12 ms·

The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?

121 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

feralimal 6y ago
If some scientists did complete some work comparable to the works "Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo" do you think this would reach everyday folk? Or would industry monetise said discovery, and that might best be done by withholding information or even suppressing it completely, if it challenged vested interests?
- oriolid 6y ago
  No scientist of that caliber would certainly want to publish that kind of research, even if their career depended on it. If they did, it certainly would be ignored by Nature, Science and others, and the newspapers who pick their content from those would have no idea.
- feralimal 6y ago
  I don't mind being downvoted, but it is the reality. What incentives are there for good science to become known to all? There are billions of incentives that say the opposite. I think some people believe in 'science' like religion, that it will save us from ourselves or something. These people dont see that in science (like religion or any other field of human endeavour) there are controlling interests that have the say. We receive what is expedient.
  - oriolid 6y ago
    What about things simple things like career, peer recognition and intellectual freedom? At lower levels it's called "publish or perish" for reason (not "keep secret or perish"), but if you're really "Newton, Einstein or Darwin" you'll be paid to research whatever you want. And by the way, even for product development there's an institution called "patents" that's intended to encourage publishing.
    - feralimal 6y ago
      Absolutely. How do career, peer recognition, and intellectual freedom stack up against up against grants and tenure? If you are honestly interested in areas that off-trend, would you be able to get anywhere? I think the answer is no. You must sing from the hymnsheet. Apparently science is never settled except that there is no funding if you go off piste.
      - oriolid 6y ago
        What's the difference between career and "grants and tenure"?
        feralimal 6y ago
        I was referring to the intellectual side not the remunerative side.
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    Any good science advance can be done only incrementally over previous advances done by others. Those who are smart enough to contribute to science advances are also aware that their work would have been impossible if others would not have published the results of their work, instead of keeping those for themselves. Therefore they understand that the best strategy for being able to do further advances is to publish what they have found until now, so that in the future, after receiving new results from others, they will be able to discover new advances. This is a rational optimal strategy that does not need any supplementary incentives, like being paid for publications or believing in science or whatever. Of course there are always people who believe that they can cheat in this game and keep secret some useful discoveries. However, in this case cheating works only if you get out of the game, i.e. if you believe that you have made a discovery so great and definitive that not only keeping it secret can bring profits but also that it no longer needs any improvements, so you will never need to do research again in that field. You might get some short-term profits by secrecy, but it is quite certain that you will not be able to find any improvements at the same pace as when the discovery would have been published and you would have seen feedback from others trying to use it and enhance it. The great advances in sciences and technology in the second half of the second millennium were due precisely to the European obsession for quickly publishing any novelty, while China and other Asian countries dominated by Chinese culture stagnated, due to the obsession for secrecy, e.g. that every wise master should reveal his whole knowledge only to a few trusted disciples, possibly only to a single one chosen from them and possibly just at the latest moment possible, on the death bed. Unfortunately, in the last few decades there was a continuous shift from traditions to publish everything in order to ensure the fastest progress to policies to keep secret as much details as possible, due to what I consider as a false belief, that this secrecy creates a competitive advantage.
silicon2401 6y ago
This is a fascinating question that does a great job of bringing realism and idealism head to head. If we're realistic, obviously a lot of people have great potential, but only a very few will both have enough potential and enough drive to realistically hit it big; but can we tell who they are? Idealistically, it's not entirely fair to give a select few all the support; but is it fair to deprive all of humanity of the advances an elite few could make, just to make the elite few's contemporaneous peers feel equally attended to? Personally, I think when you stack the probabilities of potential * interest * means * drive * luck, progress _is_ led by an elite few. The elite few are sometimes bolstered by a massive support system, but part of being the elite, successful few is being able to garner that support, whether through personality, luck, etc. For levity, I'll also add that one thing I love about history in general is finding a tidbit like this: > It is fitting that a pair of Coles gets a reply by a pair of MacRoberts (1986) who argue that bibliographies are incomplete.
- derbOac 6y ago
  To me it's not clear what realism and idealism is in your framework; my idea of each I think might be different from yours. Katalin Karikó was denied tenure at Penn. Douglas Prasher ended up becoming a courtesy shuttle driver for a Toyota dealership. These are a couple of the many of examples that only get attention for how blatantly absurd they are. For each one of these types of stories there are undoubtedly many others you never hear about. The entire reason why these conversations are happening, about how to fund research and support research, is because of how absurd these types of outcomes are.
  - madmadjo 6y ago
    This is the first time I hear about Katalin Karikó and Douglas Prasher and their stories. Thank you for mentioning them. I'm shocked (in a way)...but on the other side I'm not very surprised. :( Occasionally I would hear or read threads and news talking about the problems in science (research, funding, education) like the one we're commenting on. Still these stories are on another level (or maybe it's just a feeling I have, because there are faces, official news clips, statements etc. so we can relate to those people on a personal level). And when I just think that there are, who knows how many, people like these...
29athrowaway 6y ago
Science is done by many people every day. But advancing the frontier of science is a different thing. It requires you to be in touch with the latest developments in the field and that does require full time dedication, sometimes resources in the form of assistants, infrastructure... Very rarely this happens outside academic institutions and well funded laboratories.
rootsudo 6y ago
Much of the first documented papers were done by people who had access to wealth and free time and wanted to just let other people know what they discovered. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-mostly-true-origins-of-the-scientific-journal/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the...
ramoz 6y ago
Anyone thinks this applies to competitive enterprise software business? Or is there large complex systems models where innovation happens (like in science discoveries) at scale.
juanbyrge 6y ago
I think they may be underestimating the interactions that scientists have with other perhaps lesser folks in their field. For example, Einstein may not have been able to publish the special theory of relativity without the work produced by lesser known scientists such Lorentz, Michaelson, Morley, Maxwell, Grossman. And transitively all of those scientists were undoubtedly influenced by others who may be even lesser known or influential.
- albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  It’s scientists all the way down
- konjin 6y ago
  Not to mention that the majority of 'big' ideas are published simultaneously by multiple people at different locations. Big name scientists are usually the ones happy with publishing a half baked idea instead of being universally original. One need to look at Turing and Post, or Darwin and Wallace for a comparison. I blame papers being referenced by author name for this mental bias in the sciences.
