In this podcast on positive psychology (which I recommend watching in any case), the Harvard professor mentions that current peer-reviewed journal articles that get published now get an average of SEVEN total reads. What good is that doing anyone, unless is it some super obscure but important fact that is later picked up on?

Seven. Amazing if true. (and I think one of the seven was the author)

I was always told that, in academia, science is 'incremental.' When I was working on my thesis, my advisor said that I had two distinct ideas here. Which one did I want to write on? I had to ‘hone it down’ to one specific thing I wanted to study. I assume this is because it is easier to test something if there are few variables. Interdisciplinary studies are too complicated to devise workable experiments. How do you falsify a theory in a dynamic system?

Jon.

It's appropriate that you mention Darwin, not only in connection with biological specialization, but also because he was such a fine example of what's so rare today, a scientist whose scientific endeavor was one part of a broader philosophical endeavor.

This issue always makes me think of Nietzsche, who was prophetic on this as on so many issues. He foresaw what a danger hyperspecialization would be for thought in general, as well as for how much we could even trust scientific results.

He figured the time would come when no one outside a specialization, even other scientists within the same branch of science, would be able to judge that specialization's results, and that we'd simply have to have faith in the integrity of peer review within each specialty.

That's obviously a problem, yet I guess there's no helping it.

Ugo, I'm not so sure that the incominc crisis will decourage the inderdisciplinarity. I suppose that hyper-specialization research will fall more ...

Interesting observation that specialization is seen in ecological systems as well as human society, H. T. Odum had some brilliant insights on that very subject.

In a nutshell, he understood that systems self-organize around available resources and he observed that when a critical resource, especially energy, becomes available in abundance a system will experience a period of fast, frenzied consumption and growth characterized by "weedy" fast-growing but short-lived structure. Not unlike our current industrial civilization.

As the system matures the fast weedy growth, having consumed the abundance, dies-back and is replaced with slower-growing and much longer-lived structure characterized by recycling of resources and, interestingly, high levels of specialization.

Speaking of Odum, I couldn't help but notice you were remiss in not mentioning his significant contribution to systems modeling, not least of which being the world models using his Energy Systems Language (Modeling for all scales: an introduction to systems simulation). As Nate rightly pointed out the Systems Dynamics language suffers from a lack of an explicit basis in the universal energy hierarchy, which Odum elucidated as the basis for ALL complex systems, both living and non-living, including human society.

Odum's Energy Systems language, OTOH, lacks the explicit mechanisms found in Systems Dynamics for setting "policies" which regulate rates and flows, and by extension storages.

It would be interesting to see an effort made to combine the two languages, drawing on the strengths of both, and present the result in a way that allows people to explore fun, game-like simulations of the world and possible future scenarios that respect the realities of the universal energy hierarchy.

Personally I believe that there has been no greater power in the entire history of human civilization than the one we have now, available for the first time using computers and complex simulations, in the ability to ask in a meaningful and realistic way:

What if?

Cheers,
Jerry

...hyperspecialization. It happens also for biological organisms (by the way, today is Darwin's bicentennial).

It's mid-20th century thinking that selection usually or invariably pushes a niche generalist towards specialization, and that the converse rarely or never happens. The fact is that selection fosters adaptation as readily in one direction as in the other. Abundant examples exist of highly specialized species becoming trophic generalists as environmental conditions change.

As for academic specialization, it depends on the discipline. In the Ecology & Evolution program where I did my graduate work, scholastic generalization was highly encouraged. The encyclopedic knowledge of some of the profs was awe inspiring. I was expected to learn everything from techniques of molecular phylogenetics to tropical lotic ecology pretty thoroly. My general ignorance of plants & of inverts has been a professional liability.

Modern science has been mostly reductionist since it proved such a powerful technique over the last couple centuries. Unfortunately, this is reflected in hyperspecialization in academia and there have been strong institutional pressures to keep scientists from "straying" into cross-disciplinary pursuits. The excellent observation that this specialization is analogous to what biological species tend to do is just the sort of comment that one needs an overview to perceive.

Several times I have put together cross-disciplinary teams of scientists to work on specific mission goals, and these would only last as long as funding and strong direction could be supplied; there was a strong tendency for the participants to lose focus and revert to hyperspecialization and tenure tracks. Ironically, making them more well-known for the cross-disciplinary work had the effect of exposing them to more universities and institutes, generating ever more lucrative offers until they were quickly peeled from the work that had made them famous. This amounts to an error-correction mechanism in a system designed for specialization, and there are many of them.

Only sophisticated generalists, who are able to move smoothly between disciplines and describe patterns, will IMO be very useful as advocates and planners. There are relatively few of them, and certainly in the past it was not really possible to get a respected degree in such a thing, so generalists initially had to specialize to get the societal recognition of several degrees and then expand from there.

Some of the most clueless people I've ever met have had advanced degrees, but have been so specialized as to need keepers to feed and dress them. They will toil at their data until death stills their hearts, and work hard every day. But they are clueless about most things, and I don't look to academia to save us. Indeed, by soaking up the "science" funding, they may do more harm than good.

For some reason my mind drifts to scientists working on the ITER fusion reactor, which if all goes well MIGHT provide commercial power in 40 years. The high probability that we will not have the resources in 40 years to built out and maintain a network of giant tokamak fusion reactors is not only not discussed, it would be threatening to their lives. I'm sure we could come up with thousands more such examples.

Yes, and also note that departments have budgets. When budgets get tight, those efforts not directly supporting a department get cut. Protecting rice bowls is another form of social endowment survivalism.

Good presention, nice dense presentation of data and paradigms.