> Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed. Don

> Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed. Don't romanticize the scientific establishment too much. Yes, you want to find something that everyone else missed and publish it. However, you don't really want to "prove the majority wrong" (they, after all, review your paper and speak often with people on funding committees) in any kind of funding- and career-invalidating way. What you really want is a detail your colleagues overlooked in their largely-correct approach to a problem. This kind of thing - generating results and techniques that your colleagues can integrate into their own research, citing you - is what makes careers. Partly this is because (I honestly believe) the majority of people in my field (plasma physics) are competent and conscientious researchers, so "proving them all wrong" is the futile quest of a crank. However, my point remains - as a junior scientist I do not want to stir up any shit with senior scientists, nor do I want to challenge any narratives that funding agencies like. I mean, I might want to, but it would be counter to my own interests in a big way.