- analog31 6y ago
  In my view it's a mistake to assume that we only need the elite, and that we only need breakthroughs. I'm certainly one of the lesser folks. Much lesser. Even while in grad school, I knew that the arc of my career was not going to bend towards tenure. I wrote up what is somewhat disparagingly referred to in my field as an "equipment thesis" and went to industry. But today, I develop scientific equipment, so my equipment thesis wasn't so far off base. ;-) But front-line science research can't be done without equipment that is developed by engineering teams that include some scientists. Likewise for a lot of important but less glamorous things such as figuring out if your water is safe to drink, or if you have COVID-19. And if those teams are going to include some scientists, then you also need people who get a science education and go into teaching. And in a better world, you might even have a few science educated people who work at various levels of government.
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
codingprograms 6y ago
Almost everything in society is built by a few people. The best ideas and processes come from a small minority, the rest of us are just along for the ride
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  Actually, the rest of us are building things. The ideas and processes are the goals or blueprints that need to be implemented. Today I watched four guys pour the foundation of a house using very conventional methods. Those four guys weren't along for the ride. They were building the house. True they didn't come up with the method, nor the concrete, but they did build part of the house. Likewise, the person who made my taco last night might not have invented the taco but she did make it. Very often the most impressive part of building something isn't the novelty, it's the raw effort.
dalbasal 6y ago
> There are various levels of epistemic nihilism one can go, culminating into the "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" so we should fund everyone equally, maximally equalizing funding. I don't agree with this, and will discuss scientific egalitarianism and lotteries in the next part I enjoyed this a lot. Lots of stimulating ideas and a refreshingly robust way of thinking. But... being in the "IDK" camp, and being a self hating empiricist, I smarted a little at the "nihilism" quip. I'm absolutely not against these kinds of pursuits though. If I held the pursestrings, I'd give this man (or woman.. who wrote this?) a go. I just don't think we can get far beyond "lets give this a try" in our knowledge/prediction of what will work here. We're talking about how to fund, and therefore organize, science. There almost certainly isn't one way, and results will likely be different in different between, fields and such. Game theory also plays a role. Funding methods are legible, and legible criteria (such as citations) quickly become game fodder. The best defence against this might be to throw out criteria regularly. One of the reasons I'm game for what the author suggests is that the "co-funding" model where private interests provide 50% of the cash to prove merit is extremely played out. There was a rationale there too. I'm sure you could support it with "n-hypothesis" and such. That breaks down though, a new rationale emerges. Ideally, whatever mechanism is used tries to consciously avoid citation-seo or somesuch. I think there are elephants in the room, when it comes to funding systems. We are, almost by definition, constructing a social system... a society almost. One where livelihood, success, prestige and such are at stake. These can't be taken for granted. A concept like "tenure" invents a type of person... a tenured professor. I think we should be thinking and defining these these problems in such terms. "Lets invent X" where X is a type of institution, title, station etc.
- EhhhhSql 6y ago
  Not to mention, the scientific method is itself a culmination of a type of epistemic nihilism. I'm not sure why you'd abandon it at the funding level—in this context, having epistemic values is just called "bias". Certainly, I'd hope the phrase "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" is a trivially true phrase for a trained scientist. If not, they better read some damn Hume and justify their semantics.
lr1970 6y ago
Most of the scientific breakthroughs are achieved by select few super talented scientists. But since we have no way to tell ahead of time who will become such a genius, we should educate and employ large number of scientists even if only tiny few of them will become next Einsteins.
- gaogao 6y ago
  Reminds me of the Ratatouille monologue > In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The whole monologue is brilliant. It's an amazing film.
  - ausbah 6y ago
    reading it in his voice really adds some oomph to his speech
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I agree, but I'm not sure that's enough. "More people working on it" isn't always better. I agree that have no way to tell ahead of time. That said, I don't think this works like buying a lot of lottery tickets. A breakthrough isn't random, even if it is unpredictable. It also isn't just a function of who the scientist inherently is. Circumstances may be the bigger half of the equation. If a patent clerk shows up with relativity, there is no shortage of places that will provide him a desk and some pencils. Newton emerged out of aristocracy, as did Darwin and many others. Tenured professorships are/were an attempt to replicate those circumstances in many ways. Einstein came out of a patent clerk job. In today's terms this is a wfh with lots of bullshit time. We have a lot of math educated people today with these circumstances. It's just a really hard question.. how do we get more "one offs." IIRC pg named it black swan farming. "Employ" is a broad term and I suspect how its defined matters here.
whatshisface 6y ago
Keeping a few theoretical physicists to develop paradigms to calculate things, but firing anyone who would use those paradigms to calculate things. Yeah, great plan, I'm sure that will be helpful. Citations are heavily biased towards papers that open questions, and against papers that answer questions. Compare the value of a paper that uses a new technique to answer one question to the value of a paper that uses established techniques to answer a thousand questions. The former will get many citations, but the latter is the one you'd want to read, most likely, if you wanted answers to questions.
- eindiran 6y ago
  > [T]he latter is the one you'd want to read ... if you wanted answers to questions. I agree with this assessment, but seeking the answers to questions is only part of why I go looking for papers to read: a lot of the time, I am looking for tools / techniques to solve my particular problem, and a paper that offers a novel technique (even if the author(s) have only applied to to a single specific problem) is very enticing in that case. Papers built around a novel technique get a lot of citations because they engender new attempts to problems that were difficult to solve before the technique existed. And when everybody is suddenly exploring a new technique, testing the boundaries of what the technique can do is very interesting, making negative results significantly more publishable than normal. Lots of people know that $OLD_TECHNIQUE can't solve $PROBLEM_FOO, but the fact that $NEW_TECHNIQUE can't solve it says something quite interesting about the capabilities of the technique.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    But surely, it's clear that using the technique is the "terminal value," and inventing the technique is the "instrumental value." The inventor of the technique will be greatly rewarded, but the only reason what they did was valuable is that others will come along to use their technique. It must be kept in mind that the article is suggesting eliminating your role (that of the person trawling the literature for existing techniques to solve their problem), to focus on the invention of new techniques singularly.
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
No, it's done by the grad-students, postdocs, and hired research assistants of a small elite.
mattkrause 6y ago
