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Two obvious possibilities (among a space of many, many others):
#1: We picked all the low-hanging fruit
#2: or, We broke institutional science so badly that we just legitimately got worse at doing science, despite the rapidly-growing population of putative "scientists."
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Srsposting longpoast, sorry. I have Opinions on this.
It's a problem in a lot of fields, even the hard sciences. Not necessarily because of goofy niches per se—I wouldn't necessarily mind truly useless work, because that's merely a waste of money. Rather, the freakishly high volume of papers lowers the signal-to-noise ratio to the point that most papers are net-negative because their existence makes important work harder to find.
However, I'd argue this is just one facet of a bigger issue: the professionalization of science and its consequences. It's a human activity almost defined by its incredibly high demand for creativity and raw intelligence. Trying to scale something like that out by adding more bodies is always going to be limited foremost by what miniscule share of the population has the right mental qualities for it.
Now imagine we're in an era where universities care more about agreeableness (historical geniuses tend to be kind of buttholes) and diversity—the best scientists in history were Ashkenazi Jewish males, followed by west Euro males, and this is probably because they are legitimately better, not because discrimination. We tell ourselves that "everyone can do science", so it's okay that we run off those cis het white buttholes—they're supposedly replacable. But I could easily argue the top 0.1% of scientists do 99% of the groundbreaking work, and everyone in the field who is honest with himself knows who those 0.1% are in advance. Good luck if we don't hire them because we need to "be more inclusive."
Further, there are a number of adjacent issues: 1) The idea that science ought to be salaried leads to demand for more frequent results/papers. However, what if important work requires eureka moments with years in between? I wouldn't want to give present-day 'researchers' that leeway with our tax dollars, but real scientists need it. 2) Demands to do work other than research. Again, I don't mind making the current people earn their pay, but it'd be a waste of a genius. Which the geniuses know, so they don't go into academic science. 3) American students avoid grad school because industry pays much better and has better career prospects, so most hard sciences are done using quasi-indentured foreign grad students. 4) Funding is scarce because there are so many researchers, and so much of it is spent on useless work. Plus trying to get funding is a truly gruelling process that can easily occupy a third of someone's annual work hours.
The paper they mention in the first paragraph—Bloom et al., Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?—has been the subject of thinkpieces for years, and it's the source of almost every "we picked all the low-hanging fruit" claim. I'd argue its model is full of mistakes, but the most glaring is the extent to which they assume all man-hours are created equal. Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but he still did more in a handful of years than everyone else in the field did in a century. Adding more mediocre shoulders to stand on is no good if we don't have Newtons there to stand on them.
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A bit of A and a bit of B. The beautiful thing about democracy is that to make it succeed you have no choice but to uplift the average. The downside is if you are anywhere above average then you don't want to be going through democratic processes.
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