Pamela,
I am personally very disturbed as well. I see the trend that you are
pointing out as an instance of a much larger trend. I can't quite yet
characterize, or even scope, it yet. However, short-term thinking and
various versions of trying-to-get-something-for-nothing seem to
accompany most versions of it.
The first expression of this trend that I noticed decades ago was the
loss of respect, and insistence, for a "liberal education" (in the John
Henry Newman vein) within our culture at large and within STEM in
particular. The second expression of this trend that I noticed was in my
profession of software engineering. Here, I saw the devolution of
mathematics as a driving force. I got into the profession in the late
sixties when the names and works of the mathematicians of the forties
(who essentially invented computers) were fresh on our lips. I worked
for some of the best computer companies around over the next many years
(Univac, Sun Microsystems, (with) Seymour Cray, others) and saw nothing
but a steady decline in the centrality of mathematics. I have admittedly
exploded your topic beyond the govenment-to-private-sector issue, but do
suspect somehow the same forces are at work.
Grant
On 3/3/14, 7:20 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
Utterly nobody in FRIAM thought my question about the shift from
government led innovation to private sector led innovation was
interesting enough to comment on (even to acknowledge) but I'm going
to forward this piece from Dave Farber's list which also addresses the
issue and ask you again whether you think this shift will have
consequences.
*From:*John Day <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
*Sent:*Sun Mar 02 21:13:32 EST 2014
*To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>,[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Cc:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>,[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:*Re: [IP] Re Read re Losing a Generation of Scientists
Scott,
You have hit the nail on the head. We are not doing fundamental
research. The sciences are turning into craft. Lee Smolin first
brought this up about physics in the last 5 chapters of his book,
"The Trouble with Physics."
In CS, we have this disease in spades and partly for the reasons you
outlined below, the pursuit of the dollar. I also think to some
degree what I have come to characterize by paraphrasing Arthur C.
Clark, 'Any sufficiently advanced craft is indistinguishable from
science.' We are so dazzled by the products of Moore's Law that we
don't see that what we are doing is craft.
The trouble with craft is that it stagnates.
The classic example is Chinese "science" prior to Western contact.
See Needham's "Science and Civilization in China." To some degree,
Needham ends up arguing (and most scholars agree) that 'science' in
pre-Qing China was more technique or craft. There was no theory, no
abstraction, no attempt at a theory that holds it all together. (By
their own admission, this problem still plagues China and India.
There are the exceptions, but in general it is a recognized problem.)
By late Ming (17thC), it had pretty much stagnated and they were
losing knowledge. Needham says that it is because merchants
(capitalists) were at the bottom of the heap. The government power
structure controlled everything. I also believe it is because there
was no Euclid. There was no example of an axiomatic system. The
Holy Grail of a scientist is to do to his field what Euclid did to
geometry. Interestingly Heilbrun points out in his book on geometry
book that the Greeks were the only ones to develop the concept of
proof. Other civilizations have mathematics, they have recipes,
algorithms; but not proof. Proof is at the root of building theory.
Theory gives the ideas cohesion, shows how they relate in ways you
didn't expect, and shows you where the gaps in your knowledge are.
The quest for theory is more important to avoiding stagnation as the
pull of capitalism.
Needham didn't live to see it. But we now have the example of how
the entrepreneurial drive leads to stagnation. That drive is fine
for exploiting *within* a paradigm, but it won't get you to the next
one. And we have seen the example of that as well.
And we are seeing the same stagnation in CS. One sees the same the
same papers on about a 5 years cycle. The "time constants" have
changed but they are the same papers.
Early CS was much more scientific. We went about things much more
methodically, we were more concerned with methodically understanding
the fundamentals than just building something that worked. (BTW to
your comment: We *did* do a lot of RJE on the early ARPANET. We had
many scientific users submitting jobs on particle physics, economics,
weather simulation, etc. However, we never saw it as the future. We
had much bigger ideas in mind, for distributed computing (ask Dave).
It is really depressing that 40 years later, things really haven't
moved anywhere. The hardware is 10s of thousands times faster and
bigger. You are right. We have re-labeled RJE, cloud computing, and
never gotten past the 3270/Mainframe days.)
You are right. We do have to get back to this. And there I am afraid
it gets disheartening. We have 30 years of conditioning the field
toward everything else but. I don't see many who even when they say
we need to do it, know how to do it. We have selected against the
ability for decades. I am even finding that CS students (and
professors) have trouble with abstraction. For a field that one
could say was founded on abstraction, this is really scary.
Take care,
John Day
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