Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues
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"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -Howard H. Aiken
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment
Other than the goal being "seeds of doubt", manipulating someone into thinking something untrue is really not far from gaslighting.
> The goal of gaslighting is to gradually undermine the victim's confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from delusion, thereby rendering the individual or group pathologically dependent on the gaslighter for their thinking and feelings.
Is the described behaviour manipulative? Sure. But compared to everything I know of gaslighting and the intents behind it I don't see much similarity, not with more context than a single sentence at least. Did the manager do it to help people's careers? Did he try to lure them into a satanic cult? There's a wide range of unknowns.
I always try to avoid doing this myself and ask how they came to their conclusion. If the answer is "do your own research" however, as is very popular with the 'skeptic' community, I discard it immediately.
Essentially, I think people desperately cling to what they know. You can lose your job, your spouse, and your hair, but you know what you know. You (hopefully) will always have that. So when someone tries to take away something that was supposed to be yours forever, people get extremely defensive. I have witnessed this in politics a lot in the past decade.
See Semmelweis, Galileo, et al.
I am not Galileo when I argue that our linear pricing model is an active blocker to product adoption and that we need to move to sublinear one asap in a bullshit corp meeting.
I wish I was. Lots of good ideas get lifted all the time, in the context of the Aiken quote, new is outside of the overton window, it flips problems on their heads. Some of the new ideas actually do have to get shoved, because also in this definition of new, it isn't really about quality. It is about newness.
We should solve the metaproblem of people not accepting the Scientific Method. It ultimately comes down to proof, verifiability, falsifiability and the techniques we choose to get there. Ridicule and rejection of concepts because they are new, I think are wholly human social traits.
How do we get answers to questions we can't even think of asking? And how do we expand the ways in which we ask questions?
The individual "stealing" them did their best to make sure no one knew where he was getting his ideas, which robbed me of the benefits of sharing those ideas as volunteer.
He also badly botched them all.
This is in line with the meme that "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Me saying "You should do X!" utterly failed to result in X actually happening by someone not who was not me. That pithy one-liner failed to convey sufficient information to result in the production of the X I was envisioning when I said it.
The example I typically give is the word "chair." If I say "chair," what kind of chair do I mean? Am I thinking of a wooden kitchen chair while you are thinking of an overstuffed living room wing chair?
I had a similar thing happen at my corporate job where a new manager met very privately with me, implemented my proposal without giving me credit and bastardized it so badly that I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with her terrible, terrible program that completely missed the point of what I had proposed.
Years ago, I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. We use the same word -- "idea" -- to talk about radical new theories and to talk about more prosaic details of how to get things done, business-wise: "It was my idea to paint it blue, not green."
I think we really need better ways to make such distinctions.
As an aside....etc etc
As an aside, I generally bring up Semmelweis and the like because I'm one of those unfortunate souls the world has decided is a loon. I don't have any answers for you because my methods for discovery and proof of concept fall outside of accepted scientific methods.
Silly me: I wasn't trying to make a scientific discovery backed up by evidence. I was just trying to not die and to be less tortured by my defective body.
People can basically take my word for that or not. Most people choose "not."
I don't have a ready solution for that.
Sounds wonderful! An IDE for concepts and definitions. Now it would have to have a visualizer and a bunch of NLP.
And when I say, "the colorless green ideas sleep furiously" it could synthesize an abstract picture of ideas (shapes) being various shades of grey, the ideas a new (green) and growing but the pace at which they stir starts to grow. A colorless idea is one which describes a technique or a capability but without a goal or context. To hammer, a hammer, a specific hammer, a specific hammer to build a house ... join, flatten, temporary, permanent, to move.
I could see a system like this being used in very delicate negotiations. It never occurred to me how difficult bidirectional translation could be with all the semantic nuance, history, idioms, etc. And then have personalities and intellects involved. The translators are the true heros of non-war.
Always enjoy your take.
