The decline in scientific productivity is due to complex social and technical factors that have resulted in a feminized academia and 'play-it-safe' research
The obvious solution is alternative academia to outcompete the state-backed academia, founded by autists for autists, somehow resilient against normie takeover, e.g. by strict meritocracy being autistically enforced.
Obviously this is illegal in the world of "civil rights" and "equity laws", because such a system would strongly bias towards white men, so such alternative academia would have to operate outside the west, or get past these laws somehow.
Its already happening in tech. Kids are skipping University and being recruited direct from High School based on testing and apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is making a come back. Startup life is the only way to go now if you are part of the discriminated class.
"unfortunately they’re likely too busy eating crayons and sucking donor dick." HAHAHAHA
It will be fixed when the sacrifice and reward systems are fixed. Which is likely never.
However, there might be something with what Musk is driving at. When people do make it to Mars, which I think they will sooner rather than later. You will have people innovating – because they're on Mars!
People on Mars can't rely on bullshit research from Earth. They'll have to figure out new things on the spot. And I believe they will.
As the proverb goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Who first said it and when – I don't care, you get the point.
Why does everyone want to be rich?
People like to be comfortable, that much is known. And so, people will not strive for things that don't gain them something, either in the form of increased comfort, or the form of legacy. Currently the incentives are just not there for real scientific research. You can get big-ass grants for bullshit papers, why would you strive to do something real?
I would like to go a step further though. I think that all this is on purpose. I believe that there are innovations that have far surpassed what we’ve seen in the private realm – and bullshit research and the grant system itself are the cover.
In other words, you don’t need a conspiracy, you just need the existing scientific research framework to be minimally effective, and then incentivize that ineffectiveness.
Putting women back in the harem will solve the feminization of the sciences issue. That will take another 100-250 years, ceteris paribus. Depopulation might supercharge the pace, though its more likely to supercharge surrogacy and artificial wombs. OTOH, rehareming women will also signal the rise of a reactionary conservative regime that will gleefully see to the "completion of science" in the Spenglerian meaning of the phrase.
Fantastic atmeticke, pulling together threads from several different areas to form a cohesive whole.
I don't see the university model lasting another 50 years. Trump's idea of American University would easily get half of the current college cohort on board and sink most universities. Then the truly elite who truly want to do research can go to a brick and mortar campus and do real work.
There's an "edit" button, I won't fault you for using it. Thanks for the review though. I've seen a number of articles on this subject, but few have the inside-perspective that I can provide on academic work.
An additional problem occurs when breakthrough research or invention goes against bigger interests. The enthusiasm around the Royal Rife microscope or the circumstances leading to Nikola Tesla's shut down of operations cone to mind.
This is even beyond the scope of what happened to Peter Duisberg's career which could be classified as found against financial interests AND a resulting scientific dogma.
Speaking of which, the way to the stars will stay a bumpy road when all revisiting of Einsteinian cosmology is forbidden. 90% unmeasurable "dark" matter my ass. But hey, now the equation works again.
All this is of course partly beyond academia per se but it fits with the general tenor of this great article IMO.
Unfortunately, there's no editing option. I meant to say " initial enthusiasm with the Royal Rife microscope and subsequent destruction of the whole enterprise"
You're right, Academia is in a rough spot. this spending freeze by the Federal government is going to cause extreme reevaluations in research. Hopefully.
A brilliant analysis. As a scientist who has spent 30 years post-PhD building a professional career while avoiding the bullshit, you've diagnosed the problems very well. What I have been able to do (which of course, won't work for everyone) is to get engineering jobs adjacent to my scientific interests. Sometimes (rarely) I get paid to do what I want to do. Other times, I get paid to do useful but less interesting work. I spend my free time pursuing my self-directed research. Hardly ideal, but the difficulties are far less than navigating the hostile territory of academia.
I am in the process of putting together a curated list of scientific/invention/business ideas that I lack the money/time/talent/gumption to develop myself. The free tier will be open to everyone to develop, and so will the paid tier (though it will be limited to “billion dollar ideas”). In the next few years, you may well see disruptive innovations coming out of this collection. It has been described as a reverse incubator—instead of founders looking for funding, it consists of ideas looking for founders.
I have a list of several hundred ideas in science/inventions/business that have been filling up my computer and phone for years, which I have tried and failed to materialize, so I am releasing (most of) them into the general public to use instead. I am sick of being the bottleneck for all these great ideas—it is less important that they are developed by me than that they are developed by someone.
