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To me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science going forward, you need enough pe

To me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science going forward, you need enough people who understand the field to generate a sufficient probability of anyone putting together the pieces of the next major discovery. That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor. Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.

rook_line_sinkr 1y ago
agreed! there's a nice short story along those lines, by Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
kibwen 1y ago
Yep. Human civilization is fundamentally predicated on the transmission of ideas through time. Without old ideas to build upon (Newton's "shoulders of giants"), there's no long-term advancement. Transmitting established knowledge is just as important to civilization as generating new knowledge.
kulahan 1y ago
An interesting example, in my opinion: In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks. Why do we keep making them? Because you need people who, on day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can't spend months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people making tanks for "no reason".
- XorNot 1y ago
  This is also why US shipbuilding is a dumpster fire: lack of a consistent order book for warships means they're more expensive to produce and the process is chaotic. It's one of the great reasons to cultivate a collection of close allies who you support: it keeps your production lines warm and your workforce active and developing.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    It would help if there was a active civilian shipbuilding industry. Easier to pivot than building up something from nothing. But that industry has been taken over by asia.
    - bluedino 1y ago
      > But that industry has been taken over by asia. There aren't many that haven't been.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    I hadn’t considered this - it must be a nightmare to try and find experienced aircraft carrier engineers. We have like 14 of em, right? Probably like 70% the same crew on each one, but I don’t remember the last time we built one. I wonder if the expertise is still there, and maybe I’m just missing these stories.
    - renewiltord 1y ago
      The last time we built aircraft carriers in the US? Has there ever been a one year period when we haven't been building aircraft carriers (or ships which other nations would consider carriers)? Certainly there are many we're currently building and many we will build after that. Biggest in the world kind of stuff. Gerald R Ford class.
      - hollerith 1y ago
        Ditto destroyers, which the US has been building continuously going back at least to 1988 according the dates in this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_de...
      - kulahan 1y ago
        TIL! I guess I just haven't been following this stuff. Now I've got something to read about all night, thanks!
- paulpauper 1y ago
  Why do we keep making them? Didn't you answer your question in the above sentence? They are used to protect US foreign interests by sending them to allies. It's not because people will somehow forget how to make them. It's based off of an assembly line and blueprints. I don't see how this would be forgotten, any more than it would be possible for society to forget how to build a CRT TV just because they are not used anymore.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    I wonder how much we've learned from the Saturn V project where the majority of the crucial knowledge (including for the machines that build the parts for the machines that build the parts) was undocumented. Hopefully a lot but maybe we just forward evolve instead. I'm always impressed that America's moribund manufacturing industry nonetheless makes prodigious amounts of expensive vehicles. It feels like one year I was hearing about the terrible failure that the F-35 was and the next year I looked up and we've got more than a thousand of them - enough to dwarf any other conventional air force.
    - cwillu 1y ago
      The whining about F-35 was always transparently nonsense, and happened more or less with every generation of attack and fighter jet.
      - nradov 1y ago
        The whining wasn't completely nonsense: the JSF / F-35 program is a prime example of procurement malpractice where the government set flawed initial requirements which made the final product later, more expensive, and less capable than it should have been. Congress and the Department of Defense repeated the same errors from the debacle of the TFX / F-111 program and then compounded the problem with additional unforced errors like trying to do concurrent testing and production. But in the end the F-35 really does work pretty well by all credible accounts. It could have been a lot worse.
  - nradov 1y ago
- nitwit005 1y ago
