The power of the amateurs, from Mendel to Lovecraft, Crick and beyond | Hacker News Reader

The power of the amateurs, from Mendel to Lovecraft, Crick and beyond

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40 pointssoufron12 comments

Decent idea, but unfortunately unconvincing examples.

Mendel has been the subject of controversy regarding whether his results were fraudulent. Hardly a great choice for an exemplar, whatever the truth is.

Linus Pauling (described as an "amateur biologist" in a caption) was hardly an amateur interested in the structure of DNA, having written his PhD on x-ray diffraction. In addition, he is introduced in the text as "Linus Pauli," a Nobel-prize winning physicist. This seems to be a Mendelian cross between Linus Pauling, the Nobel-prize winning chemist, and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel-prize winning physicist.

Francis Crick, who made the title as an example of the power of amateurs, was pursuing a PhD in the field of x-ray crystallography, which sort of disqualifies him an "amateur" in my mind. Those "careful biology experiments" were studies of x-ray diffraction images of DNA, making Crick's physics background entirely relevant.

The controversy regarding Mendel is now out of date. It was mostly a clash of power from people who disregarded results coming from someone who was so obviously out of the system.

Dammit you're right about Pauling, it's a typo and I'll correct it. Thanks for it.

For their "amateur" venture into biology. The idea occurred to me while reading "the double helix". Watson consistently repeat that they were not insiders from the field. And more than the X-Ray diffraction results, it was the "stupid" 3D wooden models inspired by Pauling who helped to achieve faster and better results than the other teams. I'll add it also.

The controversy was actually by the great statistician/geneticist R.A. Fisher in the 1930s -- and the criticism was that Mendel's experimental results were too close to his theoretical results, not that Mendel was an "outsider". It wasn't necessarily conscious fraud on Mendel's part, but once you see a pattern it is easy to discard "bad data" that doesn't fit it. That's why modern experimentalists tend to "blind" groups during the data collection phase.

People consider today that Fisher was wrong in his criticism. It's my own opinion that his feud was aggravated by the fact that Mendel was an outsider.

Michael Faraday.

"Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena.[1][2] He similarly discovered the principles of electromagnetic induction and diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.

As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as "anode", "cathode", "electrode" and "ion". Faraday ultimately became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a lifetime position.

Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple language; his mathematical abilities, however, did not extend as far as trigonometry and were limited to the simplest algebra."

Tesla never graduated university, and was homeless for a while. Ended up basically creating everything we needed to make and use AC power.

Wow, I did not know about these two. I'll note it for later.

This is an oddly structured argument, which collapses upon itself based on the examples the author chose-and the vocabulary he uses to segment them.

An amateur does a thing because they love it, while a professional does it because they are paid to do so. Once an amateur is paid, they become professional.

Perhaps this would be more compelling if the author segmented his examples based on whether they were members of the scientific establishment, or of the scientific avant garde instead.

I'll not defend the structuration of the argument. This a small medium post only intended to put a few ideas together. As it's supposed part of a more complete book, I'll keep your critics in mind though, and try formulate things more completely and clearly then - I'll have more space and more time.

Also, I think I'll add new posts on this topic in the future.

Crick was a professional scientist i.e., that's how he earned his living.

You're right, but he was not a professional biologist. Watson was though.

The power of the expert is to limit public access to knowledge and scare amateurs of, thus raising his value by means of artificial scarcity.

And that is how it worked in the past. Todays problem is, that to become a expert, one has to sacrifice years of life, just to gather all knowledge necessary to understand and contribute to a field. Thus barriers are not only no longer needed, the sheer mass of knowledge works as a paywall against amateurs. This ocassionally lowers, when a completely new field is discovered, but in general this principle holds.

To allow amateurs to contribute something usefull again, they would have to study in there spare time, spend a lot of time on the subject - in there free time and then they- will become experts without titles. Thank you for those, internet.

That's exactly what many amateur researchers reproach to Big Science. That it's less a way to discover new ideas, than to control access to knowledge.

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