PhD and postdoc salaries are way too low, by a factor of 2 or more. To retain the best, they have to be able to afford services (childcare, etc.) which in the US are extremely expensive. And to work in deep focus, one should not be constantly thinking about saving the next penny.
Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down? If you think so -- is there anything we should be doing differently?
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My equivalent in Comp. Sci makes twice my faculty salary. Their postdocs make 3-5 times what our postdocs make. Bioscience is paying a fundamental price for relying on cheap or free labor, and a monastic vow of poverty is keeping lots of talent away.
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Is there any good (evidence-based) reason to believe it's slowing? Ppl have a tendency to view the past through rose tinted glasses. I don't trust anyone's pronouncements of "things are worse now" unless they've got data to back it up.
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Agree in general, although some change is not really arguable. E.g. the pace of really fundamental advances in particle physics is certainly not what it was last century. Maybe less that it slows but that the frontier location shifts?
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Yes it seems reasonable and expected that the location of rapid change should vary over time. Especially as some of the very people in fields like particle physics move on to other things!
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Yes, definitely agree with this.
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We should agree less on Twitter it makes things less interesting hahaha
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Ha, yeah, I dunno, I like our little corner of civility thanks.
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YAY YOU DIDNT AGREE!!!!
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Oooooooo nice. I didn't even see that. Now everybody's happy!
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It is hard to come up with a metric by which it is slowing, and I think people's perceptions are completely unreliable. That said, shouldn't it? I mean, naively shouldn't progress get harder the more (relatively) "easy stuff" is done?
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Certainly, the volume and depth of experimental data required to support a new finding is increasing. Fortunately, pretty much in line with advances in technical instrumentation.
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True, though discontinuously. I feel like now many fields are generating tons of data and fairly little new understanding. Compare to 90s gene bonanza, where huge discovery + increased understanding in many fields coincided.
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Maybe that's just hindsight... I'm not a pessimist, just think we're in a wool-gathering phase.
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The cycle is: new tech tools > fast adopters > messy hot papers with poor analysis > new analysis tools > better papers but less hot > new tech tools…
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So true, could add somewhere > papers highlighting caveats/limitations of new tech tools or models >
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You haven't read
@drugmonkeyblog on the purchasing power of an R01, have you? -
PIs can do less science with one grant than they could two decades ago. http://drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2018/05/11/the-purchasing-power-of-the-nih-grant-continues-to-erode/ …
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That's only part of the equation, right? If cost per experiment/figure/paper has gone down with cheaper tech...Has it?
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If science only stayed with cheaper tech then yes. But our nature is to push the envelope. So yeah it’s really cheap to sequence a genome now, but we aren’t content with only that knowledge. We can do more, so we will do more, and that more is almost anyways expensive.
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