Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

All the labs working on this spoke to each other, collaborated occasionally, and saw each other at conferences. So making a big stink about this wouldn’t have made life easier. Plus peer reviewers for submitted papers are “hidden” but because the field is so niche they are likely people you know, and they know who you are when you publish (reviews aren’t double-blind), so it could hurt your career if the PI became angry at you and started bad-mouthing you to to the other labs.

View on HN

I understand, but science isn't supposed to make life easier, it's supposed to progress mankind's knowledge and that necessarily entails eliminating bad information from the body of knowledge. Avoiding challenging bad papers because someone you know wrote it and you're worried they might not like you for it; well, yuk.

You've missed the point: getting along with your peers is the most important thing. What is truth?

No I haven't...

> getting along with your peers is the most important thing

No it isn't, hence the yuk. Anyone who thinks getting along with your peers is more important than getting the science right, isn't someone I trust doing science. The most important thing is getting the science right, full stop, end of story.

The problem appears to be is that anyone who can't "get along with their peers", or otherwise "social game", is not getting close enough to attempt to do any kind of science/serious project/study in the first place.

So you would argue that Galileo Galilei was a bad scientist? He was imprisoned for disagreeing with the pope. I suppose you'd have to argue that a good scientist in the middle ages had to be in good standing with the church and monarchy?

Galileo only needed basic tools (like feathers, balls, an inclined plane, and a handheld telescope) to pursue science.

If he'd needed access to impossibly expensive equipment available only in a few palaces around Europe, politics might have stopped him before he ever got started.

You can't predict what the next great discovery will be, or where it'll come from. Generally however, they're on the theoretical side, not the experimental side, so your point doesn't really stand. Those big machines rarely do little more than confirm exiting theories and those theories can very well come from one person who is anti-social.

Science is about being right; not about getting along with your peers.

What he actually did was closer to calling the pope a moron.

No, something like this can spiral: they can write bad reviews about your work, tanking your publication rate, which makes it harder to find funding etc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com