  I wish it was that logical, but the tanks aren't going to make sense in future wars either. They're just too heavy. They previously had to re-enforce bridges in Europe so that the tanks could act as a defense if Russia invaded. We sold some of them to Australia, and they struggled to get them off of the docks as the trains and bridges couldn't handle the weight. Unsurprisingly, the military has asked for lighter tanks.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Eh, until we have drone-bots that can perform at nearly a human level, we'll still need to have a physical presence, and there's roughly nothing as dangerous or safe (for the users) as a brand-new tank. They're heavy because of the shielding - if it weren't necessary, they'd just be lighter. As it is, we do also have lighter military vehicles - basically retrofitted F250/350s with a shitload of steel bolted on. They're great in many instances, but sometimes a tank is just what you want.
    - nitwit005 1y ago
      How will a tank that you can't get to the battlefield help? That truly is not a joke or exaggeration. They are above the weight limit of many bridges, without any other vehicles on the bridge. They are just that heavy.
      - kulahan 1y ago
        C5s can also transport them easily. I... don't know if C17s can, but I assume not? Maybe though. If so, they're not a problem at all, if you really want 'em. But also remember tanks are tanks - they're meant to drive over all kinds of nonsense. It might be something of a technical roadblock if there's an impassable ravine, but there are still many, many instances where they'll be useful. IMO we'll see them fall out of favor heavily if we start doing more mountainous island warfare. Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, and there are a number of options: 1. Shore up/reinforce the bridge you want to cross with temporary structures 2. Just fill the damn terrain if it's a narrow ravine 3. Build a quick ferry 4. There are apparently literal armored vehicle-launched bridges (AVLBs)
throwawaymaths 1y ago
> That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor. Numbers game doesn't work in the idealized way you think it does. if you let too many mediocre or bad people become scientists, some of them engage in fraud or ill- considered modelmaking, which wastes the time of good scientists who are in the place of having to reproduce results that were never going to work.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Pretty impossible to compensate for or prevent. The day doctor or phd because a prestigious title; the first fraudsters were born. If the title becomes even more prestigious, the more damage can a bad actor be able to evoke with its influence.
- jasperry 1y ago
  I didn't say more people should become career scientists; the incentives of that are all messed up from trying to measure research output like it's a product. IMO the best way to prevent junk science is to teach more people to tell good science from bad. Better understanding is empowering regardless of career.
- vladms 1y ago
  Would you have any reference of why it matters the number of people doing something for some to engage in something nefarious? I would expect to happen no matter the number of people. I feel it is more connected to the culture (for example I would expect to happen more in a hierarchical culture than in an egalitarian culture, or more in a believing culture than in a critical culture).
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    it happens no matter the number of people. but if you create a directive to dump more people into science than the capacity of society to produce scientists, (and there isn't an aggressive system to cull fraudsters) you will wind up with a linear increase of fraud/bad science, and a superlinear negative effect.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
Mediocre baseball players take their teams to the world series. Mediocre soldiers, not special forces commandos, win wars. Etc. The principle is pretty general.
- paulpauper 1y ago
  Statistically, most people must be mediocre
utopcell 1y ago
..or, as Aristotle put it more succinctly: "those who can, do; those who understand, teach".
smiley1437 1y ago
> Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding. Especially if the work is classified. The manufacture of FOGBANK, a key material for a thermonuclear weapon's interstage, was lost by 2000 because so few people were involved with its manufacture and the ones who knew retired or moved on. It's thought to be an aerogel-like substance. 5 years and millions in expensive reverse engineering was required to figure it out again. I'm guessing they documented it this time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
- algorithmsRcool 1y ago
  My favorite part about the FOGBANK story is that once they figured out how to manufacture it again, the new version of the material was more chemically pure than the old version, but this actually made the material LESS effective, so they had to add spcific impruities back into it to make it work correctly. [0] https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-use...
sinuhe69 1y ago
If what you said is true, I wonder whether (fine-tuned AI) will replace mediocre scientists and specialists very soon.

