[HN Gopher] The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small el... ___________________________________________________________________ The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite? Author : barry-cotter Score : 33 points Date : 2021-01-15 06:37 UTC (16 hours ago) (HTM) web link (nintil.com) (TXT) w3m dump (nintil.com) | silicon2401 wrote: | 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. | Out_of_Characte wrote: | The premise of treating everyone equally under the law (or | otherwise) despite knowing for certain that not everyone is | equal is that it helps prove beyond reason of doubt who the | elite truly is. That is, the top contributers are in part there | because of socioeconomic factors, exeptional parental support | or a culture of sorts (Think Chess versus Go) But trying to at | least give everyone resources to compete helps us find the | exeptional few. | weichi wrote: | I'm not sure what you mean by "premise", but I really hope | that the justification for "treating everyone equally under | the law (or otherwise)" is not because doing so "helps prove | beyond a reason of doubt who the elite truly are". For that | would imply that if a better way is found of "proving" who | the elite truly are, we could abandon the idea of equal | treatment. Or that we could abandon equal treatment if we | agreed that "proving who the elite are" is actually | unimportant. In fact, I'm personally skeptical of the value | of "proving beyond reason of doubt who the elite truly are", | but also highly committed to the principal of equal | treatment, so I think the two are unrelated. | | Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point? | dalbasal wrote: | | Ah the dreamers ride against the men of action / Oh see the | men of action falling back - leonard cohen | | To champion the idealists for a moment, what's the practical | implication of realism in this case? Elitism in retrospect is | one thing, but trying to bring it forward or explicitly | advancing it seems like it would result poorly. By what | criteria would an Albert Einstein, the patent clerk, ever have | been selected? Your best bet at an Einstein is to let everyone | in and see who discovers relativity. | | It seems to me that the only way to enrich the elite is to | empower the masses, so to speak. In any case, I think it's more | important to focus on what circumstances allow a person's | potential to emerge. Potential is a highly available resource. | | Like the author note, the problem isn't that most will fail. | It's that most will never try, tenure or no. The free | mindedness required to even attempt greatness is often | frivolous. Frivolousness is more of an egalitarian than an | elitist hallmark. | | *Note: I'm not referring to politics or economics in any way. | Just playing along with the language of the article. | 29athrowaway wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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... | lr1970 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | codingprograms wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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. | ramoz wrote: | 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. | whatshisface wrote: | 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. | feralimal wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | juanbyrge wrote: | 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. | konjin wrote: | 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. | albertgoeswoof wrote: | It's scientists all the way down ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-15 23:00 UTC)