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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

My experience: I proposed a thesis to an advisor who deemed it unlikely to work. He ran it by a colleague who came to the same conclusion. I went to a different major and pursued the same thesis and invited the previous faculty who initially turned it down to the defense because it was relevant to their field.

It was frustrating to hear them voice their opinions in the defense that they felt, “of course it world work.” After seeing the data, they took the exact opposite side claiming it was obvious to the point of being of limited publishing value.

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Academia is 'full' of people who lack intellectual integrity. Imagine Frege's response to Bertrand Russell's letter concerning barber's paradox: 'it's obvious!' Instead of doing that, Frege openly acknowledged Russell's criticism in his book.

Imagine how much worse it is outside where there's even no pretense of adhering to any intellectual rigor.

Also within academia there is still a wide spectrum of intellectual rigor across the disciplines. Some things are just more verifiable than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

I recall Dan Ariely mentioning this in one of his books. His field is psychology/behavioural economics, a field where very often either outcome of an experiment can seem obvious after the fact. (Questions like Do newborn babies have an intuitive understanding of gravity?)

As I recall, he restructured his lectures, asking upfront for a show of hands as to which outcome everyone anticipated, before the big reveal. After making this change, he had fewer people approaching him after lectures saying how obvious the outcome was.

> Do newborn babies have an intuitive understanding of gravity?

I really had no idea about this one, but how it's studied is very interesting.

https://www.livescience.com/18101-infants-grasp-gravity.html

That’s interesting because much of the thesis was rooted in behavioral economics. The faculty that turned it down initially were in the economics department

Do you know which book?

It's one of the three of his books I own, I'm afraid I can't easily narrow it down further. (I own all three as audiobooks, and I recall Simon Jones reading it, but it turns out he read all three.)

• Predictably Irrational

• The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

• The Upside of Irrationality

Tangentially related I wish there were a way to “search” within audio books. Once you’ve finished the book its almost impossible to figure out where a specific chapter or passage is if you’d like to go back.

The semantic data format people have had a point all along. Just because digital audiobooks are inspired by books on cassette is no reason the data format can't support all sorts of metadata. We could have a format for written and read aloud works that highlights every word in the text on a screen as it's read when used in the proper player software, with user notations, bookmarks, indexes, an completely searchable by full text.

Kindle supports this with Whispersync. I don't know how the file format works.

They'd rather charge you separately for a DRM-locked ebook version.

I've been noticing a variant of this in myself lately. Maybe I think about some problem and stew on it and think to myself that it's probably not possible, or at least I can't come up with ideas. Then I hear that somebody else has made progress and suddenly I have a bunch of ideas. Somehow switching from "how could this work" or "can this work" to "how did they do it" leads me down entirely different paths.

I've been trying to get better at recognizing the bias and switching viewpoints without the external push.

I often think about this Michael Abrash story: (chapter introduction) http://orangeti.de/OLD/graphics_programming_black_book/html/...

When I'm stuck, or getting close to stuck, I always try to assume what I want to do has already been done in some way. Long Google searches or discussions with domain experts, purposely vague, looking for similar ideas. Even a ridiculously not-so-related paper or mention in a paper will launch me in a idea-generation frenzy and I'll quickly build confidence.

Love M. Abrash's books. Shame he didn't keep writing them, they were inspirational for me.

This is an interesting perspective that I think may exhibit itself in many domains. I’m reminded of the fact that the sub-four minute mile was impossible and then when it was first broken, many others completed the same feat in a relatively short period of time

I like the linked Egg of Columbus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

I guess the lesson is, when an advisor rejects your thesis idea, get them to put their reasons in writing.

I had their rejections in email. Ultimately, the committee brought them around and accepted my thesis so I didn’t feel it was worth burning those bridges.

What would that get you though, other than knowing you were right (which you already knew without having it in writing) and (if you decide to publicly call them out on it) enemies for life in your chosen field of study?

Oh, I wouldn't do it publicly. The point would be to push back, in private discussions, against the argument that the result was not interesting enough to publish.

I believe this quote from J.B.S. Haldane is relevant here:

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:

(i) This is worthless nonsense;

(ii) This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;

(iii) This is true, but quite unimportant;

(iv) I always said so

It's actually pretty impressive when a scientist goes through the full cycle, especially if they're already at the top of their field. Usually, they never make it past (ii) hence the Planck principle: "science advances one funeral at a time" (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn)

Didn't you ask them "But didn't you say this was uspublishable?" and what was their response?

I did not. Maybe I was being weak or maybe I didn’t want to try and make them look bad in front of their peers but I did not bring up any of the previous conversations during the defense

Thanks for the response. I'm always just curious how people react to things like that.

Since the first and second interactions were 4 or more years apart, it is entirely conceivable that the field had moved enough during those years to warrant a genuine change in opinion.

It's also possible that they were just trying to protect a student from investing years into a project that they deemed to have a low (but perhaps non-zero) chance of success. This is a thing that good advisors should do to protect their students from career-wasting wild goose chases.

The fact that the two interactions were very different with four years and a completed thesis between them doesn't surprise me at all. My own embarrassing story is that I advised Jason Donenfeld to submit his WireGuard paper to NDSS, forgot about the meeting entirely after a few months, then complained (in retrospect, unfairly) when NDSS accepted it. Advisors do stupid, embarrassing, forgetful things all the time. The OP's story isn't even a misdemeanor.

Well I guess the problem there is inviting them to your defence. People gonna people.

True. In retrospect, I was a bit naïve.

I would have challenged them to a duel.

But be sure to put all your brilliant thoughts into writing and send it to a friend, you just might get a whole area of mathematics named after you...

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