New essay from @patrickc and myself, arguing that science has suffered from greatly diminishing returns over the past century:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ …
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The subjective survey methodology guarantees the outcome will be dominated by availability bias. "Sharks kill more people than mosquitos!" Today there are: (1) many more innovations (2) happening more frequently (3) on a far more distributed basis (4) developed by more people.
I don't think I understand the first part of the comment - could you clarify? Do you mean ppl will reply with whatever past discovery is top of mind, not based on merits? In the second part it sounds as though you're saying there will be diminishing returns(?)
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The innovations pointed to by Gordon are "Edison invents lightbulb" style innovation. Today's innovations are more like Kubernetes (open-source container-orchestration). Today there's no lone inventor like Edison. Distributed continuous incremental innovation is the new normal.
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As another example, Linus Torvalds invented Git. Many people contributed to making that technology valuable and spreading its usage and usability. Git isn't easy to grasp like the toilet Gordon likes to talk about. Where's the Nobel prize for computer science and software?
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This is interesting and good data to have but I too wonder about the subjectivity. We have only the current generation's opinions. I wouldn't call it "availability" bias on their part: but can they fairly judge discoveries of different distances in the past?
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Few understand what innovations GitHub or Kubernettes are, let alone what they do. They aren't like a light bulb or a toilet. But they do enable innovative new services at vastly more affordable prices like Kahn Academy, Lyft, Airbnb and Alipay. Important tech is often invisible.
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