I don't find the dismissal of the Matthew Effect ('the rich get richer') even vaguely convincing here. The Bol (2018) paper shows that scientists that are just above the cut-off to receive an early career grant tend to do much better in their subsequent career than those just below it. Both the paper and blogpost explain this away as a "participation effect": the winners end up applying for many more grants, while the non-winners "cease" doing so. However, it seems disingenuous to frame this as an issue of motivation or encouragement without thinking about why else this could happen. In many cases, a scientist needs to bring in grant money to keep their job. There's a very clear causal chain between <no grant> -> <no money> -> <no job>. Less severely, it also takes (grant) money to make (grant) money. Most funding agencies want to see preliminary data, which takes money (and staff) to collect. They also want to see evidence of productivity and 'excellence', which is again dependent on money; in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! In the previous section, the author also discusses how the "top scientists train future top scientists." Some of this may be due to their ability to select the most talented future researchers from a pool of 22 year olds, but it beggars belief that there aren't network effects here too on top of any improvement in training. For example, big well-funded labs have access to better equipment and technical support, which allows their members to fully express their scientific abilities. There are more opportunities for synergy and collaboration than in a small group. Since top scientists are frequently invited to give talks, their work is better advertised, with knock-on effects on citations. Recommendations and letters of support are vital for hinting, grants, and tenure too.
- derbOac 6y ago
  > in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! I can't tell how playful you're being, but in case it's not clear, in my experience at most R01 institutions, this is the norm, not the exception. I have so many problems with this piece and its line of thinking I don't even know where to start. The current academic system is characterized by huge gap between reality and the benchmarks that most attempts to try to evaluate theories about academic success and support fail from the get-go because they're so oversimplified. The piece basically adopts this standard paradigm where you have researchers just doing their thing, publishing, putting out into the world, and all you have to do is "read out" their output. The framing of it, in terms of "the distribution of talent", while meaningful at some level, completely ignores the context any given researcher finds themselves in, in terms of institutional culture, support, corruption, everything. There are metrics, and they are gamed in ways that are hard to even start to ennumerate. To take the Li and Agha paper discussed later in the piece: the author notes that "the paper tries to control for prestige by using dummy variables for having a PhD, an MD, or both, and how many years a PI has been in academia" before admitting "these are highly imperfect as proxies of prestige." This is an absurd understatement. In my experience, "prestige" is an extremely diffuse and elusive thing that has more to do with social networking than institutional prestige per se. Previous papers have shown, for example, that one of the biggest predictors of grant receipt is having previously published with people on the review panels. This alone should be striking to anyone, but it points to how this works: it's not superficial markers of prestige necessarily like US News rankings, but subtle things like social associations etc. In recent years there's been a certain amount of attention to sexism in academics of various forms. Putting sexism per se aside, it's nevertheless an example of a social process that has nothing to do with academic talent per se that neverthless can have huge impacts on academic careers. For every social-environmental variable like sexism, there's some other variable operating on some other person characteristics, like age, race, other social background etc. I could go on and on. I think it's telling that the vast majority of the work cited in the piece is pre-2005 (all but one paper?). I would say the academic environment before, say, 2000 is almost inapplicable to today in many respects, and even the period 2000-2005 is very different.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
There was a recent post here that suggested that Einstein's first wife was much more involved in doing the science for which he became famous than she was given credit for. They wrote the papers together and published under his name because that was the thing that had some hope of working. It took two attempts to come up with proof of his hypothesis and these two attempts happened years apart. The first attempt to photograph the sun during a total eclipse occurred during World War I -- known as The Great War at the time -- and one of the teams was arrested. The other failed to get good photos due to bad weather. Although there are two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses most years, total eclipses aren't common and occur several years apart. IIRC, there were six teams trying to get photographs the second time and only one (or maybe two) succeeded). There was no war on but weather was again a factor. Einstein himself was not on any of the teams that took the photos that were seen as proof of his theory. Scientific breakthroughs are frequently a team effort while one person takes the lion's share of the credit and ends up with the big name recognition. And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit. I found your comment generally thoughtful and interesting, but couldn't let this part stand. The P and the B episodes I remember were all about Pinky messing up Brain's plans. Is this true or do I have a serious case of the Piaget effect??
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    My recollection is that Pinky saves Brain's ass on a regular basis and it goes completely unnoticed. Yes, he routinely "messes up Brain's plans" but that's in part because Brain's plans are almost always idiotic and Pinky prevents him from doing what he wanted to do, much like as a mom I often interfered with first-born child's attempts to climb on the oven door to check out what I was cooking on the stove top and similar shenanigans. I'm sure that as a toddler my oldest son thought I was an idiot and a meanie face who spent all my time thwarting his brilliant plans. (I know for a fact he read late in part because when I bought some reading program and would go through the exercises with him, he was looking at me and thinking stuff along the lines of "I already told you ten times that is the letter P. How much repetition do you need to remember it? God!") Edit: I will add that the lyrics to the theme song include the line "One is a genius, the other's insane" and fail to specify which is which, leaving room for people to either accept the obvious interpretation that Brain is the genius or to go with the less obvious interpretation that Pinky is the real genius and Brain is merely an insane megalomaniac. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_and_the_brain_pinky_is_actually_the_genius/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_an...
op03 6y ago
"almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest" - Grigori Perelmen Basically we need to round up and shoot the conformists and dishonest bunch to Mars when ever the rockets are ready. We already have enough personal data to categorize everyone pretty accurately.
- Bakary 6y ago
  Wouldn't this selection process ironically conform to the main view? And isn't the analysis of personal data yet another chilling effect on non-conformism in the first place?
  - op03 6y ago
    I was just being flip. The selection process will never happen because the conformists and professionally dishonest will have something to say about it.
    - Bakary 6y ago
      I got that, I meant to illustrate the idea that anti-conformism isn't always what it purports to be
KirillPanov 6y ago
> the relative frequency of authors with a given number of publications follows a power law that scales with the square of the number of articles published Please don't count publications. Counting publications is pretty much the worst way to measure anything. Anybody who discusses counting publications in the furtherance of some goal ought to be required to insert the text "yes, I am counting publications, which is the absolute worst metric available, but I doing so because I could not find any other metric."
Ericson2314 6y ago
I don't think we can make a more competitive system that isn't gained. My issue is that research is itself very inefficient. We need to bake new research papers into encyclopedias at a much higher rate. We need to automate tons of research so there's no more grad students hanging around beakers. We need to make much better programming tools than python or Cuda, that allow working with high level concepts not shitty arrays. All that will require a lot of work. We can siphon would-be researches to do that instead. The remaining research will be more productive.
