Science as a Craft Industry

Science is constantly changing, and the craft industries that it engenders must change too. Technologies rise and fall, and fashions come and go. In the future, many of the small enterprises of today will be consolidated, and new small enterprises will have to find different niches to fill. Today the most successful craft industries are concerned with software and biotechnology. The craft industries of the future might be concerned with neurophysiology or ecology, with technologies not yet invented or with sciences not yet named. Two facts of life will not change. Science will continue to generate unpredictable new ideas and opportunities. And human beings will continue to respond to new ideas and opportunities with new skills and inventions. We remain tool-making animals, and science will continue to exercise the creativity programmed into our genes.

That is Freeman J. Dyson in 1998 in this article, which I found in one of Lin Ostrom's syllabi. 

Entrepreneurial scientists

When we compare the research performance of entrepreneurial scientists with that of conventional academics, the results of a quantitative analysis applied to a sample of 1,957 scientific papers published by 66 scientists active in advanced materials research in Japan confirm that (i) entrepreneurial scientists (Pasteur and Edison scientists) publish more papers than traditional scientists (Bohr and Other scientists) do; (ii) the papers published by Bohr scientists demonstrate better citation performance than those published by Pasteur scientists, do on average; (iii) the prestige of high-impact papers is favored by the authorship of Pasteur scientists; and (iv) the degree of the multi/inter-disciplinarity of the papers authored by Pasteur scientists is higher (more diverse) than that of Bohr scientists.

Source: Shichijo, Sedita, & Baba (February 2013). 

The authors explain:

To compare the entrepreneurial orientation of scientists, we classified scientists by using Stokes’ (1997) quadrant model. In the quadrant model, four types of scientists are identified: Edison, Bohr, Pasteur, and Other. Edison scientists conduct mainly pure applied research, oriented toward discovering knowledge to be applied to the real world and having little interest in deepening the understanding of basic science. Bohr scientists are keener to develop pure basic research, oriented to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, having little interest in the potential uses of their research findings for the real world. Pasteur scientists are devoted to application-oriented basic research, never losing sight of their hope to advance scientific understanding while contributing to real-world utility. By applying this classification, which is rather peripheral with respect to the current literature, we investigate differences in publication performance among differently modeled scientists. Adopting Lam’s (2010) typology, Edison scientists are mainly entrepreneurial, whereas Bohr scientists are “ivory tower” traditional, and Pasteur scientists turn out to be the “hybrids.”

Scientific Collaboration

In a working paper on scientific collaboration Carillo, Papagni, & Sapio (June 2012) say:

. . . what really matters for enhancing the quality of research are the flows of knowledge that arise from collaborations among researchers from different institutions and/or countries. 

The abstract:

In this paper, we analyse the effects of research collaborations on the scientific output of academic institutions, drawing on data from the first official Italian research assessment exercise. We measure the scientific performance of a research unit as the number of publications that received an excellent grade in the evaluation process. Different aspects of scientific collaboration are taken into account, such as the degree of openness of a research team towards other institutions and/or other countries, the frequency of co-authorships, and the average size of a collaborating team. Using econometric models for count data, we find that collaborations are more effective when they imply knowledge exchange resulting from collaboration with external or foreign colleagues, are very frequent, and the collaborating teams have a small size.

The title is "Do collaborations enhance the high-quality output of scientific institutions? Evidence from the Italian Research Assessment Exercise (2001-2003)."

Governance in the scientific community

. . . “[H]igh profile” false science is unlikely to go undetected, perhaps because of the additional scrutiny that such manuscripts attract. In contrast, less prominent science is far less likely to be acknowledged as false. This suggests either that the scientific community holds attention-grabbing papers to a higher standard or that within the vast under-scrutinized literature much false science remains unacknowledged. This result contrasts with the finding that the lag between publication and retraction is uncorrelated with article, author, or institution characteristics.

Source: Furman, Jensen, Murray (Research Policy, 2012). 

A graph from the paper:

A draft is here (November 2011). 

"The Econometric Mafia"

In this paper we take a purely descriptive look at the relationship between becoming a Fellow of the Econometric Society and receiving the Nobel Prize in economics. We discover some interesting aspects: of all 69 Nobel Prize Laureates between 1969 and 2011, only 9 of them were not also Fellows. Moreover, the proportion of future Nobel winners among the Fellows has been quite high throughout time and a large share of researchers who became Fellows between the 1930s and 1950s became Nobel Laureates at a later stage. On average, researchers become Fellows relatively early in their career (14.9 years after their PhD) and those who were subsequently made Nobel Laureates become Fellows earlier than other researchers. Interestingly, Harvard and MIT have been the dominant PhD granting institutions to generate Fellows and Nobel Laureates in the past. 

Who are (were) not Fellows:

Elinor Ostrom (2009), Robert A. Mundell (1999), Douglass C. North (1993), Ronald H. Coase (1991), William F. Sharpe (1990), James M. Buchanan Jr. (1986), Theodore W. Schultz (1979), Sir Arthur Lewis (1979) and James E. Meade (1977). 

