Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.
Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades.
Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the...
Another is recommending trans-fat based margarine over butter. That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.
Once the group-think machine gets going in a direction, it has a tremendous amount of inertia.
I think this was more a case of lobbying by certain agricultural producers than ignorance. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14823257_Food_Lobbi...
Sadly history is full of such occurrences.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfi...
My Post-doc colleague during my PhD@MIT was explaining this trick he does to get his system working that he never publishes (one very small step of 100 steps). He was concerned that if he published the step, it would hurt his chances at getting a professorship.
It’s exactly the same logic behind why code is not published.
Because ethically you can ‘hand wave it away’ as obvious to other experts and not worth publishing.
"Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory."
-- Hermann Weyl
1. A is not the empty set
2. A is not the set of all rational numbers
3. A is closed downwards, meaning if x is in A and y < x, then y is in A
4. A has no greatest element, meaning for all x in A, there is a y in A such that y > x.
And each Dedekind cut is in one-to-one correspondence with a real number. You can define the usual arithmetic operations on them, show that every rational number has a corresponding Dedekind cut (for any rational q, we have {x in Q | y < q } as the corresponding cut). I haven't seen a proof of the uncountability of Dedekind cuts using the diagonalization argument, but you can prove there is a one-to-one correspondence between Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences of rational numbers, which is another construction of the reals. And there is a fairly straightforward proof that those are uncountable using diagonalization.
But as you can see, you don't need any sort of repetition to do the construction, it's just a set of sets of rational numbers satisfying a few simple properties. For more information, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
Also Plate Tectonics...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_development_of...
Doesn't she deserve to be heard? By labeling her a antivaxer and ignoring her based on that label you effectively are closing your mind to her.
Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends. Too much and good ideas get neglected or squashed for far too long. There is a cost to both.
> Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends.
Much time is supposed to be spent on dead ends anyway. That's the way the corpus matures, not to mention an inevitable result of peer review (no need to review anything if all the research product is perfect). Research is a search; imagine running BFS without expecting to encounter dead ends.
Given the current scenario we are certainly not sure if we are ever going to achieve it! Though that achievement can work wonders. Any thoughts how you see that change can be made possible?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community.
> He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.
But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.
It's not a homogenous demographic, and it doesn't have a substantial overlap. So there is a very large (super-majority) of medical doctors who have absolutely no training in research, statistics etc. Because it's not what they do - they are not scientists. Their training is about their obligations to follow current developments in best practice, drug prescriptions etc. (or the same but for surgical technique) and apply it. They do not do science, they don't even necessarily particularly understand the scientific method.
So it is absolutely incorrect to imply that all medical professionals are "the scientific community". They're not. Those which participate in and publish research are but that is not even a significant fraction of their population.
Comparisons about what general population surgeons and medical doctors historically reacted to changes in practice does not say anything about the idea that these people represent a peer-reviewed scientific consensus, because they didn't. They represent the equivalent of a mechanic rejecting manufacturer recommendations on fuel quality and complaining about it to their colleagues.
The nice, pretty scientific method we learn about in school is largely an idealized myth
Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible?
Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.
It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.
Agreed, but self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and outright fraud are also tools in the toolbox and if you don't have strong enough defensive tools, you are open to attacks from those. Obviously, they can be misapplied. Humans are not perfect. But without powerful social tools like ridicule and shunning, science becomes essentially a honeypot for charlatans like Andrew Wakefield.
Happens all the time. Academia is a snake pit and this is low hanging fruit.