You can do all the 'proving your chops' and in-the-box thinking in the world and still get ostracized for your creative insight. * Semmelweis - medicine. Demon

You can do all the 'proving your chops' and in-the-box thinking in the world and still get ostracized for your creative insight. * Semmelweis - medicine. Demonstrated textbook obstetric technique at Vienna General Hospital, then produced statistically impeccable data showing that hand-washing slashed puerperal fever mortality. Colleagues drove him out of the profession, and he died in an asylum. * Barbara McClintock - genetics. Member of the National Academy, meticulous corn geneticist; her discovery of “jumping genes” (transposons) was ignored for 30 years and derided as “mysticism.” * Georg Cantor - mathematics. Earned a Ph.D. and published dozens of orthodox papers before writing on transfinite numbers; was then declared “a corrupter of youth”. Career was blocked, contributing to a breakdown. * Douglas Engelbart - computer science. Published conventional reports for years. When he presented the mouse, hypertext, and videoconferencing in “The Mother of All Demos” (1968), ARPA funding was slashed and he was professionally sidelined for the next twenty years. Then you've got Stravinsky, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, James Joyce; all who displayed perfect 'classical' techniques before doing their own thing. In economics you've got Joan Robinson and Elinor Ostrom. And let's not forget Galileo. I'd even put Assange in this list. So, "following the rules" before attempting to revolutionize your field doesn't seem to actually help all that much. This is a major problem, consistent across many centuries and cultures, which ought to be recognized more.