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> Krapivin was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it. “I did this without knowing about Yao’s conjecture,” he
by taylodl 2y ago
> Krapivin was not held back by the conventional wisdom for the simple reason that he was unaware of it. “I did this without knowing about Yao’s conjecture,” he said.
This idea resonates with me, especially in the context of modern physics. The extensive learning required to make advancements often means that one's thinking is heavily influenced by established theories and teachings, potentially stifling true innovation.
- vincekerrazzi 2y agoPotential digression here, this is why I absolutely insist on high performing software teams to have at least one junior. You need someone asking questions like this.
- r00f 2y agoWould it work in this case? Had he asked about this in a team, he would be told about the existing approach and that'd be it. I've been on the both sides, as junior questioning common practices and as senior answering such questions - and it always resulted in transfer of common knowledge, not some breakthrough. I totally support searching for the new truths, but we must not forget why the phrase "do not roll your own crypto" exists. It is ok, or maybe it even MUST be done by students and researchers, but I am not so sure about juniors working on production systems. Still fine if you work in R&D department
- socks 2y agounfortunately, I have a feeling that in the age of LLMs, this junior on the team will have no impetus to actually put in effort and _think_ about such a problem
- falconertc 2y agoWe survived the age of StackOverflow. I don't see why LLM's will be the death of critical thinking where all else has failed so far.
- sitkack 2y agoTotally, the future is nearly identical to the past.
- netdevphoenix 2y agoBecause SO at least requires you to THINK a little about what do you have a problem with. With LLMs, you don't even need that. Just copy paste the error and you get a response. Copy and paste the Jira ticket description and you get a response. This wasn't possible with SO. Yes, none of those will likely work straight away but the point is that less thinking is required. Hopefully, the junior's code will be reviewed before it gets merged
- ForTheKidz 2y agoI can't imagine blindly committing what LLMs spit out will get you very far, much less into a job.
- phs318u 2y agoDid we survive the age of StackOverflow though? The market (globally) is absolutely flooded with not-even-mediocre software devs who are effectively doing what an LLM is i.e. finding the most plausible looking answers on SO and somehow munging them together, without any real understanding of what they're doing nor why it's working (or not working). The number of people charging contract rates yet lacking an understanding of actual software design principles (largely language agnostic) and no idea how computers actually work, is scary.
- gopher_space 2y agoIt’s nice to have someone around who doesn’t understand that I’ve given them hard work. Big, open ended tasks like “invent a photogrammetry pipeline”
- KineticLensman 2y agoYes, just like evil geniuses should have their plans for world domination reviewed by a 5 year old
- jsty 2y agoOf course not - that would be ridiculous - it's clearly a job for a Mini-Me! ;)
- geodel 2y agoI think a presence of even single senior can dampen the questioning part. So I prefer all junior team to make some big path breaking changes.
- jhanschoo 2y agoDo you have a personal example that you can point to regarding modern physics?
- mistercheph 2y agoDo you have an example of a meaningful breakthrough in that field in the last 25 years? What's more likely, that we are nearing completion of understanding, or that our approach is misguided and in need of Newtonian revolution of method?
- gsk22 2y agoPhysics is the poster child of a discipline that knows its foundations are wrong. Basically every physicist understands that our current theories are full of holes and a new way of thinking is needed. So I don't really buy the idea that physics in particular is stifled by a rigid adherence to the status quo.
- andrewflnr 2y agoThe charitable version of this is that to reconcile all the holes, we in fact need radically new and different mathematical underpinnings that aren't currently on the horizon. I don't know how that could be true; certainly any new foundation would have to reduce to something very like the current theories under already-studied conditions. If it is, though, we might be on a really big local maximum, and the path off of it might look really weird and nonsensical for a long time (which is why I can't quite bring myself to fully dismiss Stephen Wolfram, for instance :D).
- MadnessASAP 2y agoMaybe the trick is to forget math entirely! Accept we live in a universe where 2+2=, where pi will change before your even half way around the circle! Cast off the shackles of rationality and embrace a universe where the only constant is change. While you're at it you should smoke this shit, it's wild.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoThere’s some truth to that. But there are also a LOT of “self-taught” cranks out there who think they’ve discovered an amazing new theoretical framework… but if they’d done any background reading, they’d know it’s been tried and didn’t work.
- mistercheph 2y agoSo what? Let them crank on, it's no less productive than most career researchers, collecting data on the 10,000th subdegree of some nested abstraction. (It is good to have some number of people doing that!) To me the two seem to actually be extremely similar behaviors except one is blessed by the church and the other is heterodoxy. Thou shalt not inquire without passing through the blessed gates of wisdom and drinking from the fountain of holy knowledge!
- ikanreed 2y agoIt's a heuristic for understanding why you don't need to take some people seriously with your limited time available to approach new concepts. Credentialism should never be a fundamental basis for refuting new theories, but it might be a reason to not pay attention to them.
- mcherm 2y agoI would say a reason to limit the attention paid to it. If some crank came to me with a perpetual motion machine I might take 2 minutes to ask them, "So how does this account for the conservation of energy?" If their first response is "Energy conservation doesn't apply at the QUANTUM level." then I can quickly move on and ignore them. If their first response is "I think it is extracting energy from the Earth's rotation through interaction with it's magnetic field." then it may be worth me investing another 5 minutes to see what the next level of reasoning says.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoIt matters because they waste the time of serious researchers.
