Slashdot Mirror
Is There a Creativity Deficit In Science?
nerdyalien writes with this story that explores the impact of reduced science funding on innovation in science. "There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much."...There is no more important time for science to leverage its most creative minds in attempting to solve our global challenges. Although there have been massive increases in funding over the last few decades, the ideas and researchers that have been rewarded by the current peer-review system have tended to be safer, incremental, and established. If we want science to be its most innovative, it's not about finding brilliant, passionate creative scientists; it's about supporting the ones we already have.
yes
We're well past the innovation of the late 20th century, and we're on our way to the navel-gazing imploding Roman Empire stage of our Western civilization.
More bureaucracy, more government, more universities, more requirements for simple jobs, more and more employees "required" for simple jobs, endless regulations and committees and civil servants and laws and rules and regulations...
If the Apollo program were announced today, in 9 years we'd still be arguing over the color of the rocket by PhDs in colorometry.
because the school systems are grinding the future brilliant, passionate creative scientists into drones.
It might, however, take millions of years...
I have been working in research (chemistry) for 10 years, half in academia and half in industry. In my time in academia, it was all about putting together enough results to scrape a paper together, nevermind whether the "promising results" were benchmarked against shitty "state-of-the-art".
In my current industry job, I have been asked to prepare a 5-year plan with high ambitions, and I am free to explore any path to the final goal without (reasonably at least) restrictions.
Unfortunately until non-tenured researchers will need to publish as much as possible without actually delivering important results, this will not change.
In my opinion the peer-review system is not perfect, but it's the best thing we have. I have found many reviewers whose comments have been genuinely beneficial to making my papers stronger. Others barely read the manuscript and rejected it because it encroached on their turf, or didn't cite them enough.
In my opinion the peer-review should be changed to a double-blind system: the reviewer should not see name and affiliation of the authors, and judge the work as it would grade an undergrad paper (i.e. harshly). Like this I believe the signal-to-noise ratio in journals would increase, and only good papers would get published. At that point, I'd be willing to accept impact factor as a measure of worthiness of a publication. Until then, it's just friends judging friends, with nobody wanting to piss off anybody else. Minor revisions, congratulations, you're published.
Well, for starters, 10,000 leagues is a quite a bit over the circumference of the earth, so being so far under the sea is just simply impossible. If this Verne character is serious about his scientific ambitions, he shouldn't be three to four orders off with his approximations.
... is the more salient question.
Hollywood has turned against scientists again, and the anti-science hacks of antivax and climate change denial and creationism/intelligent design and alt-med are getting more and more air time.
Uneducated intuition and magical thinking seem to be the respected characteristics in pop fiction, and well respected heroes like Sagan and David Attenborough have given way to more niche respected heroes like Hawkings, Cox and Tyson.
This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust.
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.
Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.
I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
What you mention is I believe symptom of other problems, not a problem by itself. To run down why science is currently being operated this way would be rather extensive so I'll cover the biggies.
1) IP Laws have allowed certain entities to own ideas, and patent trolls to buy patents in bulk for no other purpose than to milk innovators if a product becomes successful. Remember that success can also include causing damage to a competing product, so the "success" is related to the patent owner and not society or the science. This has dissuaded sharing of science (collaboration) that up until very recent times was very normal and healthy for progress.
2) Massive government and bureaucratic control of public funding. This has allowed "pet" project funding in place of what benefits society. In fact many projects are only to benefit the bureaucrats at the detriment of society.
3) Same massive government does not understand science to uses measures which are invalid and unrealistic to maintain science programs.
Everyone else including Universities are playing the games. There are many motives for this, and in many cases playing along is the only way to get funding.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Now the best way to resolve this is to increase basic research funding to college labs and lone researchers who go through a vetting process.
The problem with trying to do research in a University setting is that there is a strong tendency to rely on graduate students to do the lab work - rather than career scientists. This means that a typical tenured science professor graduates another new science PhD every couple years. So the tenured professor could easily graduate a dozen or so PhDs over their career before retiring to create one single solitary job opening for those dozen PhDs.
And that creates a problem in funding lone researchers. The number of people with science PhDs would would love to be paid to go off on their own and research a big question is orders of magnitude greater than the available funding. There's this huge pool of people who are all capable of major creative breakthroughs in science - but no way to know who is more or less likely to actually succeed if you fund them.
And in addition to this a certain percentage of the funding should be earmarked for experimental research that doesn't have any immediate payoff.
Of course, all other things being equal more funding is better. But when it comes to cutting edge outside-the-box scientific research I'd be in favor of keeping the government out of it almost entirely - don't make any attempt to judge the research itself.
Instead, what I would propose is part-time arrangement. Pay a scientist a decent salary, say, $75K/year, to do six months of work that requires specialized skill and creativity but is relatively well defined - giving lectures in science, DNA sequencing more diverse organisms, etc. Then for the other six months let the scientists work on whatever they want - without any restriction aside from subject/patient ethics. If the tax payers absolutely insisted, the scientists could be required to keep a basic accounting of their time to show that they were, in fact, doing something scientific with their time (wrote code for molecular dynamics simulation in morning, researched replica exchange algorithms in afternoon, etc.).