That is from the paper "Econometric Fellows and Nobel Laureates in Economics" by Fai Chan and Torgler. 
An interesting quote from the paper:

A quote by Samuelson (2004, p. 60) demonstrates that researchers are also motivated by recognition: “Let me close with a few remarks on the motivation and rewards of scientists. Scientists are as avaricious and competitive as Smithian businessmen. The coin they seek is not apples, nuts, and yachts; nor is it the coin itself, or power as that term is ordinarily used. Scholars seek fame. The fame they seek, as I noted in my 1961 American Economic Association presidential address, is fame with their peers—the other scientists whom they respect and whose respect they strive for. The sociologist Robert K. Merton has documented what I call this dirty little secret in his book The Sociology of Science. I am no exception. Abraham Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon observed that there was always a little clock of ambition ticking in the bosom of honest and whimsical Abe. No celebrity as a Newsweek columnist, no millions of clever-begotten speculative gains, no power as the Svengali or Rasputin to the prince and president could count as a pennyweight in my balance of worth against the prospect of recognition for having contributed to the empire of science”.

A graph from the paper:

The title of the post comes from this (p. 4): 

Simon (1996) also stresses that “[i]t is perhaps not too disrespectful to label the people who brought about this revolution the Econometric Mafia. Who were they? If you examine the list of Fellows of the Econometric Society in 1954, fifteen years before the first Nobel Prize in economics was awarded, you will find the names of 20 of the first 27 prizewinners.

HT: Jonas Holmstrom.

The age for main contributions in science

From a Scientific American blog:

Albert Einstein once commented that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” This may have been an accurate reflection of physics in his time, but it is no longer the case—for physics or any other field. Benjamin Jones, an expert in innovation at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes awarded in physics, chemistry and medicine between 1900 and 2008. With a few exceptions—notably quantum mechanics discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s—the trend across all fields is toward researchers being older when they produce their greatest work.

Another report on this is here.  The paper is here. 

That is an idea to be tested in economics. One would also expect that the main contributions in economics are done when laureates are not that young, but not that old either. Probably in the 30s. But again that is an empirical question. 

A great Nobel-Prize banquet-speech

There are awesome speeches, but this one stands out. 

The goal of science, as we all know, is to discover simplicity in the midst of complexity. Yet when Paul Nurse, Tim Hunt and I and our students and colleagues began studying how cells divide, any sensible scientist should have expected to find only hopeless complexity. If you think of cell division as a symphony, we knew that the symphony had to be performed by thousands of musicians each playing a different instrument. So - our research can only be described as motivated by a kind of foolish optimist. Sometimes nature rewards foolish optimism. Continuing with the metaphor of cell division as a symphony, our research paths led each of us, independently and by great luck, smack into the conductor of the symphony. And, it turned out that the same conductor performed this symphony in all types of cells - yeast, fruit flies, sea urchins, frogs and humans. I really have no idea how often nature rewards such foolish optimism, but I am pleased to report that the Nobel committee is rather fond of foolish optimism.

That is Leland H. Hartwell's speech in 2001. He is a Nobel Laureate in psychology or medicine. Source.

Every Child Is A Scientist

[P]arents and teachers must navigate the fine line between giving kids a taste of knowledge – the universe is not all mystery – while at the same time preserving a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. When we explain things to kids, we shouldn’t pretend that we have all the answers. We shouldn’t turn science class into a dry recitation of facts that must be memorized, or only conduct experiments in the classroom in which the results are known in advance. Because it’s the not knowing – that tang of doubt and possibility – that keeps us playing with the world, eager to figure out how it works.

Source

What is pseudoscience? A quick review of demarcation, and a proposed new approach

From "Scientific American:"

It was Karl Popper who first identified what he called “the demarcation problem” of finding a criterion to distinguish between empirical science, such as the successful 1919 test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and pseudoscience, such as Freud’s theories, whose adherents sought only confirming evidence while ignoring disconfirming cases. Einstein’s theory might have been falsified had solar-eclipse data not shown the requisite deflection of starlight bent by the sun’s gravitational field. Freud’s theories, however, could never be disproved, because there was no testable hypothesis open to refutability. Thus, Popper famously declared “falsifiability” as the ultimate criterion of demarcation.

The problem is that many sciences are nonfalsifiable, such as string theory, the neuroscience surrounding consciousness, grand economic models and the extraterrestrial hypothesis. On the last, short of searching every planet around every star in every galaxy in the cosmos, can we ever say with certainty that E.T.s do not exist?

Princeton University historian of science Michael D. Gordin adds in his forthcoming book The Pseudoscience Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2012), “No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist. There is no person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself, ‘I’ll just head into my pseudolaboratory and perform some pseudoexperiments to try to confirm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts.’” As Gordin documents with detailed examples, “individual scientists (as distinct from the monolithic ‘scientific community’) designate a doctrine a ‘pseudoscience’ only when they perceive themselves to be threatened—not necessarily by the new ideas themselves, but by what those ideas represent about the authority of science, science’s access to resources, or some other broader social trend. If one is not threatened, there is no need to lash out at the perceived pseudoscience; instead, one continues with one’s work and happily ignores the cranks.”

I call creationism “pseudoscience” not because its proponents are doing bad science—they are not doing science at all—but because they threaten science education in America, they breach the wall separating church and state, and they confuse the public about the nature of evolutionary theory and how science is conducted.

Here, perhaps, is a practical criterion for resolving the demarcation problem: the conduct of scientists as reflected in the pragmatic usefulness of an idea. That is, does the revolutionary new idea generate any interest on the part of working scientists for adoption in their research programs, produce any new lines of research, lead to any new discoveries, or influence any existing hypotheses, models, paradigms or world­views? If not, chances are it is pseudoscience. Keep reading . . .

Lessons from a Life in Science: How to get a Nobel Prize.

Conference by Nobel Laureate Dr. Tim Hunt Here
Main ideas -- towards the end of the video:

• Science is a random walk.
• The importance of simplicity and of getting at the heart of the problem.
• Solve the problem with the minimum amount of work.