Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Whenever you hear about science being a "cabal", you have to remember that there's a huge survivorship bias. At any moment in science, there are a few dominant hypotheses, which seem to work pretty well, and hundreds of alternative hypotheses, with only vague evidence in favor of them. The vast majority of alternative hypotheses turn out to be completely wrong, and the researchers pushing them are forgotten. The few that turn out to be right get funding and recognition, exactly as many of the researchers mentioned in this article are getting now. In fact, most criticisms of dominant paradigms in science you read are not from outsiders, but from career scientists who are leading the charge towards the next dominant paradigm.

I say this just to point out that understanding the world is not as simple as believing contrarians. At any moment in time, almost all contrarians are completely wrong. Almost all paradigm shifts didn't work. Almost all anomalies faded away.

Recall the saying that science proceeds one funeral at a time. I believe it was coined as part of describing the shift to acceptance of plate tectonics.

That's the worst case. It doesn't always proceed that slowly.

The professional science/medicine funding system (i.e. NIH money) can be characterized by "cabal" depending on how you look at at it. If by "cabal" they mean any organized profesional vetting system. I suppose there is a trade off between vetting good funding ideas from the bad, vs. the risk of "suppressing" original views aside from the "dogma".

Did some alternative views get squashed by not receiving R or K grants? maybe. I would bet some of them might have been true original ideas that needed money to get good preliminary data. But many of them probably did not pan out.

A lengthy way of saying I agree w/ the OP of the thread...

... the shift to acceptance of plate tectonics

Of all things. My favourite odd anecdote of the year.

It was coined by Max Plank in 1930.

I believe that it was about the acceptance of Quantum Mechanics.

Examples include that Edward Cope never accepted Darwin's theory of evolution (even though the fossils that he found were good evidence for it), Albert Einstein never accepted QM (even though his Nobel was for one of the key discoveries on the way to QM), and Fred Hoyle never accepted the Big Bang (even though he coined the phrase).

I went and found an interesting article confirming this. When a star researcher in a field dies, the result is an increase in people entering the field and exploring the ideas.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21917047

>Despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.

I felt the author did a decent job trying to explain this themselves, but the title is pretty misleading in my opinion.

The few that turn out to be right get funding and recognition, exactly as many of the researchers mentioned in this article are getting now.

Some of the ones that are right eventually get funding, as long as their proponents stick around long enough and produce enough results to convince someone to fund them. On the time scale this article talks about, I'd expect a quite a few people who had ideas worth looking into gave up and went off to do something else instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com