yudlejoza 6y ago
> The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite? That's a horrible re-framing of Sturgeon's law. I'm a big believer of it, especially in science and technology. But where does the word 'elite' come from? Let's say you are a recent PhD doing a post-doc somewhere decent, not a top institute, but not low-ranked either. Your thesis was average, your post-doc research topic is kinda boring (for now). Well, does that make you a non-elite? You have 30 to 40 years of career ahead of you. Should you instead be grateful to find a lecturer position in the middle of nowhere and be satisfied with your career? Not to single out, but does being a tenured professor, leading a STEM lab in MIT make you elite? Again not to single out, and may he rest in peace, but Marvin Minsky ruined the field of AI for many decades with his narrow-mined critique of neural networks. MIT tech review tried to bury the field of 'longevity research' with a vicious, below-the-belt attack on Aubrey de Grey in 2005. STEM history is full of so-called 'elites' (i.e., those getting fame early in their careers, or resting on the laurels of one branding or another) ruining the overall progress for everyone, and setting humanity back. This is not too unrelated to 'science progressing one funeral at a time' as observed by Planck. Point: how do you know someone is 'elite'? You don't. You find out after the fact, e.g., at the end of someone's career if they don't get an early break. In the meantime, you have to give them a chance, and check your 'elite' bias.
Gatsky 6y ago
I don't think you can lump physics, life sciences, chemistry etc all together. This article mainly pertains to physics, which is notable for being more cathedral like than other fields, where prior work is very foundational. Physics is also a field where mathematical aptitude is particularly important, and there is significant variation between people in this dimension with some clear outliers. The small elite theory doesn't work in life sciences in my estimation. There are no life science 'geniuses', it isn't that sort of field. The scientists that won the prize for CRISPR have many excellent qualities, but they are not really distinct from millions of other scientists with similar qualities. I have had a bit to do with 2 other life sicence nobel laureates, and I can verify that they are not John von Neumann in a lab coat. The important thing for CRISPR is that Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier had the opportunity to be studying something like repetitive sequences in bacterial DNA. If you cut science funding, you could easily annihlate fields like this. CRISPR might have taken another 20 years to be discovered, or longer. Charpentier struggled to get funding, living from grant to grant in small labs until she hit upon CRISPR.
- mjfl 6y ago
  Life science research is also conducted in a weird way, where usually the PI mostly does administrative work while grad students / post docs do the actual experiments. It’s weird that they become experts in their field and then put their pipettes down. I feel like in physics the Van Neumann types are always doing research, always at the chalk board, etc.
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    At least in condensed matter physics I can say that the PIs are not in the lab at all doing research. They lead from behind the desk and the grad students and postdocs are the ones running the experiments and data analysis. The PIs just react to the data presented and offer guidance. It's a weird system, before they became professors they were running experiments in a lab and were able to get good results to get published and become a professor, clearly there's a skill set there. But the minute they get professor job we take these people out of the lab and put them behind a desk. It's kind of like yanking LeBron James off the court during his prime and making him coach.
neuah 6y ago
I think using citation count as a metric for scientific importance by definition incorporates a ton of hindsight bias. Less cited papers are sometimes poorly executed research, but often they also just represent dead ends and uninteresting avenues that would've eventually needed to be explored. they don't form the foundation for lots of new research, but collectively they are important for directing things in the right direction. In that sense the citation count undervalues their collective worth. I don't buy the idea that we could get rid of the vast majority of them and the high impact work would be done just the same.
Ceezy 6y ago
A very silly article. Newton laws where certainly not "discover" by newton alone. Erasing people from the history and then painting a picture of a lone scientist is an high prospective. There are scientists that work alone and they are rare and NOT the most productive. And I'm talking about Physics and Math here. So no you need to shower communities of scientist before getting result from research. By the way if an hypothetical lone scientist find all the theorems of the world he would still need to spend some time to teach them to others. At the and you still and up funding a large group of top scientist. There is no way around it.
1MachineElf 6y ago
>Imagine that only a handful of scientists at every point in time are able to –if given the time and means–lead revolutions on par with the work of Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo (This is an extreme case admittedly because most of science does not look like this; most of science is more incremental and less memorable). >>It is possible that my message may be seen as elitist and of interest only to those very few scientists who might be putative members of a twenty - first century Planck Club. >For example we have Heinrich Kayser who did pioneering work on, and coined the expression, "adsorption". I bet you hadn't heard of him before. >It might be facetiously asserted that the best way to win a Nobel prize is to study with a past laureate. >Consider for example what would happen if the already highly cited PCR paper by Mullis et al. (1986) were cited every single time we see "PCR" in a paper. Was I the only one who laughed at these parts? I am not a scientist, but I did enjoy this writing.
selfishgene 6y ago
If flying on Mr. Epstein's private jet called the Lolita Express down to his private island in the Caribbean called "Pedophile Isle" counts as "elite," then maybe so: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science-eugenics-sexual-abuse-researchers.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science... https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher-did-sex-offender-jeffrey-epstein-fund-he-told-science-he-died https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher... Many young scientists have left the research community after completing their PhD's because they were unable to obtain funding the old-fashioned way, by submitting grant applications that are evaluated through the peer review process, rather than by kowtowing to a sexual predator who was facing charges for the sex-trafficking of minors and was trying to buy his way out of federal prison by "facilitating" donations to Harvard and MIT through his billionaire co-conspirators that include Leon Black, Glenn Dubin, and Les Wexner, in exchange for thank-you notes, as a form of reputation laundering, from co-conspirator and still-president of MIT L. Rafael Reif.
drno123 6y ago
A personal annoyance: why mention Galileo as a leader of scientific breakthrough, when Copernicus’ and/or Kepler’s scientific achievements are greater.
richajak 6y ago
Perhaps, I found out about one family who made substantial contribution to science after digging into rabbit hole on names mentioned below. Roger Y. Tsien, who collaborated with Douglas Prasher for Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008, came from a family who has already contributed a lot to science. A lot of his family members: his brothers, parents, uncles, extended family members by birth or marriage, became the top on their fields. Not sure, if it is nature or nurture. No one in my extended family - although our family has produced doctors, etc - has that kind of accomplishment like this family. I, myself, do not inherit the 'gene', all comes from hard work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsue-Chu_Tsien https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsue-Chu_Tsien

