The Rise and Fall of Science. By Ideas and Data.
Scientific progress has significantly slowed over the last century, both at a per-scientist and absolute level. …
Scientific progress has slowed
First, there is the subjective approach. … There exists a set of people and events that experts consider to be important and there is a rank order of these people and events that experts largely agree on, and this rank ordering does not appear to be culturally biased. …
The second approach is, in some sense, a more objective one. It consists of looking at some measure of technological productivity, say the yields of crops or the speed of computers, and looking at how these things have changed with time. … This approach is also obviously limited to technology and cannot measure progress in other, more basic, areas of science. …
(Looking at patent rates is probably not a good measure of scientific innovation. It is a measure of how many new ideas are produced, but it is not necessarily a good measure of how many good ideas are produced.) …
The brown line, the rate, is the important one. (Murray, 2003)
We see the same trend when looking at the rate of significant innovations …
Of course, each generation does achieve at least a few significant scientific breakthroughs. Research which has scientists rank the importance of Nobel prize winning discoveries suggests that the best ideas of the 1970s were better than the best ideas of the 1980s. Ideas from the 1990s and 2000s weren’t included in the data set because almost none of them have been given Nobel prizes, a possible sign of even steeper decline.
The rate of great ideas is declining, and among those great ideas which do manage to be produced, there is also a decline in quality.
But but but … smartphones!!!
Now, some people may be surprised to hear this given the obvious progress that has been made in certain technological fields. For instance, they may note the growth in computational power over the past few decades as evidence of great scientific progress.
However, this data obscures the fact that the number of researchers working on computational power has been increased by a factor of 25 over this period in order to maintain this growth rate.
Across a variety of technological fields, we can see a decline in growth once we control for the number of people working in each field. It can also be seen that this decline began, at the latest, in the 1950’s.
Computers and electronics are private industries with relatively little government interference, and have thrown vast numbers of people at the problems. Bloom (2019)
We’ve been able to maintain the absolute rate of growth in certain technological fields by massively increasing the number of people working on these technologies. …
Despite massively increasing the number of people working in academia, we’ve seen an absolute decline in the rate of major theoretical progress in most academic fields. By theoretical progress, I mean the production of ideas that change fields in a fundamental way and which come to be nearly universally accepted by people in the relevant fields.
I am referring to something similar to what Kuhn famously called a “paradigm shift”. Wikipedia has a list of such paradigm shifts in the natural sciences, and they concord with my impression in that such great shifts largely stop in the third quarter of the 20th century. …
Of course, this is not to say that there’s been no progress in these fields. But the progress that has happened has largely either been incremental progress where details at added to pre-existing paradigms, or new paradigms that fail to gain widespread acceptance (e.g. evolutionary psychology).
I’m also not making the claim that there have been literally no paradigm shifts since the 1970s. But I am saying that it seems highly probable that such shifts have become much rarer.
So, I think there is a real phenomena to be explained here, evidenced by narrative accounts, measures of technological productivity, and counts of important scientific contributions. These methods are all imperfect, but that they all converge on the same conclusion renders that conclusion more probable than its negation in the absence of some other, equally powerful, evidence pointing in the other direction.
All the Low Hanging Fruit Have Been Picked? No, it always seems like that.
Many people attempt to explain the falling rate of scientific progress by saying that scientific progress will inevitably slow with time because people first solve the easiest problems in a given science meaning each successive generation has to solve ever harder problems. …
This was clearly untrue for almost all of human history.
So a proponent of this view needs to explain why it is that this inevitable slowing of science only became manifest within the last century.
We’re also owed an explanation of why it is that this inevitable slowing showed itself at roughly the same time in nearly every scientific field. The fact that this slowing occurred in both very old fields like physics and biology as well as much newer fields like psychology and statistics makes these trends even harder to explain using this hypothesis since it is improbable that various fields would, by random chance, be born at the right time for them to all run out of “easy problems” within a few decades of each other.