As an example, parents cannot bring their babies to swimming pools because diapers only come in two varieties. Either they absorb nothing and so the pool fills with ever increasing partial pressure of baby urine, or else they absorb the urine…and then attempt to absorb the entire pool, upon which they explode and make an even bigger mess. Well, if we add a simple zeolite lining, the diaper will absorb only the pee but not the pool water, because of the different pH of the two liquids.
On the paid tier, there is a metamaterial that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity as a byproduct—note that this is not standard electrolysis, because there is a net gain of electricity; the resulting hydrogen and oxygen can then be fed into a standard fuel cell and produce electricity as a byproduct, along with water which can be sent back through the metamaterial to be split again. Round and round using the same water over and over, with a constant stream of electricity. I don’t know how it works, just that experiment seems to indicate that it does (I have been as yet unable to procure a sample for field tests, but the recipe for making it is included in the patent).
We can include lots of crazy ideas as well as straightforward ideas like noise-suppression headphones for dogs (an instant seller with a widespread built-in audience). I have named the site (still in the design phase) FOR SCIENCE!! because my motives are less mercenary than aspirational. These ideas need to be instantiated, for the continuation of civilization and the glory of mankind.
I am pleased to no end that you have shown interest in this project. I hope in the coming days to turn this project from a back-of-the-envelope project into a finished site. I would be glad of any and all help you may be able to contribute.
I am interested. This actually seems like a few things that are up my alley in a technical sense. Substack supports direct-messages to authors, not just comments. Click on my username and hit the 'message' button. We can talk there... pretty decent based on what little I'm reading here.
I have a small list like that as well, but without the money, implementation is difficult. I've spent far too much time writing grant proposals and doing presentations for VCs.
The whole feminization thing is fascinating to me, in large part because i don't understand it but it seems like i should!
I'm a woman in my late 50s and I worked for 20 years in a somewhat male dominated field (I'm an actuary). Maybe more important than "somewhat male dominated" is that actuarial work is technical and objective. Insurance company solvency and competitiveness of rates, plan designs, etc, is like a hard science in that its truth is rather black & white. It's not about feelings or other "feminine" traits. Frankly, the objective nature of the work and that my success early on depended on passing actuarial exams (not kissing butts) was a big part of its appeal for me.
Yet I'm a woman. I'm feminine. I'm a mom and I love being a mom. At the same time, actuarial work was a great fit for me in lots of ways. I believe some aspects of being female/feminine affected how I managed people or lead teams, and that was not a bad thing. But my being female did not change the nature of actuarial work or how insurance companies succeed.
I'm struggling to understand how & why more women in academia has lead to the results we're clearly seeing. Did women come in with the goal of reducing the objectivity of the hard sciences, for example? Or is it that academia lacks the accountability inherent in the market, which defines the atmosphere insurance companies and other businesses operate in?
I'm not trying to be obtuse. But it's not automatic that a higher proportion of the positions being held by women leads to "feminization" of an industry. It has to be more nuanced than that. I suspect there are multiple factors - the nature of academia, the nature of the women and men who are attracted to that sort of work, changes in the broader culture, and probably other factors.
I left the corporate world several years ago to get a PhD. I would rather scrub toilets to pay my bills than work in a "feminized" academic setting. Yes, I'm a woman. But I'm just n=1.
You're not wrong. What I'm looking at here are macro-trends.
It appears that human societies at least partially operate on a tipping-point system. There appears to be a point where the nature of a profession fundamentally changes, somewhere around becoming 30% or 40% female. In modern history, when a profession becomes around 30% to 40% female, it appears to then become 60% to 80% female within a single professional generation thereafter.
There's a tipping point somewhere around 35% female that results in radical cultural changes to professions and organizations. I'd argue that at around 35% the females have sufficient cultural dominance and there's enough male simps in the culture at that point to reorganize the immediate culture around female comfort rather than male drive. As a result, the majority of men (the non-simps who just want to do the job) begin slowly extricating themselves, and new young men elect not to go into that profession because it's so female-dominated. Male and female psychology are (in aggregate over large populations) extremely different. So when aggregated populations attempt to work together they either have to behave in a feminine psychological/cultural fashion or a masculine psychological/cultural fashion.
Women, holding most of the emotional and cultural power, will shift a professional culture to be feminine once they reach 30% to 40% of the total workforce. Most males don't want to work in a feminine profession, so they leave. They put their skills and drive for competition, and hard hours into something else. Some men stick around... that's why you have the "male feminist" stereotypes, but most men would simply rather go do something else.