121 points by barry-cotter 6y ago

If some scientists did complete some work comparable to the works "Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo" do you think this would reach everyday folk? Or would industry monetise said discovery, and that might best be done by withholding information or even suppressing it completely, if it challenged vested interests?

oriolid 6y ago
No scientist of that caliber would certainly want to publish that kind of research, even if their career depended on it. If they did, it certainly would be ignored by Nature, Science and others, and the newspapers who pick their content from those would have no idea.
feralimal 6y ago
I don't mind being downvoted, but it is the reality. What incentives are there for good science to become known to all? There are billions of incentives that say the opposite. I think some people believe in 'science' like religion, that it will save us from ourselves or something. These people dont see that in science (like religion or any other field of human endeavour) there are controlling interests that have the say. We receive what is expedient.
- oriolid 6y ago
  What about things simple things like career, peer recognition and intellectual freedom? At lower levels it's called "publish or perish" for reason (not "keep secret or perish"), but if you're really "Newton, Einstein or Darwin" you'll be paid to research whatever you want. And by the way, even for product development there's an institution called "patents" that's intended to encourage publishing.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    Absolutely. How do career, peer recognition, and intellectual freedom stack up against up against grants and tenure? If you are honestly interested in areas that off-trend, would you be able to get anywhere? I think the answer is no. You must sing from the hymnsheet. Apparently science is never settled except that there is no funding if you go off piste.
    - oriolid 6y ago
      What's the difference between career and "grants and tenure"?
      - feralimal 6y ago
        I was referring to the intellectual side not the remunerative side.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  Any good science advance can be done only incrementally over previous advances done by others. Those who are smart enough to contribute to science advances are also aware that their work would have been impossible if others would not have published the results of their work, instead of keeping those for themselves. Therefore they understand that the best strategy for being able to do further advances is to publish what they have found until now, so that in the future, after receiving new results from others, they will be able to discover new advances. This is a rational optimal strategy that does not need any supplementary incentives, like being paid for publications or believing in science or whatever. Of course there are always people who believe that they can cheat in this game and keep secret some useful discoveries. However, in this case cheating works only if you get out of the game, i.e. if you believe that you have made a discovery so great and definitive that not only keeping it secret can bring profits but also that it no longer needs any improvements, so you will never need to do research again in that field. You might get some short-term profits by secrecy, but it is quite certain that you will not be able to find any improvements at the same pace as when the discovery would have been published and you would have seen feedback from others trying to use it and enhance it. The great advances in sciences and technology in the second half of the second millennium were due precisely to the European obsession for quickly publishing any novelty, while China and other Asian countries dominated by Chinese culture stagnated, due to the obsession for secrecy, e.g. that every wise master should reveal his whole knowledge only to a few trusted disciples, possibly only to a single one chosen from them and possibly just at the latest moment possible, on the death bed. Unfortunately, in the last few decades there was a continuous shift from traditions to publish everything in order to ensure the fastest progress to policies to keep secret as much details as possible, due to what I consider as a false belief, that this secrecy creates a competitive advantage.

silicon2401 6y ago

This is a fascinating question that does a great job of bringing realism and idealism head to head. If we're realistic, obviously a lot of people have great potential, but only a very few will both have enough potential and enough drive to realistically hit it big; but can we tell who they are? Idealistically, it's not entirely fair to give a select few all the support; but is it fair to deprive all of humanity of the advances an elite few could make, just to make the elite few's contemporaneous peers feel equally attended to? Personally, I think when you stack the probabilities of potential * interest * means * drive * luck, progress _is_ led by an elite few. The elite few are sometimes bolstered by a massive support system, but part of being the elite, successful few is being able to garner that support, whether through personality, luck, etc. For levity, I'll also add that one thing I love about history in general is finding a tidbit like this: > It is fitting that a pair of Coles gets a reply by a pair of MacRoberts (1986) who argue that bibliographies are incomplete.

derbOac 6y ago
To me it's not clear what realism and idealism is in your framework; my idea of each I think might be different from yours. Katalin Karikó was denied tenure at Penn. Douglas Prasher ended up becoming a courtesy shuttle driver for a Toyota dealership. These are a couple of the many of examples that only get attention for how blatantly absurd they are. For each one of these types of stories there are undoubtedly many others you never hear about. The entire reason why these conversations are happening, about how to fund research and support research, is because of how absurd these types of outcomes are.
- madmadjo 6y ago
  This is the first time I hear about Katalin Karikó and Douglas Prasher and their stories. Thank you for mentioning them. I'm shocked (in a way)...but on the other side I'm not very surprised. :( Occasionally I would hear or read threads and news talking about the problems in science (research, funding, education) like the one we're commenting on. Still these stories are on another level (or maybe it's just a feeling I have, because there are faces, official news clips, statements etc. so we can relate to those people on a personal level). And when I just think that there are, who knows how many, people like these...

29athrowaway 6y ago

Science is done by many people every day. But advancing the frontier of science is a different thing. It requires you to be in touch with the latest developments in the field and that does require full time dedication, sometimes resources in the form of assistants, infrastructure... Very rarely this happens outside academic institutions and well funded laboratories.

rootsudo 6y ago

Much of the first documented papers were done by people who had access to wealth and free time and wanted to just let other people know what they discovered. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-mostly-true-origins-of-the-scientific-journal/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the...

ramoz 6y ago

Anyone thinks this applies to competitive enterprise software business? Or is there large complex systems models where innovation happens (like in science discoveries) at scale.

juanbyrge 6y ago

I think they may be underestimating the interactions that scientists have with other perhaps lesser folks in their field. For example, Einstein may not have been able to publish the special theory of relativity without the work produced by lesser known scientists such Lorentz, Michaelson, Morley, Maxwell, Grossman. And transitively all of those scientists were undoubtedly influenced by others who may be even lesser known or influential.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago
It’s scientists all the way down
konjin 6y ago
Not to mention that the majority of 'big' ideas are published simultaneously by multiple people at different locations. Big name scientists are usually the ones happy with publishing a half baked idea instead of being universally original. One need to look at Turing and Post, or Darwin and Wallace for a comparison. I blame papers being referenced by author name for this mental bias in the sciences.
analog31 6y ago
In my view it's a mistake to assume that we only need the elite, and that we only need breakthroughs. I'm certainly one of the lesser folks. Much lesser. Even while in grad school, I knew that the arc of my career was not going to bend towards tenure. I wrote up what is somewhat disparagingly referred to in my field as an "equipment thesis" and went to industry. But today, I develop scientific equipment, so my equipment thesis wasn't so far off base. ;-) But front-line science research can't be done without equipment that is developed by engineering teams that include some scientists. Likewise for a lot of important but less glamorous things such as figuring out if your water is safe to drink, or if you have COVID-19. And if those teams are going to include some scientists, then you also need people who get a science education and go into teaching. And in a better world, you might even have a few science educated people who work at various levels of government.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago

codingprograms 6y ago

Almost everything in society is built by a few people. The best ideas and processes come from a small minority, the rest of us are just along for the ride