- jfengel 2y agoAll of the advances of modern physics were made by people who were well trained and well acquainted with the state of the art. There is a myth that Einstein was an outsider. He had a degree in physics. He was working as a patent clerk because he couldn't find a job as a high school teacher, not because he didn't know physics.
- gaugefield 2y agoOne of his earliest great works is one that indicated wrong in the foundational aspect of the theory, namely incompatibility with E&M Maxwell equations and Galilean Transformations and E&M equations not being invariant under those transformations. The principle of symmetry is one of the foundation issues in physics. He also had th wisdom of understanding of the physics of new transformation, Lorentz transformation, which we know today as Special Relativity. Yes, of course he was well-trained and had the enough background, but also the problem at the time was the type of problem that was solvable (i.e. no limitation in terms of tech) and that required new framework with new understanding.
- snarf21 2y agoOne question I had in college was if learning inhibits our ability to learn new things. We can gain knowledge but is that the same as learning? I'm not sure where the line sits between questioning and obstinance. Looking back at Theranos, lots of "experts" (at Stanford, etc.) told her her idea was impossible given the small amount of blood but she convinced people she found a way. It was all a fraud but is there a way to do blood testing at that scale? Do we just need people to keep failing and see if anyone ever gets there? Should academia stick to things that aren't known to be "impossible"? I don't have any answers but find it interesting to contemplate.
- andrewflnr 2y agoPicking Theranos as an example in favor of ignoring conventional wisdom is really a bold choice. I know there are better examples, based on actual results instead of wishful thinking.
- fragmede 2y agoAvoiding more recent (aka controversial) examples, the best search engines of the early Internet required users to trawl through pages and pages of search results, with the useful answers on page 8 or so. Conventional wisdom was this was as good as it was gonna get, and that's just how search is. That was, of course, until Google came around and totally changed the game.
- plorkyeran 2y agoYour example of a time where ignoring the "experts" was a good thing was a time when the experts were correct?
- 9rx 2y agoDo you have a better example to set the context up to ask whether blood testing at that scale could ever become possible if enough people kept trying to crack that nut, contrary to the general consensus of infeasibility?
- graemep 2y agoSomewhat similar to Plank's principle: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it "
- eviks 2y agoThis is just a phrase in an article, there is no reason to believe it reflects the reality in any way. For example, the guy faced a sceptical advisor's response to his proposal. You could say "Krapivin was held back by the conventional scepticism of his boss" (which is a real thing vs the mythical power of conventional wisdom). Yet he wasn't.
- beej71 2y agoReminds me of (I think) the PostIt note inventors saying that if they'd looked at the research ahead of time, they never would have even tried.
- sitkack 2y agoThat says more about the culture of giving up than of doing research. Research can tell you immediately if something is possible, or that you need to do more research.
- meifun 2y agoThis intrigues me, can you share more about this?
- gowld 2y ago? https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us/ https://www.post-it.com/3M/en_US/post-it/contact-us/about-us...
- andrewflnr 2y agoSince people are getting a little squirrelly, I think it's important to point out that this discovery was only in contradiction with a conjecture, not something anyone pretended to prove. Conjectures exist to be falsified.
- rmah 2y agoIf I may be so bold, it resonates (with you, with me, with most people) because the idea that one can make revolutionary discoveries that contradicts the status quo as an outsider is an inherently attractive idea. It scratches many emotional itches: tweaking the nose of "the man"; suspicion of institutions; being an unknown hero (before the discovery); discovering one's inherent, but unrecognized, greatness; and more. But the reality of the matter is that for every Krapivin, there are thousands of other people who tried but did not. And more importantly, there are hundreds of others who did the work, gained the foundational knowledge, and THEN made a discovery that changed how we think about the world even if only a tiny bit. While it's not as romantic, it's the way reality works. Mostly. It sounds like Krapivin is continuing his education. And hopefully his hard work will hone his brilliance and help him to make even more discoveries in the future.
- campbel 2y ago> because the idea that one can make revolutionary discoveries that contradicts the status quo as an outsider is an inherently attractive idea This might be satisfying if you have a grievance with the "institution" but to OP's point its also interesting because we often limit our areas of exploration to what is conventionally accepted. If you are ignorant of convention you are more likely to retread ground, but less likely to be bounded by it. As you say, conventional wisdom is conventional because its pretty dang good, so this doesn't often pay off.
- Pxtl 2y agoYeah, everybody wants to be the Karate Kid who binged karate studies in one montage and then won the tournament instead of training in the dojo for years and still having to cheat to come close to winning (and still failing) like the chumps at Cobra Kai.
- phkahler 2y ago>> Yeah, everybody wants to be the Karate Kid who binged karate studies in one montage and then won the tournament instead of training in the dojo for years and still having to cheat to come close to winning (and still failing) like the chumps at Cobra Kai. Somehow I think you missed the lesson of that movie - if there is one. It's been a long time and I can't put it into words well, but I suspect it was about someone with character and humility vs brute force and cheating. Something like that, but far different from underdog find shortcut to success.
- bloqs 2y agoIt resonates because of dopamine, and little else
- etchalon 2y agohttps://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=Lqi274EhmzM7nTgB https://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=Lqi274EhmzM7nTgB
- viccis 2y agoMartha Argerich has a similar anecdote when it came to learning a very difficult piano piece. Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit is notoriously difficult, even for accomplished pianists. She learned it (along with another tough one) in 5 days because her teacher told her to learn it. She claims that she was helped by the fact that she was unaware that it was supposed to be difficult.