This happens in hobbies, some sports, and professional settings, and it seems relatively consistent. Expecting men and women to work together as if they were Tabula Rasa in the 20th and 21st centuries was a huge mistake. As a younger guy who has had to put up with academia, it's incredibly feminized in most disciplines. What I see as petty disputes and childish emotional lashing out is quite common among faculty. Especially in the social sciences. I can see why men now make up the minority of university students, there's much less in it for them. Status, prestige, even a job that can pay off their student loans when they're done... and the reason for that is that feminine egalitarianism is inherently collectivist. The hyper-competitive nature of old academia had a few brilliant women, but when you take the average tiktok THOT and make her the average college student: you change the nature of academia, not the nature of the women attending.
You may be right in general that once a field becomes 30 to 40% female that it will become 60 to 80% in the Next Generation. For what it's worth, this has not been the case in the Actuarial field. When I was coming up through the exams 20 plus years ago there was a concerted effort to increase the number of women in the field and they did so for a while. But now it has waned somewhat and is back to around 35 to 40%.
This effort to 'add more women' to fields that aren't already dominated by women has been a disaster. That's why there are so many men simply dropping out of society at this point. There's very few places left to go, and even fewer that present a decent level of prestige.
We shouldn’t ignore the fact that all of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Breakthroughs would typically require combined breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and materials sciences simultaneously to occur.
We have to expect a slowing of progressive when advances require exponentially more difficult to reach milestones.
That's definitely true. We're in an era of significant declining-returns-on-investment... A slowing of the sciences will alter the technical landscape considerably. The big issue is that our economic system is predicated on infinite accelerating growth. Without regular significant scientific breakthroughs, our economic (and by proxy political) system destabilizes.
I’m no longer sure our economic system is predicated on infinite growth, and too bad if it is because there’s hundreds of trillions in fraud in the open.
So… maybe we should make things to solve problems or improve matters instead.
… which will as it always has been the most of the breakthroughs, such as HTML, is the way to go.
The obvious solution is alternative academia to outcompete the state-backed academia, founded by autists for autists, somehow resilient against normie takeover, e.g. by strict meritocracy being autistically enforced.
Obviously this is illegal in the world of "civil rights" and "equity laws", because such a system would strongly bias towards white men, so such alternative academia would have to operate outside the west, or get past these laws somehow.
It would also bias toward Asian men if it were classically academic.
Its already happening in tech. Kids are skipping University and being recruited direct from High School based on testing and apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is making a come back. Startup life is the only way to go now if you are part of the discriminated class.
"unfortunately they’re likely too busy eating crayons and sucking donor dick." HAHAHAHA
It will be fixed when the sacrifice and reward systems are fixed. Which is likely never.
However, there might be something with what Musk is driving at. When people do make it to Mars, which I think they will sooner rather than later. You will have people innovating – because they're on Mars!
People on Mars can't rely on bullshit research from Earth. They'll have to figure out new things on the spot. And I believe they will.
As the proverb goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Who first said it and when – I don't care, you get the point.
Why does everyone want to be rich?
People like to be comfortable, that much is known. And so, people will not strive for things that don't gain them something, either in the form of increased comfort, or the form of legacy. Currently the incentives are just not there for real scientific research. You can get big-ass grants for bullshit papers, why would you strive to do something real?
I would like to go a step further though. I think that all this is on purpose. I believe that there are innovations that have far surpassed what we’ve seen in the private realm – and bullshit research and the grant system itself are the cover.
In other words, you don’t need a conspiracy, you just need the existing scientific research framework to be minimally effective, and then incentivize that ineffectiveness.
That’s literally what we’re seeing right now.
another great article.
Putting women back in the harem will solve the feminization of the sciences issue. That will take another 100-250 years, ceteris paribus. Depopulation might supercharge the pace, though its more likely to supercharge surrogacy and artificial wombs. OTOH, rehareming women will also signal the rise of a reactionary conservative regime that will gleefully see to the "completion of science" in the Spenglerian meaning of the phrase.
Women took over science, that's how
Great article bro, and I'm glad you included your little rant!
Pretty sure it's a big rant.
Fantastic atmeticke, pulling together threads from several different areas to form a cohesive whole.
I don't see the university model lasting another 50 years. Trump's idea of American University would easily get half of the current college cohort on board and sink most universities. Then the truly elite who truly want to do research can go to a brick and mortar campus and do real work.
*ARTICLE*
There's an "edit" button, I won't fault you for using it. Thanks for the review though. I've seen a number of articles on this subject, but few have the inside-perspective that I can provide on academic work.
An additional problem occurs when breakthrough research or invention goes against bigger interests. The enthusiasm around the Royal Rife microscope or the circumstances leading to Nikola Tesla's shut down of operations cone to mind.