ARandomerDude 6y ago
Actually, the rest of us are building things. The ideas and processes are the goals or blueprints that need to be implemented. Today I watched four guys pour the foundation of a house using very conventional methods. Those four guys weren't along for the ride. They were building the house. True they didn't come up with the method, nor the concrete, but they did build part of the house. Likewise, the person who made my taco last night might not have invented the taco but she did make it. Very often the most impressive part of building something isn't the novelty, it's the raw effort.

dalbasal 6y ago

> There are various levels of epistemic nihilism one can go, culminating into the "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" so we should fund everyone equally, maximally equalizing funding. I don't agree with this, and will discuss scientific egalitarianism and lotteries in the next part I enjoyed this a lot. Lots of stimulating ideas and a refreshingly robust way of thinking. But... being in the "IDK" camp, and being a self hating empiricist, I smarted a little at the "nihilism" quip. I'm absolutely not against these kinds of pursuits though. If I held the pursestrings, I'd give this man (or woman.. who wrote this?) a go. I just don't think we can get far beyond "lets give this a try" in our knowledge/prediction of what will work here. We're talking about how to fund, and therefore organize, science. There almost certainly isn't one way, and results will likely be different in different between, fields and such. Game theory also plays a role. Funding methods are legible, and legible criteria (such as citations) quickly become game fodder. The best defence against this might be to throw out criteria regularly. One of the reasons I'm game for what the author suggests is that the "co-funding" model where private interests provide 50% of the cash to prove merit is extremely played out. There was a rationale there too. I'm sure you could support it with "n-hypothesis" and such. That breaks down though, a new rationale emerges. Ideally, whatever mechanism is used tries to consciously avoid citation-seo or somesuch. I think there are elephants in the room, when it comes to funding systems. We are, almost by definition, constructing a social system... a society almost. One where livelihood, success, prestige and such are at stake. These can't be taken for granted. A concept like "tenure" invents a type of person... a tenured professor. I think we should be thinking and defining these these problems in such terms. "Lets invent X" where X is a type of institution, title, station etc.

EhhhhSql 6y ago
Not to mention, the scientific method is itself a culmination of a type of epistemic nihilism. I'm not sure why you'd abandon it at the funding level—in this context, having epistemic values is just called "bias". Certainly, I'd hope the phrase "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" is a trivially true phrase for a trained scientist. If not, they better read some damn Hume and justify their semantics.

lr1970 6y ago

Most of the scientific breakthroughs are achieved by select few super talented scientists. But since we have no way to tell ahead of time who will become such a genius, we should educate and employ large number of scientists even if only tiny few of them will become next Einsteins.

gaogao 6y ago
Reminds me of the Ratatouille monologue > In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The whole monologue is brilliant. It's an amazing film.
- ausbah 6y ago
  reading it in his voice really adds some oomph to his speech
dalbasal 6y ago
I agree, but I'm not sure that's enough. "More people working on it" isn't always better. I agree that have no way to tell ahead of time. That said, I don't think this works like buying a lot of lottery tickets. A breakthrough isn't random, even if it is unpredictable. It also isn't just a function of who the scientist inherently is. Circumstances may be the bigger half of the equation. If a patent clerk shows up with relativity, there is no shortage of places that will provide him a desk and some pencils. Newton emerged out of aristocracy, as did Darwin and many others. Tenured professorships are/were an attempt to replicate those circumstances in many ways. Einstein came out of a patent clerk job. In today's terms this is a wfh with lots of bullshit time. We have a lot of math educated people today with these circumstances. It's just a really hard question.. how do we get more "one offs." IIRC pg named it black swan farming. "Employ" is a broad term and I suspect how its defined matters here.

whatshisface 6y ago

Keeping a few theoretical physicists to develop paradigms to calculate things, but firing anyone who would use those paradigms to calculate things. Yeah, great plan, I'm sure that will be helpful. Citations are heavily biased towards papers that open questions, and against papers that answer questions. Compare the value of a paper that uses a new technique to answer one question to the value of a paper that uses established techniques to answer a thousand questions. The former will get many citations, but the latter is the one you'd want to read, most likely, if you wanted answers to questions.

eindiran 6y ago
> [T]he latter is the one you'd want to read ... if you wanted answers to questions. I agree with this assessment, but seeking the answers to questions is only part of why I go looking for papers to read: a lot of the time, I am looking for tools / techniques to solve my particular problem, and a paper that offers a novel technique (even if the author(s) have only applied to to a single specific problem) is very enticing in that case. Papers built around a novel technique get a lot of citations because they engender new attempts to problems that were difficult to solve before the technique existed. And when everybody is suddenly exploring a new technique, testing the boundaries of what the technique can do is very interesting, making negative results significantly more publishable than normal. Lots of people know that $OLD_TECHNIQUE can't solve $PROBLEM_FOO, but the fact that $NEW_TECHNIQUE can't solve it says something quite interesting about the capabilities of the technique.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  But surely, it's clear that using the technique is the "terminal value," and inventing the technique is the "instrumental value." The inventor of the technique will be greatly rewarded, but the only reason what they did was valuable is that others will come along to use their technique. It must be kept in mind that the article is suggesting eliminating your role (that of the person trawling the literature for existing techniques to solve their problem), to focus on the invention of new techniques singularly.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

No, it's done by the grad-students, postdocs, and hired research assistants of a small elite.

