! All great questions, I'm not sure I have great answers.
We are definitely not sure if creativity is on the decline. I would suspect that we are probably less creative than in the past, or at least we produce less outliers than we used to. It's impossible to know of course, but I get the sense that if we aren't less creative we are all creative in in the same kind of information/reading overloaded way.
I'm a fan of Erik Hoel, the neuroscientist/author - he strikes me as someone who's done well because of the internet as it's allowed him to blend science and literature in cool ways.
The incentives are definitely a problem, the question is are they downstream of deeper cultural forces such that fiddling with them in a superficial manner won't accomplish much.
The listening-reading distinction feels like another shapelord vs wordcel or lateral thinking vs vertical thinking distinction. The art of hyperlinks and data visualization are inherent to what is missing in science. This might explain why Nicky Case and 3Blue1Brown are both great "content creators".
In the case of metrification, it can be said that we ought to create a kind of platonic "junk" metric. Having a metric that in essence random makes bureaucratization impossible, and frees up space for people to freely think. Alterative would be "multi-objective optimization" or having so many metrics that "A for effort" is justified. Metrification and lack of creative slack is often caused by the drainage of funding paired with "anti-intellectualism" of the fundamentalist masses. Political demands for science to "do real work" or pull funding back into military spending or public welfare.
Egregores, info-bombing, homogenization, and groupthink are now universal constants that cannot be changed, it is now a matter of how we can rely on new techniques to navigate information. I for one think that "second brain" or "knowledge gardens" are good ways to create spaces of philosophical play. (need to figure out a sensible way to publish LogSeq with WIP portions tho, need to grow a pair) The best way to fight against single-mindedness is to become multitudes, to dip your toes in every direction and reconcile the contradictions. And yes be heretical lol.
A similar solution to this in STEM is how we need more engineers (artists) and less "scientists". Engineering training IS anxiety inoculation, and most of the bloggers out there are very theory-driven rather than data-driven or experiment-driven. These theorists are more apt in becoming liberal arts writers (midlist or midwit types) than being a real innovator. When LARPing as an innovator is lucrative and midwit writing are being swamped by spammers, the whole ecosystem collapses. A good tell is if they sound like a "theater kid", a performer rather than a maker. Oh look there is a *writer strike* AND an *actor strike* while the EA and X-Risk theorists run wild. https://archive.fo/pgFdQ