This is even beyond the scope of what happened to Peter Duisberg's career which could be classified as found against financial interests AND a resulting scientific dogma.
Speaking of which, the way to the stars will stay a bumpy road when all revisiting of Einsteinian cosmology is forbidden. 90% unmeasurable "dark" matter my ass. But hey, now the equation works again.
All this is of course partly beyond academia per se but it fits with the general tenor of this great article IMO.
Unfortunately, there's no editing option. I meant to say " initial enthusiasm with the Royal Rife microscope and subsequent destruction of the whole enterprise"
I'm pretty sure there is an edit button
[edit] yeap there appears to be.
You're right, Academia is in a rough spot. this spending freeze by the Federal government is going to cause extreme reevaluations in research. Hopefully.
No edit button for me. I know it's supposed to be in the hamburger menu but it isn't.
weird.
Same with me. It used to be there, but seems to have disappeared from my interface after Substack introduced Notes.
A brilliant analysis. As a scientist who has spent 30 years post-PhD building a professional career while avoiding the bullshit, you've diagnosed the problems very well. What I have been able to do (which of course, won't work for everyone) is to get engineering jobs adjacent to my scientific interests. Sometimes (rarely) I get paid to do what I want to do. Other times, I get paid to do useful but less interesting work. I spend my free time pursuing my self-directed research. Hardly ideal, but the difficulties are far less than navigating the hostile territory of academia.
I am in the process of putting together a curated list of scientific/invention/business ideas that I lack the money/time/talent/gumption to develop myself. The free tier will be open to everyone to develop, and so will the paid tier (though it will be limited to “billion dollar ideas”). In the next few years, you may well see disruptive innovations coming out of this collection. It has been described as a reverse incubator—instead of founders looking for funding, it consists of ideas looking for founders.
Interesting. We should get in touch.
I don’t have time to talk right now. I’ll text you after work
Sure, shoot me a DM at your convenience.
I have a list of several hundred ideas in science/inventions/business that have been filling up my computer and phone for years, which I have tried and failed to materialize, so I am releasing (most of) them into the general public to use instead. I am sick of being the bottleneck for all these great ideas—it is less important that they are developed by me than that they are developed by someone.
As an example, parents cannot bring their babies to swimming pools because diapers only come in two varieties. Either they absorb nothing and so the pool fills with ever increasing partial pressure of baby urine, or else they absorb the urine…and then attempt to absorb the entire pool, upon which they explode and make an even bigger mess. Well, if we add a simple zeolite lining, the diaper will absorb only the pee but not the pool water, because of the different pH of the two liquids.
On the paid tier, there is a metamaterial that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity as a byproduct—note that this is not standard electrolysis, because there is a net gain of electricity; the resulting hydrogen and oxygen can then be fed into a standard fuel cell and produce electricity as a byproduct, along with water which can be sent back through the metamaterial to be split again. Round and round using the same water over and over, with a constant stream of electricity. I don’t know how it works, just that experiment seems to indicate that it does (I have been as yet unable to procure a sample for field tests, but the recipe for making it is included in the patent).
We can include lots of crazy ideas as well as straightforward ideas like noise-suppression headphones for dogs (an instant seller with a widespread built-in audience). I have named the site (still in the design phase) FOR SCIENCE!! because my motives are less mercenary than aspirational. These ideas need to be instantiated, for the continuation of civilization and the glory of mankind.
I am pleased to no end that you have shown interest in this project. I hope in the coming days to turn this project from a back-of-the-envelope project into a finished site. I would be glad of any and all help you may be able to contribute.
Let us know when you have it up.
I am interested. This actually seems like a few things that are up my alley in a technical sense. Substack supports direct-messages to authors, not just comments. Click on my username and hit the 'message' button. We can talk there... pretty decent based on what little I'm reading here.
I have a small list like that as well, but without the money, implementation is difficult. I've spent far too much time writing grant proposals and doing presentations for VCs.
The whole feminization thing is fascinating to me, in large part because i don't understand it but it seems like i should!
I'm a woman in my late 50s and I worked for 20 years in a somewhat male dominated field (I'm an actuary). Maybe more important than "somewhat male dominated" is that actuarial work is technical and objective. Insurance company solvency and competitiveness of rates, plan designs, etc, is like a hard science in that its truth is rather black & white. It's not about feelings or other "feminine" traits. Frankly, the objective nature of the work and that my success early on depended on passing actuarial exams (not kissing butts) was a big part of its appeal for me.
