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I agree completely with criticisms of the journal - clearly their process is flawed in a multitude of ways. But regarding "shopping around for a respected autho

I agree completely with criticisms of the journal - clearly their process is flawed in a multitude of ways. But regarding "shopping around for a respected authority to be taken seriously" - I think this is actually an important lesson. The problem with the vision of an egalitarian meritocracy in science (or any other field, honestly) is that reviewing, understanding and critiquing someone else's work has a non-zero cost - actually quite a large cost if done correctly. Also, the people most qualified to do this analysis generally loathe doing it, as they'd rather be spending time on their own original work. Inevitably, people develop heuristics to estimate the credibility of every new email or article that comes across their desk, to decide which is even worth reading. Understandably, one of those heuristics is credentials/authority - the ratio of good articles published by non-experts in their field is extremely small and massively outweighed by crackpots. So what does a smart non-expert with a good idea do to hack this system? "Bootstrap" your authority, by first finding someone with more credentials than yourself, but not so much notoriety that they're too busy to read your email. If you can convince them, they'll bring it up the chain to the next-highest authority they can convince, and eventually it'll have some important names behind it and people will pay attention. Brown was able to accomplish this with only two collaborators, so I consider him a master bootstrapper for this :) Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days. On the internet, a non-expert trying to rapidly gain credibility on their own is indistinguishable from social media hucksterism/"influencing". If you want to break into a new field, find some experts in that field and work with them!

mcguire 5y ago
"Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days." And note that that patent clerk wasn't just some patent clerk. He had published four papers (plus a bunch of reviews) and finished his dissertation by 1905.
Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
Juxtaposing this to Nakamoto's creation of bitcoin and original use cryptography, it makes no sense to me how anyone would have ever paid even an ounce of attention to what some random, supposedly unkown guy on the internet has to say about ... anything. Or how Perelman even got someone to even eant to verify his solution. Maybe not so much Perelman since he had some important figures knowing him already.
- dandelany 5y ago
  Yeah Bitcoin is such an interesting exception! I think some ideas are viral enough on their own to go from zero to front-page on HN/reddit/etc. even when posted by an anonymous user - but it's rare to go beyond that, they usually run out of momentum. Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts. Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Perelman was widely known as a math prodigy (he won gold for the USSR at the International Mathematical Olympiad) and studied at the Leningrad University, so he could approach pretty much any of his former professors to take a look. He was definitely not an outsider in the field. A recluse, yes, but that is different from being a no-name.
- dfabulich 5y ago
  Bitcoin received early support from high-reputation folks in the cryptography community, including Hal Finney and Nick Szabo. (As a result, some people thought that one or both of them were Nakamoto.) Regardless of who Nakamoto actually was, it does appear that Finney and Szabo played a similar role that Sokal did in this story; getting support from high-rep folks was essential to getting Bitcoin off the ground.

mcguire 5y ago

"Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days." And note that that patent clerk wasn't just some patent clerk. He had published four papers (plus a bunch of reviews) and finished his dissertation by 1905.

Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago

Juxtaposing this to Nakamoto's creation of bitcoin and original use cryptography, it makes no sense to me how anyone would have ever paid even an ounce of attention to what some random, supposedly unkown guy on the internet has to say about ... anything. Or how Perelman even got someone to even eant to verify his solution. Maybe not so much Perelman since he had some important figures knowing him already.

dandelany 5y ago
Yeah Bitcoin is such an interesting exception! I think some ideas are viral enough on their own to go from zero to front-page on HN/reddit/etc. even when posted by an anonymous user - but it's rare to go beyond that, they usually run out of momentum. Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts. Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...
inglor_cz 5y ago
Perelman was widely known as a math prodigy (he won gold for the USSR at the International Mathematical Olympiad) and studied at the Leningrad University, so he could approach pretty much any of his former professors to take a look. He was definitely not an outsider in the field. A recluse, yes, but that is different from being a no-name.
dfabulich 5y ago
Bitcoin received early support from high-reputation folks in the cryptography community, including Hal Finney and Nick Szabo. (As a result, some people thought that one or both of them were Nakamoto.) Regardless of who Nakamoto actually was, it does appear that Finney and Szabo played a similar role that Sokal did in this story; getting support from high-rep folks was essential to getting Bitcoin off the ground.