Science’s Rise
We see that the rate of scientific progress increased radically between the years 1400 and 1600 [first graph above] …
Murray also conducts a regression showing that rich countries with non-authoritarian governments are more likely to produce great science. …
Unsurprisingly, there is also a link between national intelligence, especially the intelligence of the elite, and national rates of scientific progress. Rindermann (2018) finds that the intelligence level of the 95th percentile of a nation correlates at .76 with its scientific production as measured via various metrics including Nobelprize winnings and the production of highly cited scientific articles. …
More individualistic nations tended to have higher levels of innovation and by several of these measures the association was quite large with individualism explaining over 40% of national variation in several innovation metrics. This makes good theoretical sense given that scientific innovation is often an act of nonconformity and the result of great individual drive.
The last national correlate I want to mention is Protestantism. As I’ve argued in a previous post, Protestantism increases national levels of education, democracy, and wealth, and therefore sets up the national conditions in which science tends to prosper while also encouraging cultural attitudes which are antagonistic towards centralized authority.
While no doubt incomplete, a theory which says that science will flourish in nations which are liberally governed, individualistic, protestant, and highly intelligent, gives us substantial help in explaining why science exploded in north western Europe, and especially England, around the year 1600. …
Scientific progress is largely driven by a small number of scientists working in a small number of countries. Thinking of scientific ability through this frame, we see that it is very rare, and, as the historical picture makes clear, the norm is for there to be virtually none of it anywhere. The decline in scientific progress then can be seen as a return to normal, and so plausibly the result of the destruction of whatever conditions led to the previous period of great scientific productivity.
When political repression started in Renaissance Italy, about 250 people in northern Italy — the leading lights of the Italian Renaissance — moved to the politically easy-going Netherlands and some to England. The Italian Renaissance promptly ended, and the Dutch took over, and later the English. Note the number: about 250 was all it took.
Psychological Correlates of Genius
Eminent individuals possess IQs far above average, and this is especially true of scientists and philosophers. Notably, these IQ estimates are higher than 130, which is roughly the average IQ of scientists and mathematicians …
It is also clear that intelligence, while necessary for genius, is not sufficient. This is obvious since there are far more people with very high IQs than there are geniuses. …
The traits that most strongly differ between creative and non-creative scientists are openness (d = .40), and confidence (d = .39). Using Eysenck’s three factor model of personality, it was shown that, compared to non-scientists, scientists score higher on psychoticism (d =.45) and extroversion (.33), and this difference in extroversion is driven by the dominance facet of extroversion rather than sociability.
Some may be unfamiliar with psychoticism, so it is worth noting that this personality factor is defined by being “aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, creative, and tough-minded”. …
To be recognized as a genius a person normally must think of a new idea and then convince people that old ideas are wrong. This is, by its very nature, a creative, non-conformist act which requires some degree of arrogance, and a great deal of persistence. On the whole, consistently telling everyone else that they’re wrong and you’re right could be described as anti-social. Certainly, being comfortable with being anti-social would make this process easier for someone to do. …
Reviews of people who have made great scientific contributions also suggest that they tend to come from middle class homes.
Religiously, Jews, atheists, and, to a lesser extent, protestants, are over represented among geniuses while Catholics, Muslims, and followers of Asian religions are under represented. Jews, Atheists, and Protestants, share an IQ advantage over neighboring religions, and are relatively non-conformist. Protestants also tend to set up democracies which, as we’ve seen, is a correlate of scientific progress.
We can also see that the vast majority of significant figures were Europeans born after the year 1600.
And most of the science done post-1600 was done by North Western Europeans, especially the English. …
Historically, something like 97% of geniuses have been white. And roughly 98% of them have been men.
Works of genius also tend to be done between the ages of 30 and 40. Plausibly due to intelligence.
There is also a strong tendency for geniuses to have poor or non-existent relationships with their parents. … These poor relations with parents might be related to the anti-social tendencies of geniuses.