mattkrause 6y ago

I don't find the dismissal of the Matthew Effect ('the rich get richer') even vaguely convincing here. The Bol (2018) paper shows that scientists that are just above the cut-off to receive an early career grant tend to do much better in their subsequent career than those just below it. Both the paper and blogpost explain this away as a "participation effect": the winners end up applying for many more grants, while the non-winners "cease" doing so. However, it seems disingenuous to frame this as an issue of motivation or encouragement without thinking about why else this could happen. In many cases, a scientist needs to bring in grant money to keep their job. There's a very clear causal chain between <no grant> -> <no money> -> <no job>. Less severely, it also takes (grant) money to make (grant) money. Most funding agencies want to see preliminary data, which takes money (and staff) to collect. They also want to see evidence of productivity and 'excellence', which is again dependent on money; in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! In the previous section, the author also discusses how the "top scientists train future top scientists." Some of this may be due to their ability to select the most talented future researchers from a pool of 22 year olds, but it beggars belief that there aren't network effects here too on top of any improvement in training. For example, big well-funded labs have access to better equipment and technical support, which allows their members to fully express their scientific abilities. There are more opportunities for synergy and collaboration than in a small group. Since top scientists are frequently invited to give talks, their work is better advertised, with knock-on effects on citations. Recommendations and letters of support are vital for hinting, grants, and tenure too.

derbOac 6y ago
> in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! I can't tell how playful you're being, but in case it's not clear, in my experience at most R01 institutions, this is the norm, not the exception. I have so many problems with this piece and its line of thinking I don't even know where to start. The current academic system is characterized by huge gap between reality and the benchmarks that most attempts to try to evaluate theories about academic success and support fail from the get-go because they're so oversimplified. The piece basically adopts this standard paradigm where you have researchers just doing their thing, publishing, putting out into the world, and all you have to do is "read out" their output. The framing of it, in terms of "the distribution of talent", while meaningful at some level, completely ignores the context any given researcher finds themselves in, in terms of institutional culture, support, corruption, everything. There are metrics, and they are gamed in ways that are hard to even start to ennumerate. To take the Li and Agha paper discussed later in the piece: the author notes that "the paper tries to control for prestige by using dummy variables for having a PhD, an MD, or both, and how many years a PI has been in academia" before admitting "these are highly imperfect as proxies of prestige." This is an absurd understatement. In my experience, "prestige" is an extremely diffuse and elusive thing that has more to do with social networking than institutional prestige per se. Previous papers have shown, for example, that one of the biggest predictors of grant receipt is having previously published with people on the review panels. This alone should be striking to anyone, but it points to how this works: it's not superficial markers of prestige necessarily like US News rankings, but subtle things like social associations etc. In recent years there's been a certain amount of attention to sexism in academics of various forms. Putting sexism per se aside, it's nevertheless an example of a social process that has nothing to do with academic talent per se that neverthless can have huge impacts on academic careers. For every social-environmental variable like sexism, there's some other variable operating on some other person characteristics, like age, race, other social background etc. I could go on and on. I think it's telling that the vast majority of the work cited in the piece is pre-2005 (all but one paper?). I would say the academic environment before, say, 2000 is almost inapplicable to today in many respects, and even the period 2000-2005 is very different.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

There was a recent post here that suggested that Einstein's first wife was much more involved in doing the science for which he became famous than she was given credit for. They wrote the papers together and published under his name because that was the thing that had some hope of working. It took two attempts to come up with proof of his hypothesis and these two attempts happened years apart. The first attempt to photograph the sun during a total eclipse occurred during World War I -- known as The Great War at the time -- and one of the teams was arrested. The other failed to get good photos due to bad weather. Although there are two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses most years, total eclipses aren't common and occur several years apart. IIRC, there were six teams trying to get photographs the second time and only one (or maybe two) succeeded). There was no war on but weather was again a factor. Einstein himself was not on any of the teams that took the photos that were seen as proof of his theory. Scientific breakthroughs are frequently a team effort while one person takes the lion's share of the credit and ends up with the big name recognition. And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit.

wutbrodo 6y ago
> And I sometimes wonder how often it's kind of like Pinky and The Brain where the real genius of the show is actually Pinky but he never gets any credit. I found your comment generally thoughtful and interesting, but couldn't let this part stand. The P and the B episodes I remember were all about Pinky messing up Brain's plans. Is this true or do I have a serious case of the Piaget effect??
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  My recollection is that Pinky saves Brain's ass on a regular basis and it goes completely unnoticed. Yes, he routinely "messes up Brain's plans" but that's in part because Brain's plans are almost always idiotic and Pinky prevents him from doing what he wanted to do, much like as a mom I often interfered with first-born child's attempts to climb on the oven door to check out what I was cooking on the stove top and similar shenanigans. I'm sure that as a toddler my oldest son thought I was an idiot and a meanie face who spent all my time thwarting his brilliant plans. (I know for a fact he read late in part because when I bought some reading program and would go through the exercises with him, he was looking at me and thinking stuff along the lines of "I already told you ten times that is the letter P. How much repetition do you need to remember it? God!") Edit: I will add that the lyrics to the theme song include the line "One is a genius, the other's insane" and fail to specify which is which, leaving room for people to either accept the obvious interpretation that Brain is the genius or to go with the less obvious interpretation that Pinky is the real genius and Brain is merely an insane megalomaniac. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_and_the_brain_pinky_is_actually_the_genius/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_an...

op03 6y ago

"almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest" - Grigori Perelmen Basically we need to round up and shoot the conformists and dishonest bunch to Mars when ever the rockets are ready. We already have enough personal data to categorize everyone pretty accurately.

Bakary 6y ago
Wouldn't this selection process ironically conform to the main view? And isn't the analysis of personal data yet another chilling effect on non-conformism in the first place?
- op03 6y ago
  I was just being flip. The selection process will never happen because the conformists and professionally dishonest will have something to say about it.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    I got that, I meant to illustrate the idea that anti-conformism isn't always what it purports to be

KirillPanov 6y ago

> the relative frequency of authors with a given number of publications follows a power law that scales with the square of the number of articles published Please don't count publications. Counting publications is pretty much the worst way to measure anything. Anybody who discusses counting publications in the furtherance of some goal ought to be required to insert the text "yes, I am counting publications, which is the absolute worst metric available, but I doing so because I could not find any other metric."