But the key point would be to not impose bureaucratic restrictions on the areas of science to be explored.
Neither you nor the GP offer any evidence to back up your claims. I'm not interested in preparing a thesis about the correlation of political orientation and intelligence. I'll just offer this,
http://www.psychologytoday.com...
and share my own personal experience, which us that there are smart and dumb people across the political spectrum.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In some areas, e.g. for SIGGRAPH, the review is double-blind; only the paper committee knows the identity of the authors so that they can assign reviews who do not have a conflict of interest. However, this only really works for areas that are being hotly pursued by many different research groups; diction (often researchers will have different terms for the same thing based on what research group they are in), writing style and illustrations will often give away at least one of the authors, if not the first author.
Lee Smolin's brilliant book The Trouble with Physics discussed this issue eight years ago. The book also includes the best introduction to string theory for a scientifically oriented non-physicist I have ever seen.
Smolin concluded the "trouble with physics" is the problem discussed in the article: the current system rewards small incremental steps over creative leaps. He discusses the risk to payoff ratios. He says the current system drums out most truly creative people.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I work in biomedical research and yes - a lot of money is diverted into research with incremental benefits - me-too drugs.
remember that big pharma spend more on marketing than on research.
The interesting stuff has effectively been outsourced to start-ups that find compounds, do some basic work and then sell to a pharma to commercialise. That way at least the people doing the creating get some benefit.
What hasn't happened in its stead is any good research at delivering and applying a lot of the knowledge/ practice we do have, and this is where we could get a lot of bang for our buck and we could be a lot more creative - just by doing what we know works correctly.
This is particularly true in fields where there is not currently much research (because there is no big drugs market)
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
You cannot predict what you do not know, and to measure how long something takes, it turns out you need to know it pretty darn well. So if anyone claiming to be a scientist claims they need x dollars to get you something amazing in y days, they are talking straight out of their ass. All they have is their curiosity and a hunch. The journey is unknown, and so are the results. To know you will succeed, you have had to have succeeded already. This isn't to be confused with engineering. Engineering is different because you already know the technology and have the tools. You can simulate what you're building before you build it. But the science that gives way to technology no one can predict. If anyone should admit to this, it should be the scientists. The only reason they can't is for political and financial reasons.
Is 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea considered science?
I don't know; I've never heard of it. By any chance are you referring to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? If so, most definitely, because the book accurately predicted a number of features that later became standard on submarines.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
All I am saying is this emphasis on leadership and creativity is a little too much. Leads to "All Chiefs and no Indians" problem. Good, strong, independent thinking followers are as important to science as leaders. And we need an order of magnitude more followers. If anything we should reduce the incentives for creativity so that only truly creative people shine through.
[*1] Power Law: aka 80-20 law. 80% income by top 20% of earners, 80% of crime by 20% of criminals etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's not that hard to see what you have to do. Provide a funding system that reflects how science actually works. Provide longer-term grants that are accepting of minor failures or changes in research direction. Cut down on the bureaucracy and the committees. Realize that not all research falls into the domain of 'big name' journals and instead focus on more realistic metrics of progress. Some funding agencies are already starting to move in this direction.
Non-risky science is a big problem, but there's an even bigger problem. You know how news outlets have a focus on churning out news that is sensationalist and overhyped to whore for views and attention? Well, sadly, it's starting to look like that in science. Nowadays the most 'successful' labs are the ones that hype their output the most and shout loudest over the din of everyone else. This is aided and encouraged by both grant agencies and 'big name' journals like Nature.
As a result, we now have an entire self-sustaining system for producing bullshit, where bullshit goes through the cycle of hype and publication, leading to grant money, leading to even more bullshit. Some of these big labs become black holes for funding, consuming millions upon millions and then ten years later everyone wonders why their miraculous cancer cure turned out to be a dud.
I don't know when it got this way, or if it's always been this way. Hell, I'm just a newcomer. But I have a hard time imagining that this system would produce people like Einstein or Crick. People like Fleischmann and Pons, more likely.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
True. Some people are quite intelligent but pretend to be stupid in order to fit in with a bunch of luddite extremists, especially if there is a chance of money or power on the table.
NASA, for example, does not allow grant funding to be used to write grants. So, this preliminary data thing sounds like a different model. Where did the money come from to obtain the preliminary data? With regard to NASA, grants can cover administrative overhead. And, most institutions have support for new grant writing efforts. Doubtless, some NASA grant money that goes to overhead ends up providing support for that kind of effort so new grants do get written. It is just murky.
In any case, all that work to find out if an idea is technically feasible enough to make a good grant proposal gets paid for somehow to persuade peers that a proposal is viable. So, really, the originality of new grant proposals has something to do with how well faculty are supported in exploring new ideas. That would seem to be the place to ensure that peer reviews get to see exciting and not just competent proposals. Are the institutions hiring the most creative postdocs, for example? Are junior faculty getting good seed money? Is there time set aside for use of laboratories for pursuit of hunches? So, if granting institutions want to see more creative proposals, they'll have to look at the institutional culture grant overhead supports.
