michael_nielsen

I think you miss the point. @patrickc and @michael_nielsen are not unfamiliar with that literature. They think it is insufficient. They have been spending time recently, for example, looking at what appears to be the slowdown of basic scientific research. How do we measure that?

My specific point is it takes a monumental amount of hubris to stand up and try to declare a new field of that _people have already been studying for decades_. If they truly want to engage, they wouldn't be trying to invent their own field out of whole cloth.

Like if you want to talk about the slowdown of scientific research, you can talk to literally anyone who does innovation policy or the history of science and get deep on the tangled web of incentive structures, research structures and other things that do and don't affect that

And ironically, this is an exact replication of the type of thing that Silicon Valley does all the time that gets it in trouble. It surveys the world, decides it is wanting, throws out all the existing work, and then only later realizes people knew what they were doing

And further _who is to say its the existing literature is deficient_ , a tech CEO and a business writer waltzing in and saying that no one has anything of value of to say on this subject, is again, hubris in the extreme.

Sorry, but @michael_nielsen is not a business writer but a working scientist. They are not saying that none of the existing literature has value, just that there are many important questions not being investigated. Their view is shared by many science funders, btw.

That has far more to do with these funders and the sheer paucity of investment in socio-technical studies over the last decades than any lack of initiative. We're what, 3 years?, in these fields being taken at all seriously, so of course there are research gaps