So, the model scientific innovator is a non-catholic white male who is smart and creative but who has a troubled history with their parents and thinks in somewhat strange ways and gets his best ideas sometime in his 30’s, and pushes ideas against the status quo in a non-conformist fashion. Northwest Europe between the years 1600 and 1900 was fairly ideal for this sort of thing.
Science’s Decline
With this explanation of scientific progress in mind, a partial explanation of scientific decline is immediately made obvious. It simply involves the undoing of every one of these factors which allowed for great scientific achievement in the first place.
Consider the demographics. Since the 1960s, advanced degrees have increasingly been giving to women, with them now making up the majority of degree earners in many fields. This is true in the US and around the world.
Notably, this increase in women academics may be partly driven by discrimination. Willams and Ceci (2015) sent applications to 2,090 STEM faculty members for academic positions. Across five experiments, they consistently found a 2:1 bias in favor of women.
Of course, we’ve also seen an increase in non-whites taking academic positions in historically white countries. The result of these forces combined is that today in America only 44% of college faculty are white males. …
Given how dominant white males have been in the history of scientific genius, it would be extremely difficult to replace white males with members of other groups with an equal likelihood of being geniuses. We have not even attempted to do this in a serious fashion and so it would be surprising if this demographic shift did not lead to a decline in the rate of genius among academics.
At the same time, various lines of evidence suggest that genotypic IQ, and phenotypic general intelligence, declined over the last century or so. … All over the world, it’s been seen that populations with lower IQs are reproducing at greater rates suggesting that the decline in genotypic IQ is a global phenomenon. …
This problem is plausibly compounded by the fact that we now send a huge number of people to college and so require that there be a huge number of academics to teach them. To accomplish this, we have to lower the bar of what is required in order to be an academic. …
Because our population used to possess greater general intelligence and our population of academics used to be more selective, it seems plausible that academics of the past may have been more competent. This will obviously reduce the rate of innovation per scientist. It may also make the work of geniuses more difficult because the field which they most convince of their innovation now includes a greater number of incompetent individuals who may be relatively immune to the force of reason.
The Rise of Conformist Science
By conformist science, I mean a scientific community in which a great deal of conformity is required in order to be a successful scientist. …
Great scientists are generally non-conformist and an act of scientific innovation is inherently an act of non-conformity. Because of this, institutionalizing conformity in science seems likely to inhibit scientific progress. …
Today, before people can even become academics, they must finish graduate schools. The dissertation process involves dedicating years of one’s life to a question approved by an existing academic. This often means that aspiring academics can’t focus on anything too radical as their advisor will be unlikely to approve something which truly departs from the status quo. …
This is probably more problematic than it at first seems for at least two reasons. First, the topic of one’s dissertation often defines the rest of their academic life and so this may to some degree constrain the boldness of one’s entire career. Second, geniuses often come up with their genius idea in their 30s following many years of study. Innovative insights may be lost if the focus of study in one’s 20s is constrained by existing academics, and the intelligence needed for such insights is diminished at later ages. …
Moreover, once one becomes an academic they are still under strong pressure to not say anything too radical until they’ve acquired tenure. This typically doesn’t occur until someone is in their late 30s or older. Prior to this, their career may be greatly hampered by seriously challenging anything fundamental in their field.
Even once one has tenure, for their work to be seen as respectable it must pass through peer review. Of course, the rise of peer review has meant that scientists must convince the scientists defending the status quo of the legitimacy of their work in order for it to even be published. …
“Science” as the Sole Authority
The final speculation I want to offer is that science has been made worse by the fact that educated people today regard the official scientific community as the sole source of scientific knowledge. Knowledge produced by others is disregarded because of who it was produced by.
This means that many would be geniuses can’t work around the problems of academia by simply doing their work in a different institutional context. To do so would be to volunteer to have one’s work not be taken seriously.
Amen. Another way our civilization is falling. Serious researchers estimate that the average western IQ by 2100 will be 85, so unless there is still some isolated elite that gets around bureaucracy there won’t be much new stuff. Organizations built by Elon Musk and his ilk seem to be the best bet.