Yet I'm a woman. I'm feminine. I'm a mom and I love being a mom. At the same time, actuarial work was a great fit for me in lots of ways. I believe some aspects of being female/feminine affected how I managed people or lead teams, and that was not a bad thing. But my being female did not change the nature of actuarial work or how insurance companies succeed.
I'm struggling to understand how & why more women in academia has lead to the results we're clearly seeing. Did women come in with the goal of reducing the objectivity of the hard sciences, for example? Or is it that academia lacks the accountability inherent in the market, which defines the atmosphere insurance companies and other businesses operate in?
I'm not trying to be obtuse. But it's not automatic that a higher proportion of the positions being held by women leads to "feminization" of an industry. It has to be more nuanced than that. I suspect there are multiple factors - the nature of academia, the nature of the women and men who are attracted to that sort of work, changes in the broader culture, and probably other factors.
I left the corporate world several years ago to get a PhD. I would rather scrub toilets to pay my bills than work in a "feminized" academic setting. Yes, I'm a woman. But I'm just n=1.
You're not wrong. What I'm looking at here are macro-trends.
It appears that human societies at least partially operate on a tipping-point system. There appears to be a point where the nature of a profession fundamentally changes, somewhere around becoming 30% or 40% female. In modern history, when a profession becomes around 30% to 40% female, it appears to then become 60% to 80% female within a single professional generation thereafter.
There's a tipping point somewhere around 35% female that results in radical cultural changes to professions and organizations. I'd argue that at around 35% the females have sufficient cultural dominance and there's enough male simps in the culture at that point to reorganize the immediate culture around female comfort rather than male drive. As a result, the majority of men (the non-simps who just want to do the job) begin slowly extricating themselves, and new young men elect not to go into that profession because it's so female-dominated. Male and female psychology are (in aggregate over large populations) extremely different. So when aggregated populations attempt to work together they either have to behave in a feminine psychological/cultural fashion or a masculine psychological/cultural fashion.
Women, holding most of the emotional and cultural power, will shift a professional culture to be feminine once they reach 30% to 40% of the total workforce. Most males don't want to work in a feminine profession, so they leave. They put their skills and drive for competition, and hard hours into something else. Some men stick around... that's why you have the "male feminist" stereotypes, but most men would simply rather go do something else.
This happens in hobbies, some sports, and professional settings, and it seems relatively consistent. Expecting men and women to work together as if they were Tabula Rasa in the 20th and 21st centuries was a huge mistake. As a younger guy who has had to put up with academia, it's incredibly feminized in most disciplines. What I see as petty disputes and childish emotional lashing out is quite common among faculty. Especially in the social sciences. I can see why men now make up the minority of university students, there's much less in it for them. Status, prestige, even a job that can pay off their student loans when they're done... and the reason for that is that feminine egalitarianism is inherently collectivist. The hyper-competitive nature of old academia had a few brilliant women, but when you take the average tiktok THOT and make her the average college student: you change the nature of academia, not the nature of the women attending.
Here's my citation for this information that I'd encourage you to read: https://barsoom.substack.com/p/academia-is-womens-work
You may be right in general that once a field becomes 30 to 40% female that it will become 60 to 80% in the Next Generation. For what it's worth, this has not been the case in the Actuarial field. When I was coming up through the exams 20 plus years ago there was a concerted effort to increase the number of women in the field and they did so for a while. But now it has waned somewhat and is back to around 35 to 40%.
This effort to 'add more women' to fields that aren't already dominated by women has been a disaster. That's why there are so many men simply dropping out of society at this point. There's very few places left to go, and even fewer that present a decent level of prestige.
Just eliminate government funding except for space, hydro carbon but not green energy, defense.
Well
Bye
Need moAr dEEEgrease !!
$$$$
Gimmedat grant mOnEE$ to study dah problem
You have no idea how true that is.
We shouldn’t ignore the fact that all of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Breakthroughs would typically require combined breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and materials sciences simultaneously to occur.
We have to expect a slowing of progressive when advances require exponentially more difficult to reach milestones.
Plus research energy is spent on stupid shit.
That's definitely true. We're in an era of significant declining-returns-on-investment... A slowing of the sciences will alter the technical landscape considerably. The big issue is that our economic system is predicated on infinite accelerating growth. Without regular significant scientific breakthroughs, our economic (and by proxy political) system destabilizes.
I’m no longer sure our economic system is predicated on infinite growth, and too bad if it is because there’s hundreds of trillions in fraud in the open.
So… maybe we should make things to solve problems or improve matters instead.
… which will as it always has been the most of the breakthroughs, such as HTML, is the way to go.
They're printing money to simulate growth. But who knows? Maybe AI will allow us to continue growing the economy for another century.
We all did one way or another