This is a followup question to: Is innovation in decline because of inadequate incentives?
The Economist February 27, 20120 issue in the Free Exchange column alludes to an article, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2019) by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, Michael Webb, and John Van Reenen,
But if society solves more problems, shouldn’t that increase the number of problems to be solved? For example, the advent of electronic computers created new fields related to algorithmic efficiency, data compression, software puzzles, entertainment, creation of digital social media and so on. That examples implies that the number of questions available for research should be increasing. Why would innovation be in decline? (Or maybe it isn't?)
Here is an analogy. I don’t know if it applies. When Rome became rich under the Empire, it was possible to get rich by politically obtaining more of the existing wealth, rather than adding to the already created infrastructure?
Is it possible that a similar effect could obtain in a mature academic system? Might there be more financial reward in protecting existing academic turf that seeking out new, riskier academic domains? Your thoughts?
The damage that reviewers can inflict was noted by Mintzberg (2004): "Sumantra Ghoshal wrote to the same editor about an article that he had earlier reviewed: 'I have seen the article three times … The reviewing process, over these iterations, has changed the flavor of the article significantly. I believe that the new argument … is interesting but unavoidably superficial … Citations and literature linkages have driven out most of the richness and almost all of the speculation that I liked so much in the first draft. While the article perhaps looks more 'scholarly,' I am not sure who exactly gains from this look … I cannot get over the regret of description, insight, and speculation losing out to citation, definition, and tightness. (Reprinted in Mintzberg, 2004, p. 399)
Reference
Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
That is a topic of debate. However, without peer review the quality of the works fall drastically. A better idea can be to continue with peer-review, but to focus only on the methodological aspects and not in the political agenda of the research.
I would like to call your attention to this paper: Wang, Jian and Veugelers, Reinhilde and Stephan, Paula E., Bias Against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators (April 2016). NBER Working Paper No. w22180. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2769712
Eduardo B. Viotti
Thank you for the reference to the paper, Bias Against Novelty in Science, which is so pertinent to the question posed above.
Your calling attention to this paper should be appreciated by anyone looking at your reply above.
Regards.
Science: Do preprints improve with peer review? A little, one study suggests By Jeffrey Brainard Mar. 26, 2020.
From bioRxiv: Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature. /doi.org/10.1101/581892
" the greatest difference observed from preprints to their peer-reviewed versions was the prevalence of conflict of interest statements"
Dear Robert,
for Eric Weinstein, peer-review is an integral part of „the DISC“ (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex) and he gives many impressing examples in support of your thesis (you can find that on Youtube). Also, the „Grievance Studies Hoax“ (Pluckrose, Lindsay, Boghossian, 2017/2018) and the „Reproducibility Crisis“ (2020) can be seen as indicators of massive structural problems with and through peer-review.
All the best,
Franz
Franz Kasper Kronig.
Thank you for your reply. I have not previously encountered Eric Weinstein or the DISC. Sometimes novel ideas have a frosty reception, this goes back to at least Aristarchus and probably much further back. Imagine a debate 200,000 years ago: A says (grunting), I still say grunts are more emotive than words.
I found the site below. https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Distributed_Idea_Suppression_Complex_(The_DISC)
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