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Luke_A_Somers comments on Superintelligence 5: Forms of Superintelligence - Less Wrong
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When I point out the low-hanging fruit effect to LWers, I do usually get a lot of agreement (and it is appreciated!) but I am starting to wish that someone would dig up some strong contrary evidence.
When the topic of apparent genius deficits and scientific stagnation comes up, people often present multiple explanations, like
but tend to present only anecdotal evidence for each — myself included. And I'm not sure that can be helped; I don't know of readily available evidence which powerfully discriminates between the different explanations.
PhilGoetz has data on scientific & technological progress, but I get the impression that much of it's basically time series of counts of inventions & discoveries, which would establish only the whats and not the whys. Likewise, I think I could substantiate my January comment that cohort explains a substantial part of the variation in scientific eminence. And when I scraped together the data, ran the big regression, and found that birth year accounted for (suppose) 30% of the variance in eminence, that wouldn't refute any of the potential explanations for why cohort correlated with eminence.
A partisan of the scaling hypothesis might say, "Obviously, as science gets bigger over time, it gets less efficient; more recently born scientists just lost the birth year draw".
Someone arguing that scientific stagnation is illusory might say, "Obviously, this is a side effect of overlooking more recent scientific geniuses; scientists are working as effectively as before but we don't recognize that thanks to increasing specialization, or our own complacency, or the difficulty of picking out individual drops from the flood of brilliance, or the fact that we only recognize greatness decades after the fact".
I would say, if I were the kind of person who threw the word "obviously" around willy-nilly, "How many times do you expect general relativity to be invented? Obviously, there are only so many simple but important problems to work on, and when we turn to much harder problems, we make slower and more incremental progress".
Someone most concerned with institutional degradation might say, "Obviously, as science has become more bureaucratic and centralized, that's rendered it more careerist, risk-averse & narrow-minded and less ambitious, so of course later generations of scientists would end up being less eminent, because they're not tackling big scientific questions like they did before".
And we don't get anywhere because each explanation is broadly consistent with the observed facts, and each seems obvious to someone.
I would put forth three lines of argument that might help.
First, what we consider a significant development is put in relation to its context. So, we naturally end up picking out the top-level entities and not the second-layer entities, let alone the third, fourth, fifth... modern science may have the same number of top-level discoveries, but these are underpinned by many more layers of discovery than earlier discoveries.
Second, let's stop thinking about the jump from Aristotle to modern science for a minute. Let's think about the jump from Novoselov and Geim's discovery of Graphene to today.
In their first paper, they made graphene, put it on a substrate, hooked a few wires up to it, and did low-temperature transport measurements. Worth a nobel prize. Outside of the insight that led to it, pretty simple. Not everyone could do it, but many could.
In the following years, a bunch of progressively trickier experiments were performed.
As of two years ago, our clearest path to a publishable research paper in this area was to make an enormous pristine sheet of graphene, position a layer of boron nitride on top of it, position another layer of graphene on top of that in such a way that it didn't short to the first piece, place a bunch of wires in very specific locations on this sandwich, then destroy the substrate that was all sitting on, all done so cleanly that it was smooth on every surface. This was insanely hard. This is also only a little trickier than normal for experiments in the field these days.
The low-hanging fruit has been taken, here. And it's not simply that other people took it and we're looking at sour grapes. I took some of that low-hanging fruit. There was a simple experiment to do, I did it, published it, and now I cannot do an experiment that simple again in this sub-field. My next experiment was substantially more complicated. The next experiment after that was far more complicated still.
Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but we are in a progressively rarer atmosphere.
Third, and most critically, let's look at the predictions of the 'organizational inefficiency' theory. if we were to scale back our scientific establishment to 1700-s levels, do you think we'd maintain our current level of scientific progress? That seems to be the implication, here, and it seems VERY dubious to me.