Science Fails To Show Up On Schedule

Science is an incredibly popular religion for the Godless. It always tells you how to do what you want to do, but never if you should.

But all is not well with the faithless-ful. They’ve been waiting for some VERY important scientific breakthroughs… and wonder why creativity ain’t happening on their timetable!

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

h ttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

By Max Kozlov, 4 January 2023

No one, they say? Heh heh

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

One thing that changed is this newfangled idea that world-changing discoveries and technologies are supposed to happen on schedule and on demand. Another thing that changed is suggested by their phrase “millions of manuscripts”. Back in the day, science was done by otherwise ordinary people who wanted to understand “nature and Nature’s God”, as some wags have put it.

Today, science is done mostly by people whose concept of science is publication. And lo, a million manuscripts were scientifically invented! Life found a way!

The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead would cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the CD index, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.

The average CD index declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010 for research manuscripts (see ‘Disruptive science dwindles’), and by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents. Disruptiveness declined in all of the analysed research fields and patent types, even when factoring in potential differences in factors such as citation practices.

Welcome to the Maximegalon Institute Of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious! Today’s scheduled discovery: institutional bureaucracy is a terrible way to advance human knowledge.

“It’s great to see this [phenomenon] documented in such a meticulous manner,” says Dashun Wang, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies disruptiveness in science. “They look at this in 100 different ways, and I find it very convincing overall.”

Some scientists can handle the truth.

Other research2 has suggested that scientific innovation has slowed in recent decades, too, says Yian Yin, also a computational social scientist at Northwestern. But this study offers a “new start to a data-driven way to investigate how science changes”, he adds.

Others cannot.

It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, [says John Walsh, a specialist in science and technology policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta]. The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same.

Finding an explanation for the decline was as easy as pondering what “disruptive research” means. The people who fund & direct science are on record wanting some very specific “disruptive” advances!

Artificial Intelligence & cloning, so that most humans can be reclassified as expendable.

Digital currency, so that people’s money can be stolen at will.

Subscription-based medicine, because healthy people are unprofitable people.

Internet of Things, because anonymous behavior is insurrectionist behavior. Also, nothing says ‘science’ like implanting behavior-control microchips in peoples’ brains.

And most of all, we need “disruptive advances” in Climate Change that prove humanity will go extinct without the daily supervision and intervention of an all-powerful humanist government. Climate Change science should also ‘discover’ that air travel is eco-friendly for plutocrats but not for proletariats.

One may conclude from such research goals, that the reason scientists cannot discover anything truly new, is that the people directing their research cannot steal what doesn’t yet exist.

Legit advances in human knowledge come from two factors: the belief that the material world is a Creation, carefully ordered by a transcendental Designer and running on unchanging rules much like a pocketwatch; and ordinary people having sufficient free time, wealth and motivation to follow their curiosity in solving the problems of the day.

In other words, true progress comes from devotion to Christ and the existence of a prosperous middle class.

You DON’T get progress by impoverishing the ordinary people and compensating with a small stable of designated scientists who were chosen for their ability to repeat party dogma and whose primary job is to justify the thefts and perversions of their benefactors.

You DON’T get progress by assuming there is no God, then refusing to revisit that assumption no matter the evidence.

And you CERTAINLY DON’T get progress from a bureaucracy. Nobody creates a bureaucracy in expectation of profits and productivity. A bureaucracy’s only purpose ever is the same as a bloodsucking insect’s: to consume enough lifeblood from an innocent victim to reproduce itself.

Now that science has become a proudly Godless bureaucracy in thrall to people whose main use for it is how to murder the bulk of humanity without crimping their jet-set lifestyle, amazing new discoveries aren’t happening regularly?! What a perfectly bureaucratic concept.