I’m claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past.
How does this square with the 2012-2022 machine learning push? The groundbreaking papers are not particularly impressive from a technical standpoint; in fact it’s a well-known meme that machine learning research is quite simple compared to other mathy academic areas. And the impact potential is far beyond any plausible predictions from 10 years ago.
Maybe this is true for most non-ML sciences? But advances in machine learning are already obsoleting decades of work in some other fields of science, and there are reasons to believe this trend will continue.
Only last year science has done severalimpossiblethings. I agree with the analyses on academic metrics, but claims about science being slow should have some slightly stronger supporting evidence.
EDIT: Oops, didn’t see the that the original date is in June 2022, when some of the supporting arguments for my case were not yet available. But the comments still stand; I do not think the assertion in the title is true in the most straightforward interpretation.
How does this square with the 2012-2022 machine learning push? The groundbreaking papers are not particularly impressive from a technical standpoint; in fact it’s a well-known meme that machine learning research is quite simple compared to other mathy academic areas. And the impact potential is far beyond any plausible predictions from 10 years ago.
Maybe this is true for most non-ML sciences? But advances in machine learning are already obsoleting decades of work in some other fields of science, and there are reasons to believe this trend will continue.
Only last year science has done several impossible things. I agree with the analyses on academic metrics, but claims about science being slow should have some slightly stronger supporting evidence.
EDIT: Oops, didn’t see the that the original date is in June 2022, when some of the supporting arguments for my case were not yet available. But the comments still stand; I do not think the assertion in the title is true in the most straightforward interpretation.