308 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 9 Mar \ on: Incentives and coordination to solve hard problems mostly_harmless
That problem is the root of my nym.
Another, similar problem, is that academics focus on small questions that can be answered precisely, because that's how you get published. Attempting big, paradigm shifting work upsets potential reviewers and can't usually be done with the same precision in a single article.
Basically, everyone is just tweaking the parameters of the prevailing model their field adopted decades ago, rather than exploring different models.
Excessively Pedantic Guy (was that his name?): not everyone is just tweaking -- innovation still occurs, but it's not what's generally incentivized. Even so, it eventually breaks through (see e.g., the rise of deep learning, from Hinton and others relentlessly pushing it forward, through decades of neural methods being in disfavor).
But yeah, the incentives are universally bad, as you say. If innovation breaks out, it's in spite of them.
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I agree with your point. I just remember how shocking it was when someone pointed out that pretty much no scientific field has had a major breakthrough in the past 50 years, but many had their major breakthroughs in the 50 years before that. Progress in our understanding of the universe has largely stagnated.
Needlessly Pedantic Man: The "basically" that preceded "everyone" in my previous comment implied that the statement was an inexact summary.
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Implication is irrelevant to Needlessly Pedantic Man.
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