Ericson2314 6y ago

I don't think we can make a more competitive system that isn't gained. My issue is that research is itself very inefficient. We need to bake new research papers into encyclopedias at a much higher rate. We need to automate tons of research so there's no more grad students hanging around beakers. We need to make much better programming tools than python or Cuda, that allow working with high level concepts not shitty arrays. All that will require a lot of work. We can siphon would-be researches to do that instead. The remaining research will be more productive.

yudlejoza 6y ago

> The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite? That's a horrible re-framing of Sturgeon's law. I'm a big believer of it, especially in science and technology. But where does the word 'elite' come from? Let's say you are a recent PhD doing a post-doc somewhere decent, not a top institute, but not low-ranked either. Your thesis was average, your post-doc research topic is kinda boring (for now). Well, does that make you a non-elite? You have 30 to 40 years of career ahead of you. Should you instead be grateful to find a lecturer position in the middle of nowhere and be satisfied with your career? Not to single out, but does being a tenured professor, leading a STEM lab in MIT make you elite? Again not to single out, and may he rest in peace, but Marvin Minsky ruined the field of AI for many decades with his narrow-mined critique of neural networks. MIT tech review tried to bury the field of 'longevity research' with a vicious, below-the-belt attack on Aubrey de Grey in 2005. STEM history is full of so-called 'elites' (i.e., those getting fame early in their careers, or resting on the laurels of one branding or another) ruining the overall progress for everyone, and setting humanity back. This is not too unrelated to 'science progressing one funeral at a time' as observed by Planck. Point: how do you know someone is 'elite'? You don't. You find out after the fact, e.g., at the end of someone's career if they don't get an early break. In the meantime, you have to give them a chance, and check your 'elite' bias.

Gatsky 6y ago

I don't think you can lump physics, life sciences, chemistry etc all together. This article mainly pertains to physics, which is notable for being more cathedral like than other fields, where prior work is very foundational. Physics is also a field where mathematical aptitude is particularly important, and there is significant variation between people in this dimension with some clear outliers. The small elite theory doesn't work in life sciences in my estimation. There are no life science 'geniuses', it isn't that sort of field. The scientists that won the prize for CRISPR have many excellent qualities, but they are not really distinct from millions of other scientists with similar qualities. I have had a bit to do with 2 other life sicence nobel laureates, and I can verify that they are not John von Neumann in a lab coat. The important thing for CRISPR is that Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier had the opportunity to be studying something like repetitive sequences in bacterial DNA. If you cut science funding, you could easily annihlate fields like this. CRISPR might have taken another 20 years to be discovered, or longer. Charpentier struggled to get funding, living from grant to grant in small labs until she hit upon CRISPR.

mjfl 6y ago
Life science research is also conducted in a weird way, where usually the PI mostly does administrative work while grad students / post docs do the actual experiments. It’s weird that they become experts in their field and then put their pipettes down. I feel like in physics the Van Neumann types are always doing research, always at the chalk board, etc.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  At least in condensed matter physics I can say that the PIs are not in the lab at all doing research. They lead from behind the desk and the grad students and postdocs are the ones running the experiments and data analysis. The PIs just react to the data presented and offer guidance. It's a weird system, before they became professors they were running experiments in a lab and were able to get good results to get published and become a professor, clearly there's a skill set there. But the minute they get professor job we take these people out of the lab and put them behind a desk. It's kind of like yanking LeBron James off the court during his prime and making him coach.

neuah 6y ago

I think using citation count as a metric for scientific importance by definition incorporates a ton of hindsight bias. Less cited papers are sometimes poorly executed research, but often they also just represent dead ends and uninteresting avenues that would've eventually needed to be explored. they don't form the foundation for lots of new research, but collectively they are important for directing things in the right direction. In that sense the citation count undervalues their collective worth. I don't buy the idea that we could get rid of the vast majority of them and the high impact work would be done just the same.

Ceezy 6y ago

A very silly article. Newton laws where certainly not "discover" by newton alone. Erasing people from the history and then painting a picture of a lone scientist is an high prospective. There are scientists that work alone and they are rare and NOT the most productive. And I'm talking about Physics and Math here. So no you need to shower communities of scientist before getting result from research. By the way if an hypothetical lone scientist find all the theorems of the world he would still need to spend some time to teach them to others. At the and you still and up funding a large group of top scientist. There is no way around it.

1MachineElf 6y ago

>Imagine that only a handful of scientists at every point in time are able to –if given the time and means–lead revolutions on par with the work of Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo (This is an extreme case admittedly because most of science does not look like this; most of science is more incremental and less memorable). >>It is possible that my message may be seen as elitist and of interest only to those very few scientists who might be putative members of a twenty - first century Planck Club. >For example we have Heinrich Kayser who did pioneering work on, and coined the expression, "adsorption". I bet you hadn't heard of him before. >It might be facetiously asserted that the best way to win a Nobel prize is to study with a past laureate. >Consider for example what would happen if the already highly cited PCR paper by Mullis et al. (1986) were cited every single time we see "PCR" in a paper. Was I the only one who laughed at these parts? I am not a scientist, but I did enjoy this writing.

selfishgene 6y ago

If flying on Mr. Epstein's private jet called the Lolita Express down to his private island in the Caribbean called "Pedophile Isle" counts as "elite," then maybe so: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science-eugenics-sexual-abuse-researchers.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science... https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher-did-sex-offender-jeffrey-epstein-fund-he-told-science-he-died https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher... Many young scientists have left the research community after completing their PhD's because they were unable to obtain funding the old-fashioned way, by submitting grant applications that are evaluated through the peer review process, rather than by kowtowing to a sexual predator who was facing charges for the sex-trafficking of minors and was trying to buy his way out of federal prison by "facilitating" donations to Harvard and MIT through his billionaire co-conspirators that include Leon Black, Glenn Dubin, and Les Wexner, in exchange for thank-you notes, as a form of reputation laundering, from co-conspirator and still-president of MIT L. Rafael Reif.

drno123 6y ago

A personal annoyance: why mention Galileo as a leader of scientific breakthrough, when Copernicus’ and/or Kepler’s scientific achievements are greater.

richajak 6y ago

Perhaps, I found out about one family who made substantial contribution to science after digging into rabbit hole on names mentioned below. Roger Y. Tsien, who collaborated with Douglas Prasher for Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008, came from a family who has already contributed a lot to science. A lot of his family members: his brothers, parents, uncles, extended family members by birth or marriage, became the top on their fields. Not sure, if it is nature or nurture. No one in my extended family - although our family has produced doctors, etc - has that kind of accomplishment like this family. I, myself, do not inherit the 'gene', all comes from hard work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsue-Chu_Tsien https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsue-Chu_Tsien