The student who discovered water on Mars says it was a 'lucky accident' | Hacker News Reader

The student who discovered water on Mars says it was a 'lucky accident'

bbc.co.uk

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Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés. (In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.)

- Louis Pasteur (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur)

It didn't happen by accident, but rather because he "(looks) at both visible light and infrared light and based on how different materials absorb light, (he) can compare that with the laboratory data and make some inference about what kind of materials are present.", and before that because he learned the required stuff to end up doing this.

This is the kind of thing that ends up being just another 'don't have to try too hard to succeed' story. It's like Einstein being bad at math.

People like to just believe that brilliance is only possible at random, and nothing they can do will help, unless they get lucky.

It's the same reason the lottery still exists.

Lottery exists because for some people the thought of being rich is more enticing than the reality of owning an extra buck.

The lottery still exists because there are a lot of people who are bad at statistics.

I'm not sure that that is why.

Just because someone realizes that the expected value of their purchase is negative to being almost the same as the cost, doesn't mean that they can't make the purchase.

Whether it makes sense depends on their utility function.

But luck does play a bigger role than most would think as one can work as hard as possible and not be lucky enough to succeed. It's hard to define luck though so it might be highly subjective.

Agree. You can have all the skills in the world, but sometimes you need fate (or whatever you want to call it) to fall in your favour.

A small example, not related to this, but when I started DJing about 15 years ago, I put on a party that was a warm-up party for a bigger night. I told John Digweed (who was running the bigger party) about it. John Digweed was one of the worlds biggest DJs at that point, and as 'luck' would have it he was releasing a new mix CD. So the world's music press was there to interview him.

He came down to my party with the world's press and suddenly my first ever party was in magazines across the globe. I started getting offers of gigs all over the world after that. There were much better DJs around (I was pretty average back then), but I'd had the stroke of luck which ended up in a pretty successful 'career' (I put it in quotes because I always treated it as a hobby, but by most people's measurements it was pretty successful).

Knowledge and skill is obviously important, but luck definitely plays a role, especially when it comes to areas of life that very few succeed in.

"You make your own luck." There were a sequence of events that lead to you getting the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time.

Random luck happens for sure, but how did you get to put on a warm-up for one of the biggest DJs in the world? I'd guess because of some conscious work you did, not because he picked a phone number in the book at random.

You told him about your party after getting the gig. He probably wouldn't have gone if you had not. That kind of networking and effort is a skill just as much as selecting the right music.

I did it independently in a different venue around the corner from the main night. I saw it as a courtesy to tell him what I was doing, and the rest is history. Clearly I had to spend time learning how to DJ, buying the right records, promoting it, etc. So there was definitely an aspect of making my own luck, but that is also what many wannabe DJs do without success.

Meh. This is just a silly semantics game. I think it's very wise and empathetic to just accept that sometimes you just get lucky, instead of trying to coop credit for it by saying "well I put the effort to be there to receive that luck in the first place!".

> People like to just believe that brilliance is only possible at random, and nothing they can do will help, unless they get lucky.

On the other hand, scientists (especially observational scientists) know that there's many many many brilliant scientists in the world, and which one of us actually happens to do the right kind of scan on the right data at the right time can be down to pure, "dumb" luck.

This is more/less the Dunning-Kruger [1] effect in action. From the student's perspective, all of his knowledge is "obvious common sense that everyone has" (this is his error about others).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Sorry, but over-citation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is a pet peeve of mine.

People seem to think that the Dunning-Kruger effect means "smart people think they're dumb and dumb people think they're smart!" but I don't think that's very accurate.

What they actually found was that lower-skilled people thought their skill level was somewhat higher, and higher-skilled people thought their skill level was a little lower, but not to the point where their relative perceived skill levels inverted. At no point along the skill curve did people incorrectly perceive themselves to be higher or lower in skill level in comparison others who were actually higher or lower in skill. The perceived skill curve was a little less steep than it should have been, that's all.

I think a more appropriate cognitive bias would be the curse of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

I don't disagree with anything you said. I think the curse of knowledge and Dunning-Kruger describe the same effect (one in a semi-quantitative way and one in a philosophical way).

Yea I could see that, I guess. Interesting way of thinking about it.

It's not clear what the accident was. (?)

It's also not clear why they included a picture of him playing guitar with a caption about his band...

I agree.

> It's also not clear why they included a picture of him playing guitar with a caption about his band...

There is a bit of a push at the moment, and has been for a while, to show that scientists and other technical types are normal people too, not just the stereotype anal retentive hyper-dedicated socially disconnected Asperger afflicted geniuses. You'll often see a little bit of information about the people in question that is ultimately completely irrelevant to the science/tech being discussed.

If it does help break down the stereotype a bit then it is a good thing: many kids are put off science in part because of such things.

Yea, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Pop culture like tv shows Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley are showing that it's actually cool to be geeky or into tech and startups.

> Big Bang Theory

> it's actually cool to be geeky or into tech

Is this satire?

You should know by now that all of HN is a parody of itself.

You are right, someone reading articles about scientists, or about startups might come up with "they're all a bunch of hipsters nowadays". IMHO that's pretty bad, because it renders the creative but eccentric or reclusive scientist as someone who doesnt even fit in the scientific circles anymore. Here's how Peter Thiel puts it:

"the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast"

You have to do it when you want to reach "general public" which is far-from-science type of individuals who refer to themselves as "not interested in politics, space and that kind of stuff. I'm interested in people and events that directly affect me today". These personal life descriptions helps them started. Shows quality of journalism actually.

The "I'm scientist but I'm cool also because I play guitar" is a really unfortunate message. Specially when you think in all young scientists that need to have a second job (unrelated) to keep their job as university associated teachers. Those things always remember me the Poochie satire in the Simpsons.

This is the BBC's Newsbeat - it's the news program for Radio 1, the beeb's pop music station. So it's (i) dumbed down and (ii) better if it has some kind of music connection.

I haven't been following this too closely. Are the salt streaks where the water is too? Are we actually seeing the water itself in these images or not?

Yes, the water is extremely salty (which is why it's not frozen solid) and when it evaporates, it leaves visible salt deposits.

Thanks for your reply. I've seen an animated image of these salt deposits forming online. It's my understanding these images were taken over a period of several months. Now we know what to look for, would it be possible to watch this happen in real time, or not? Would there be any benefit of a geostationary satellite that just observed the same spot over a long period of time?

>"Using a Nasa instrument called Crism, Lujendra and his team were able to tell that these 'streaks' are covered with salts."

Hard to believe that an undergraduate at the time would have "his team". He was probably the part of a larger team that gave the undergrads the opportunity to look at the images generated by the equipment, and he was the student who found the evidence. Not saying that he shouldn't be given credit.

I took that to mean "his team" as in "the team he was part of" as opposed to "the team that he led".

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