This is conservative lobbying spam. The umbrella group producing this document is called the "National Academy of Scholars" (NAS), which publishes articles about "globalists" and is funded by conservative donors (see https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/annual...).
Annoyingly, the National Academy of Scholars was named in a way that collides in the namespace with the (actually reputable) National Academy of Sciences (publishers of PNAS).
You may not like who funded the article, but it still makes valid points about the limitations of science research being so heavily connected to the mouse-maze that is college academics.
As opposed to the mouse-maze that is corporate finance?
BTW, private companies have also been doing science for decades. Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC? Battelle Labs? SpaceX? Tesla?
What we've learned is what kinds of research is best conducted by what kind of entity - commercial or private. We don't need the fallacy of this false dichotomy.
While I think simulations and models are interesting, this model is just way too simplified to give any real insight. Here's an example of a leading scholar in the field -- Allie Morgan -- developing a simple model on this exact question!
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
> Title: Prestige drives epistemic inequality in the diffusion of scientific ideas
> Abstract: The spread of ideas in the scientific community is often viewed as a competition, in which good ideas spread further because of greater intrinsic fitness, and publication venue and citation counts correlate with importance and impact. However, relatively little is known about how structural factors influence the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea originates might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate the role of faculty hiring networks, which embody the set of researcher transitions from doctoral to faculty institutions, in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates. We consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications. Analyzing five popular research topics, we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does facilitate the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a mechanism, we then analyze its potential consequences using epidemic models to simulate the generic spread of research ideas and quantify the impact of where an idea originates on its longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions. Our analyses establish the theoretical trade-offs between university prestige and the quality of ideas necessary for efficient circulation. Our results establish faculty hiring as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a theoretical lower bound for the impact of structural inequality in shaping the spread of ideas in science.
Thanks for sharing, that’s a pretty damning indictment of how science is currently done.
I think the two most important quotes being:
“The spread of ideas in the scientific community is often viewed as a competition, in which good ideas spread further because of greater intrinsic fitness, and publication venue and citation counts correlate with importance and impact.”
“We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions.”
> We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions.
That's a bit of a leap though, isn't it? How to establish that the works are of 'similar quality'?
Well, this
> As a result, well-known scientists tend to receive more credit than lesser-known scientists for work of comparable quality [27].
basically just references a bunch of other works.
One way of quality measurement is with the benefit of time I suppose - which would also be the way you would have the best metrics for idea diffusion.
If the future is already here just not evenly distributed yet it follows that what is evenly distributed now at some point in the past was unevenly distributed. With a good enough paper trail, which scientific publications provide, we could have a model of the distribution of these ideas that we believe, with the benefit of hindsight, are of similar quality.
Sure, but if there is some kind of feedback loop in there it will mask out even the effects of time.
Some possible feedback loops:
Well known universities have more funds available and will be able to attract the best teachers away from the lesser universities.
Researchers may be willing to cite work from well known universities over similar work done at lesser universities.
The work done at other universities may be in a language that the researchers are not familiar with.
And so on. Quality in a vacuum is a very precise term but in the real world you'd have to discount for all of those factors.
In the tech world we have a similar example: Silicon Valley is 'where it happens' because it has a head start that is impossible to compete with which automatically attracts new talent and funding to a degree that it starves locations elsewhere resulting in an equality that dwarfs any qualitative effects that you may want to measure.
>Well known universities have more funds available and will be able to attract the best teachers away from the lesser universities.
if we see that the work 20 years ago at a lesser known university was of the same quality as the work at a well known one, then I don't really get your argument about the money?
>Researchers may be willing to cite work from well known universities over similar work done at lesser universities.
which would really be confirming the argument that similar levels of quality get treated differently given their source.
It's a simulation (following the theme of the OP submission), so these outputs are assumed to be the same quality. The point is even if you assume the quality is the same, the structure of the faculty hiring network alone will drive faster/further diffusion from prestigious institutions.
This massive labor shift toward service work has been well underway across the US. See, eg, this excellent case study of how Pittsburgh's aging, shrinking cohort of unionized steel workers (with good health insurance) has been demographically offset by a growing (precarious, non-unionized) medical and care industry. Now the largest employer in Pittsburgh is the university medical center, and the largest sector is care workers.
that's great, thanks for sharing! (though I'm not enough of a domain expert to know if it's accurate)
another solution to this would be if Science Advances were to require submissions to provide a "Significance Statement", like PNAS does, which would be essentially at the level of readability you provided.
Generally not, but there will always be someone (next in line) who is responsible for the overall risk management. I think the problem was, once they discovered this mess, there wasn't a whole lot they could do, with rates going up. They could have booked several billion dollar loss early on, but instead, they decided to wait it out.
It's worth keeping in mind that Stephen Wolfram likely didn't write this himself.
I know people who work at the company, and they sign agreements that any intellectual property (including mathematical proofs) they generate are owned by Stephen Wolfram. Anything Wolfram puts out, like blog posts, scientific articles, and books, are likely to be partly or wholly ghost-written.
Annoyingly, the National Academy of Scholars was named in a way that collides in the namespace with the (actually reputable) National Academy of Sciences (publishers of PNAS).