Creativity tends to go a different direction with mainstream. When peer-review is important do you really want to contradict or say something different from your peers?
It may look like scientists nowadays are less creative. I don't think it's the case, they just communicate more.
Research is always made in small steps. The thing is that now, with sites like arXiv and search engines, we see all these small steps instead of just the end result. It is probably why it looks more incremental.
Another factor is that we have pretty much nailed down most of the human scale phenomena. Science now needs to address high level of accuracy or work at the nano or cosmic scales. Our brains are not made to deal with this, as a result, a lot of rigor is required and most wonderfully creative ideas end up flat out wrong when compared to the actual data. Because of this, when someone comes up with a creative idea, we need to make sure that he is ready to deal with high precision observations.
In elementary school, my kids did an independent science fair project every year. They learned to do graphical programming in Scratch. The school had several teams that competed in robotic competitions.
FYI that's not a normal public school.
It is if you are middle class. And it is not just a public school issue. It is also an income issue. My girl will have a greater chance of success given that
compared to another kid of the same age and talent potential whose parents
Neither situation implies guarantee success for my girl nor failure for the hypothetical kid in the comparison. But the conditions and disparities are real, and amount and accrue to tilt the odds one way. No amount of public education the way it is funded nowadays can change that.
We know how to teach. We simply allow a system that permits the existence of school districts better funded than others.
The problem people are discussing here is not about the school system per say, but the system that funds public education which is a) highly local, and b) relies heavily on real state taxes. If there were true state and federal level public education funding systems and/or if we were to diversify local public education funding away from real state taxes, you would see a change.
You can have a great brain surgeon or a world class oncologist, but he will not do his magic if you pay him crap, you only give him a Neolithic stone dagger and a bag of aspirins to do his work, and you measure his performance under such conditions. It is not a problem with his professional potential, but the system that funds him and deploys him.
This is very obvious. So why do we examine public education on a different light? It is not our public education system that is doing this or that. It is the system that funds it, and our culture's ethos regarding the role of state and federal government that are a) vital to our society and b) whose support systems are fundamentally broken.
Either we get Fed/big government involved, or we get local governments to find more equitative (cue morons screaming "socialism!"), more diversified sources of funding away from things that are purely a function of economic brackets/classes (real state taxes.)
We do not want big government involved, but at the same time, we do not do shit to properly fund public education across all income brackets and neighborhoods? How the hell does that make sense? How the hell does this become a fault of our public education system?
The research bearing fruit. No one is suggesting removing protections from actual subjects. The article is about funders wanting to fund "successful" (that is, hypothesis affirming) and "publishable" (that is, less contraversial) experiments.
His goal is to somehow shift the funder's incentives so high sucessful completion risk/high reward (either in basic knowledge or specific benefit) stuff gets made.
And I agree. The shit that gets funded at any real level is often piecemeal and uninteresting. Hell, even "we want money to try a similar study with N>35 so we can test a lot of spin off research of this promising study" get shot down for being too out there.%lt;/rant>
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Nary a word about Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in particular the distinction between the puzzle solving of normal science and the different conditions of revolutions in thinking? Oh, the revolutionary thinkers face an uphill battle (like they always have)? I am shocked, shocked, at this sorry state of not learning from the history of science.
I know some people in academic research; retired and current.
The system is fucked up; to use the expression of the youngest one.
In pursuit of "perfection" we have so much worrying about oversight to prevent waste and corruption that was already lower than everywhere else that we continually clamp down and harm the system more every "reform." This extends into the publishing system which also has a "gold stars" approach where it's all about quantity and not quality. A big earth shattering research paper is foolish; you milk it for dozens of lesser papers almost nobody reads (and creates more research work.) So now we need IBM to device an AI to handle the volume when it probably could go down by a factor of 100 (that said, active topics are still too much for a human to keep up with.)
Creative science isn't even required-- we just need to fund wasteful stuff that politicians ignorantly rail against as being pointless. Some marine biologist wasting time studying some creature we don't eat... like sharks... finding out why bacteria don't cling to their skin like other creatures might be a total waste; however, that led to super anti bacterial coverings (which you don't see because somebody was allowed a trivial patent on publicly funded research... the real invention was the "pointless" research.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If we don't know what we don't know, then we don't know if there's value in knowing whatever it is that we don't yet know. That's when we should fund research, to find out if the funding was worth the price of knowing whatever it is we don't know... and if there is something to know, whether it is worth knowing.
But if we research what we already know, then because we already know most of what we want to know about, we will know only a little more about what we know much about rather than know much more about what we know little about.
Isn't that pretty clear?
In some fields, letting scientists go half-time with whatever scientific thing they wanted would work, more or less. In others, it's necessary to work in teams with a whole lot of capital costs.
Assume somebody wants to do some neat experiments in particle physics, with a possibility of major breakthroughs but likely confirming what we already know. That person is likely to need access to the LHC, which is more than the person's going to be able to afford on $75K/year. (BTW, that is not an impressive salary for somebody with a Ph.D. in a technical field.) Biological experiments are going to require quite a few specimens, and some of them are fairly expensive.
This plan would impose considerable restrictions on the areas of science to be explored.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes