Comment by MikkoFinell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikkoFinell | Hacker News Reader

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> And that would mean that a younger generation of scientists would have to wait much longer before their ideas could be discussed without opposition from the established elders who see their pet theories attacked by these uppity youngsters.

Okay I will accept that premise for the sake of the argument even though I don't actually believe it's true.

Based on that you go on to conclude it's a good thing that scientists die, so that science can keep advancing.

You're essentially faced with a trolley problem, where pulling the lever one way will make everyone immortal at the cost of slowing down scientific progress, but pulling it the other way will euthanize everyone in the world, and euthanize the countless billions that might live in the future. Somehow your morals (or whatever you call it) tell you that euthanizing everyone is better than slowing down scientific progress. I disagree with you there.

Why not even try to solve the problem some other way than killing everyone? I don't know, why not, say, create an off-world colony outside the reach of those evil progress-impeding elders. Just throwing ideas out there.

Taking your logic to its limit, why not just kill every scientist after their first paper is published? But I don't think you actually want that, so lets hear your argument against my strawman.

I also don't believe it's true. The entire nature of science is that theories are modified or discarded as new empirical evidence disproves them. This idea that established immortal scientists would cling to proven-false theories despite evidence from "uppity youngsters" just flies in the face of what science is all about.

If he were talking about politics, he'd have a point, since there's a lot of irrational dogma in that field.

Also, don't forget, if we can figure out how to eliminate aging, that also means we'll eliminate many (maybe all) things that go along with biological aging, such as the changes to the brain that cause older people to tend to be less adaptable (which really is a bit of a stereotype and not all that true; my 80 year old mother happily uses a laptop computer, smartphone, and tablet, while 30 years ago she wouldn't have dreamed of being like this).

> If he were talking about politics,

You seem to be operating under the assumption that science is apolitical. As someone who's worked in science, I can assure you that it is not. Many non-scientists listen to popularizers like Neil deGrasse-Tyson and come to believe in a very idealized model of how science operates when the de facto "nature of science" is more akin to what Thomas Kuhn describes in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". I really wish that NDT were a bit more forthcoming about his own experiences in science, seeing as how he barely made it through the grad school gauntlet himself. Ditto for Carl Sagan, who made a powerful enemy in Harold Urey (I can't find a link right now, but iirc Urey basically gave Carl a bomb of a recommendation letter that cost him a tenured position Harvard and compelled him to "settle" for Cornell).

In my personal experience (as well as the experience of many, many others if you dig deep enough into this), some scientists can be very egotistical to a point where they take a challenge to their theories as a personal affront, and will employ insanely Machiavellian tactics to suppress dissenting opinions (i.e., senior researchers are the ones who hold the purse when the NIH makes funding decisions).

Problems like this can be mitigated or solved with policies, such as limiting tenure or forcing professors to move on after a certain term. We already do this with some politicians. What you're describing is really a problem with academia, not science in general. Corporations doing scientific work don't have those problems (they have other ones though), for instance.

True- I guess I should have specified "science within academia".

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