Why are modern scientists so dull? | Hacker News Reader

Why are modern scientists so dull?

medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com

34 pointsbootload20 comments

I've mentioned before here on HN problems with this source,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961305

which are that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles and reviews he cites in this submitted blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference list.

But I must, for completeness of response, mention that the book

N.J. Mackintosh, IQ and human intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1998)

http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-N-Mackintosh/dp/...

in his reference list is the best book on its subject, still amazingly current a decade after it was published (because the author is completely familiar with current research and was looking ahead to research that was still underway as he wrote his book). Even though the book is cited in a blog post that isn't supported by the book, the book itself is well worth reading.

Thank you for that Tokenadult. Comments like this are unfortunately becoming rarer on HN, but they are truly appreciated. Civil discussion backed up by facts.

You know what's kind of dull? Talking to "normal" people in a bar. All they talk about is football and the daily grind. To each his own.

This is utter rubbish if it's meant to be taken seriously. I'm not even disagreeing with the assertion that scientists are largely dull. Good science needs a dispassionate and objective attitude, and it's often solitary. I guess those don't make for fertile breeding grounds for what most people find to be interesting in other people. Sadly I believe the author to be serious in his 'analysis' - I'm left shaking my head at the crackpot pretentiousness of it all.

Are they really dull? I don't know that to be true. I think the general public is no longer well equipped to appreciate their work so they tend to be clogs in the machine just doing their job like everyone else. You have no chance to escape a stereotype of being dull if you have no audience that understands and appreciates you work.

  > ... they tend to be clogs in the machine ...

Fascinating typo ... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage ...

  > [sabotage] derives from the Netherlands in the 15th
  > century when workers would throw their sabots [clogs]
  > into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break
  > the cogs, feeling the automated machines would render
  > the human workers obsolete.

So being "clogs in the machine" is rather apposite for people who are feeling ground down and unappreciated.

Just an educated guess but I think now solving problems which will be revolutionary in nature is just beyond the means of one single person simply because they are way too hard for just one Genius to solve it- so we don't have a famous Newton or an Einstein of present age and instead have lot of people working on lot of small chinks of the bigger problem

While pretentiously written in scientific-journal format, the paper doesn't seem to have any hard data supporting the assertion that modern scientists are really dull.

It is, nevertheless, quite funny.

My expectation when I went to grad school would be that I would have more freedom to do what I was interested in than I ever had before. What I found was that what I had to do was far more constricting than undergrad; I had take take courses on things I was completely uninterested, do research I couldn't care less about, and teach undergraduates stuff that I got a D+ in when I was an undergrad, because it was so boring.

That said, I am probably not cut out for being a scientist anyway. But what drew me to science was the lure of following my intellectual interests, and it turns out I'd have to do the very opposite.

It's likely that scientists were always dull, and the newspapers of yore just reported on the significantly out-of-the-ordinary. Viewed discretely, their lives and personalities seemed idiosyncratic and 'interesting'.

Blogs and Twitter and open resources such as arXiv give the world a continuous look at scientists (and their work), which, as is more often than not, seems mundane and incremental, instead of path-breaking and revolutionary.

Also, the levels of noise on the Internet makes it singularly hard to be 'interesting' in your own unique way.

If scientists were always dull and newspapers used to report on the more interesting ones, nothing prevents our society to breed them for the "interesting" trait.

How are newspapers and society affecting the breeding of scientists? From personal experience I can tell you that getting press coverage more often than not damages your career.

Scientists are regarded as successful if they get funding for their employer. That means publishing papers. Being "interesting" tends to lead you down paths with significantly more risk, and the pressure is to reduce that risk by being plodding and incremental.

No particular comment on the article (which looks, er, dull). What I do like is Bruce Sterling's take on this topic: "<i>Artists are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas</i>"

Older discussion of the same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666440

IMO something older than 6 months is old enough that it shouldn't be killed, but I don't intentionally submit dupes that are less than a year old.

Because of the internet. It makes it a lot harder to be crazy when accounts, pictures, and videos are going to show up online.

Has this been going on long enough to have an effect? Also, is the kind of crazy made harder by the nascent fear of online exposure actually the kind of crazy referred to as "psychoticism" in the article? (Possibly. It does include "thrill-seeking" and "impulsiveness.")

I'm also not quite sure whether internet exposure will (or, indeed, has) made people more conformist, or more secretive, or perhaps even more tolerant (by provoking conversation about "open secrets" for instance.) Probably all three, to different extents in different people. Is the pressure against doing "crazy things," assuming it's even the relevant kind of crazy, significantly affecting the people who would otherwise have the best chance to become revolutionary scientists?

> Also, is the kind of crazy made harder by the nascent fear of online exposure actually the kind of crazy referred to as "psychoticism" in the article? (Possibly. It does include "thrill-seeking" and "impulsiveness.")

I really doubt it. There's a lot of room between "unoriginal confirmist" and "whacked-out nutjob".

I liked this article because it supports my personal biases, but it's worth noting that Medical Hypotheses is a unique journal that's not peer reviewed (despite being published by Elsevier), and is devoted to providing "a forum for unconventional ideas without the traditional filter of scientific peer review."

But, I agree with the article that the institutions of science bias too far in favor of the staid and obediently unoriginal type of student. I get the impression that there's too much emphasis on short-term incremental research, and not a whole lot of true curiosity-driven creativity.

In the world of both software and entrepreneurship, people recommend starting with a basic vision and relentlessly and incrementally improving it. So whats wrong with that approach applied to science.

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