rook_line_sinkr 1y ago

agreed! there's a nice short story along those lines, by Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

kibwen 1y ago

Yep. Human civilization is fundamentally predicated on the transmission of ideas through time. Without old ideas to build upon (Newton's "shoulders of giants"), there's no long-term advancement. Transmitting established knowledge is just as important to civilization as generating new knowledge.

kulahan 1y ago

An interesting example, in my opinion: In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks. Why do we keep making them? Because you need people who, on day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can't spend months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people making tanks for "no reason".

XorNot 1y ago
This is also why US shipbuilding is a dumpster fire: lack of a consistent order book for warships means they're more expensive to produce and the process is chaotic. It's one of the great reasons to cultivate a collection of close allies who you support: it keeps your production lines warm and your workforce active and developing.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  It would help if there was a active civilian shipbuilding industry. Easier to pivot than building up something from nothing. But that industry has been taken over by asia.
  - bluedino 1y ago
    > But that industry has been taken over by asia. There aren't many that haven't been.
- kulahan 1y ago
  I hadn’t considered this - it must be a nightmare to try and find experienced aircraft carrier engineers. We have like 14 of em, right? Probably like 70% the same crew on each one, but I don’t remember the last time we built one. I wonder if the expertise is still there, and maybe I’m just missing these stories.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    The last time we built aircraft carriers in the US? Has there ever been a one year period when we haven't been building aircraft carriers (or ships which other nations would consider carriers)? Certainly there are many we're currently building and many we will build after that. Biggest in the world kind of stuff. Gerald R Ford class.
    - hollerith 1y ago
      Ditto destroyers, which the US has been building continuously going back at least to 1988 according the dates in this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_de...
    - kulahan 1y ago
      TIL! I guess I just haven't been following this stuff. Now I've got something to read about all night, thanks!
paulpauper 1y ago
Why do we keep making them? Didn't you answer your question in the above sentence? They are used to protect US foreign interests by sending them to allies. It's not because people will somehow forget how to make them. It's based off of an assembly line and blueprints. I don't see how this would be forgotten, any more than it would be possible for society to forget how to build a CRT TV just because they are not used anymore.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  I wonder how much we've learned from the Saturn V project where the majority of the crucial knowledge (including for the machines that build the parts for the machines that build the parts) was undocumented. Hopefully a lot but maybe we just forward evolve instead. I'm always impressed that America's moribund manufacturing industry nonetheless makes prodigious amounts of expensive vehicles. It feels like one year I was hearing about the terrible failure that the F-35 was and the next year I looked up and we've got more than a thousand of them - enough to dwarf any other conventional air force.
  - cwillu 1y ago
    The whining about F-35 was always transparently nonsense, and happened more or less with every generation of attack and fighter jet.
    - nradov 1y ago
      The whining wasn't completely nonsense: the JSF / F-35 program is a prime example of procurement malpractice where the government set flawed initial requirements which made the final product later, more expensive, and less capable than it should have been. Congress and the Department of Defense repeated the same errors from the debacle of the TFX / F-111 program and then compounded the problem with additional unforced errors like trying to do concurrent testing and production. But in the end the F-35 really does work pretty well by all credible accounts. It could have been a lot worse.
- nradov 1y ago
nitwit005 1y ago
I wish it was that logical, but the tanks aren't going to make sense in future wars either. They're just too heavy. They previously had to re-enforce bridges in Europe so that the tanks could act as a defense if Russia invaded. We sold some of them to Australia, and they struggled to get them off of the docks as the trains and bridges couldn't handle the weight. Unsurprisingly, the military has asked for lighter tanks.
- kulahan 1y ago
  Eh, until we have drone-bots that can perform at nearly a human level, we'll still need to have a physical presence, and there's roughly nothing as dangerous or safe (for the users) as a brand-new tank. They're heavy because of the shielding - if it weren't necessary, they'd just be lighter. As it is, we do also have lighter military vehicles - basically retrofitted F250/350s with a shitload of steel bolted on. They're great in many instances, but sometimes a tank is just what you want.
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    How will a tank that you can't get to the battlefield help? That truly is not a joke or exaggeration. They are above the weight limit of many bridges, without any other vehicles on the bridge. They are just that heavy.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      C5s can also transport them easily. I... don't know if C17s can, but I assume not? Maybe though. If so, they're not a problem at all, if you really want 'em. But also remember tanks are tanks - they're meant to drive over all kinds of nonsense. It might be something of a technical roadblock if there's an impassable ravine, but there are still many, many instances where they'll be useful. IMO we'll see them fall out of favor heavily if we start doing more mountainous island warfare. Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, and there are a number of options: 1. Shore up/reinforce the bridge you want to cross with temporary structures 2. Just fill the damn terrain if it's a narrow ravine 3. Build a quick ferry 4. There are apparently literal armored vehicle-launched bridges (AVLBs)

throwawaymaths 1y ago

> That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor. Numbers game doesn't work in the idealized way you think it does. if you let too many mediocre or bad people become scientists, some of them engage in fraud or ill- considered modelmaking, which wastes the time of good scientists who are in the place of having to reproduce results that were never going to work.

aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
Pretty impossible to compensate for or prevent. The day doctor or phd because a prestigious title; the first fraudsters were born. If the title becomes even more prestigious, the more damage can a bad actor be able to evoke with its influence.
jasperry 1y ago
I didn't say more people should become career scientists; the incentives of that are all messed up from trying to measure research output like it's a product. IMO the best way to prevent junk science is to teach more people to tell good science from bad. Better understanding is empowering regardless of career.
vladms 1y ago
Would you have any reference of why it matters the number of people doing something for some to engage in something nefarious? I would expect to happen no matter the number of people. I feel it is more connected to the culture (for example I would expect to happen more in a hierarchical culture than in an egalitarian culture, or more in a believing culture than in a critical culture).
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  it happens no matter the number of people. but if you create a directive to dump more people into science than the capacity of society to produce scientists, (and there isn't an aggressive system to cull fraudsters) you will wind up with a linear increase of fraud/bad science, and a superlinear negative effect.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

Mediocre baseball players take their teams to the world series. Mediocre soldiers, not special forces commandos, win wars. Etc. The principle is pretty general.

paulpauper 1y ago
Statistically, most people must be mediocre

utopcell 1y ago

..or, as Aristotle put it more succinctly: "those who can, do; those who understand, teach".

smiley1437 1y ago

> Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding. Especially if the work is classified. The manufacture of FOGBANK, a key material for a thermonuclear weapon's interstage, was lost by 2000 because so few people were involved with its manufacture and the ones who knew retired or moved on. It's thought to be an aerogel-like substance. 5 years and millions in expensive reverse engineering was required to figure it out again. I'm guessing they documented it this time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

algorithmsRcool 1y ago
My favorite part about the FOGBANK story is that once they figured out how to manufacture it again, the new version of the material was more chemically pure than the old version, but this actually made the material LESS effective, so they had to add spcific impruities back into it to make it work correctly. [0] https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-use...

sinuhe69 1y ago

If what you said is true, I wonder whether (fine-tuned AI) will replace mediocre scientists and specialists very soon.