Noah SmithVerified account

4/There are at least two big problems I see with this methodology. The first is that Nobel Prizes are rate-limited - there can only be up to 3 per year, usually for just one or two discoveries.

5/Suppose scientific progress were actually accelerating. That doesn't necessarily mean you'd see an increasing *level* of importance for the Nobel-winning discoveries. You might just see an increasing *number* of important discoveries, many of which couldn't win Nobels.

7/The authors interpret the paucity of prizes for discoveries since 1990 as evidence of declining #'s of important discoveries. But it could indicate the committee scrambling to award prizes to a huge # of important discoveries before the discoverers die (and become ineligible)!

8/The second methodological problem is that a scientific discovery's actual, real importance is not fixed in time. New discoveries build on old ones. Each new discovery makes the old discoveries it's based on grow in actual importance.

9/Consider all the recent discoveries that MIGHT lead to great things, or MIGHT be relatively dead-endish. Will CRISPR allow ubiquitous safe genetic engineering? Or will it be a mostly useless tool due to massive side effects? We don't know yet.

10/EVEN IF scientists are capable of accurately assessing a discovery's importance, graphs of importance vs. time are naturally biased against recent discoveries. It'll be decades before we know what discoveries from the 2010s really changed the world.