If you look at the history of science over the last 2000 years or so, new insights have popped up from time to time in a rather random way. There isn't really a reason to expect them regularly thought that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop looking.
It's also worth mentioning that around 90% of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive today [0]. And not only that, but you could probably fund all of the science from 1900 and earlier with the budget of just one of the mega-experiments (ligo, LHC, ISS) of today.
There wasn't a constant barrage of new insights in every single field throughout the past 250 years. Individual fields most certainly had periods of slowed or stalled progress.
Lem's Summa Technologia is a fantastic philosophy book on exactly this subject. He talks about how our racial destiny starts to be controlled by external forces like the chaotic nature of technological progress and how we have less control over our future than you might expect. Dense material but really rich with things to think about.
Agreed. In the meantime, because we don't have understanding about something yet, it doesn't mean understanding does not exist because we don't understand it.
Many of the brightest phds in today's society are working on platforms to gather and retain people's attention to get clicks on ads. Maybe this is part of the reason.
Reaching children with education who don't have access to it will bring more of this random forward progress.
With all the technology we have now and the web and where it's gotten to it amazes me that education hasn't been revolutionised.
Example, I was interested in doing a BSc/B.Eng in software engineering online only (in the UK) and it was silly how difficult it was to find out basic details and pricing.
If I were in a different position in life, which is to say one where I had the wealth and influence to pull it off, I'd have started a non-profit for educational games. I think there is a lot of potential there that was largely untapped because the people who make decisions about what to buy had an inherent bias against anything fun; perhaps reasoning, on some level, that if it was fun it couldn't be educational, that learning had to be boring and awful because that's how they remember it.
But then I see games like KSP, which are engaging and interesting enough (downright fun enough) to drive people to learn about orbital mechanics. Not because it was on a test, but because it was a tool that could get them get to Duna. Or Minecraft, which can teach critical path analysis and Boolean logic. There's a lot of potential in games to present you with a goal you want to attain, and allow you to discover the usefulness of any given subject as a tool to achieve that goal.
Instead we get this "gamification" of education, which essentially means using the nastiest tricks of the F2P market to make kids do their homework. Bonus: we can sell you tablets!
There's no particular reason it needs to be non-profit. School books, for instance, are sold for profit, at substantial markup, by private companies. Does make one wonder why there is (to my knowledge) not much of a market there.
The textbook industry is horribly corrupt and produces crappy products. I want the mission to be enhancing the quality of education for everyone, not making shareholders money.
Textbooks are definitely a spooky world. Open textbooks and open educational resources are an interesting idea - institution pays profs to write a book instead of the publishers.
A lot of the issues would seem to be human behavioural and social stuff rather than the actual information. I mean even before web tech you could in principle learn the vast majority by reading books but most people lack the motivation. And then you think you might just be able to do the exams but a lot of university qualification is just certifying you've been in the vicinity of lecture halls for 3 years or so rather than the actual tests. I'm sure there must be some way to do better.
Technology is easy, but education is about human beings, and I don't think human beings are fundamentally any better understood today than they were by the ancients.
This is an area I'm working in. It's interesting why education disruption has been delayed, but that is finally starting to get on the radar.. :
- Academia believes they own knowledge, curriculum and delivery, when they are losing relevancy in all 3. They haven't kept up.
- The rate of change in society has surpassed academias ability to keep up. Calculus and traditional topics do not change every 2-3 years, but disruption does.
- The 2000 year old model of lectures and seats in butts is changing with, or without institutions. Recording lectures and surrounding it with questions is the height of what we have, and hasn't changed since the 90's.
- Academics largely are not competent with technology but try to implement it, or oversee it. Academics also don't professionally learn how to teach, unlike teachers. As a result, teachers of k-12 students are more tech literate than their post secondary lifers, and the wave of k-12 students heading towards post secondarys that have a worse digital learning experience than their schools.
- Employers hire competency and not just education alone. Curriculum is outdated often by the time it's released in more and more industries.
- While self directed learning is growing into many professions, instruction needs to evolve. I don't believe instructors can be replaced, but they need new and better digital supports.
According to Bryan Caplan (writer The Case against Education) the value that academic institutions provide is not necessarily knowledge but ranking the students in order of their perceived competency for jobs.
As far as that remains true I see little to no hope for any displacement of "The Academy" from its current position of significance.
I've been programming as a career for a long time and gone up against candidates with degrees and been hired where they haven't so there are a fair few companies out there that don't care.
That said I'd like to do something academic and I'm getting older and given the ageism in tech a degree/masters might tip the balance.
Mostly though I just like learning and if I'm going to do it anyway I might as well look to see if I can get more than just gratification out of it.
Your second point is a recurring thought I have every few weeks as I trudge through grad school and it's depressing to think about how much talent, even among undergrads, is ultimately used for consumer services or moving money around.
I hope we can afford to pursue other things one day soon too. The tech I grew up with and hang onto today is not about creating wealth, but creating value.
Yes, but 250 years ago one bright guy with a blog used his genius to get people to click on text ads — and he did more to advance physics than every living PhD with their billions of budget in the past 50+ years.
