Is Science Slowing Down?

Responds to Bloom-Jones-Reenen-Webb (2018), who find research productivity collapsing — 18x more transistor researchers sustain the same Moore's-Law rate; economy-wide, each researcher is ~25x less productive than in 1930. Scott's reframe: constant progress in response to exponentially-rising inputs should be the NULL HYPOTHESIS, because the alternative implies absurdities — 50% annual GDP growth, immortality discovered mid-century (a 'deathless God-Emperor Eisenhower'), a hundred living Shakespeares, marathon records scaling with the runner pool. 'Why isn't Marcus Aurelius immortal god-emperor of Earth?' Only the low-hanging-fruit explanation survives. Adds the 'Gods Of Straight Lines' (exponential trends defy common sense — Moore's Law, world GDP), the AI-doing-science coda, and Yudkowsky's Law of Mad Science as a be-careful-what-you-wish-for caveat.

Quality 78 · Excellent. 78 — Excellent floor, with the Marijuana-MMTYWTK 78 tier. A generative, memorable reframe (constant-progress-on-exponential-inputs as the null hypothesis; the 'why isn't Marcus Aurelius immortal' reductio; Gods Of Straight Lines) that became a touchstone in progress-studies. Provocative and partly speculative (the 'Gods' framing is half-serious), which keeps it at the floor rather than higher.

Claude’s paradigm shift 58 · Moderate. 58 — Major-shift edge. Reframing the BJRW science-slowdown finding via the null-hypothesis argument + the historical reductios was a fresh, non-obvious contribution at publication.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. 3 — an influential post in the progress-studies / science-slowdown discourse; the null-hypothesis + 'Gods Of Straight Lines' framing is cited within that sphere.