I did a bit of work on the project back in November and since talking with you I have done some updates and made it public. There isn't much there at the moment but I think I know what I am doing now, which I didn't know five years or so ago.
W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out, so you'll have to fill me in. I would make an initial distinction, though. The first is that once a theory achieves widespread acceptance, it's not surprising that honest people will be slow to absorb something that they can't account for. It takes time to process evidence. Think how absurd it would be to just throw away something that's made sense up until now. You have to reconcile new observations and do the work of accounting for everything accounted for by the previous theory plus the new thing. Throwing it away just like that leaves you with nothing to work with. The second distinction is that a lot of people build their egos out of knowing something and the feeling of dominance they get from it. "I'm hot shit and superior to you because I know X." Then you get these little cliques and cults of affirmation which adds another barrier because now you face the Lomanesque risk of no longer being liked.The coward cannot bear that possibility so he "defends" his tribe to protect himself. Of course, he isn't really acting for his own good or the good of others, just his own comfort.
But in general, yes, academic fads and prejudices do exist. Try being a conservative at a major university today, especially in a humanities department.
He was subjected to house arrest for advocating for a "new" idea. We now accept heliocentrism as the correct answer. It's not terribly important to me if it was, in fact, his idea...etc. etc. He's the best known example of "scientist says something we now currently accept as scientific fact -- and there is hell to pay for him during his lifetime."
W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out,
He was a physician in charge of two clinics who had studies backing up his "crazy" idea that physicians should properly sterilize their hands before delivering babies if they wanted to reduce mortality rates. He was essentially driven crazy, thrown in an insane asylum and beaten to death by the guards in short order.
I view it in simpler terms as "He was effectively murdered." because although he had studies, he had no explanation for how and why, so it was rejected out of hand.
This was maybe two decades or so before we accepted germ theory and modern sterilization techniques for surgeries and so on.
But sometimes (and the quote suggests that this happens way more frequently) the reason is that other people noticed that before you, and for some reason they all concluded "this is not going to work", and went looking elsewhere. You were "merely" the first person who continued searching in the same direction, and succeeded to finally find something useful.
In the latter case, when you announce your invention, the people who previously looked in the same direction and gave up, are likely to reiterate their reasons for giving up. Sometimes they genuinely believe that what you did is impossible, i.e. that your results are wrong, and you only made some mistake or fraud that makes it seem to work. (In their defense, people make mistakes and frauds all the time, so it makes sense to assume that you most likely are another one.) Sometimes it's that they backed "this is not possible" with their professional prestige, so accepting your invention would mean lessening their prestige. (This is a wrong reason to oppose you, but people who will oppose you for this reason will often be very powerful.)
Plus there is the usual resistance of people against trying to do new things, when the old things seem to work okay, and the new things seem like a lot of work or learning.
a) they see the immediate benefit b) it fits into their belief system c) it is socially validated
Original stuff usually violates all three points.
I don't think that distinction is the relevant one. The point is that it extended existing thought, rather than overturning it.
> If he told someone about the idea behind the proof in the initial phase without anything concrete and was not able to finish the proof, do you think the idea would be perceived?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. There's a reason mathematics journals are only interested in finished theorems rather than idle speculation, but I don't see how that's relevant.
Examples of a developments that rocked the boat would be the theory of evolution, quantum mechanics, and irrational numbers. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number#Ancient_Gree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles#Awards_and_honour...
There was a long time where he didn't have a proof yet, but it was OK, because he told no-one that he was actually working on one. If he had told people openly that THIS what he chose to spend his time on, without actually having the proof yet, he would have been ridiculed, because it seemed like such an utterly hopeless enterprise at the time.
Wiles' discovery was a tremendous breakthrough, but it didn't upset anyone. Another example of an entirely uncontroversial breakthrough is [0]. This is in contrast to the three examples of controversial discoveries that I gave above.
> If he had told people openly that THIS what he chose to spend his time on, without actually having the proof yet, he would have been ridiculed, because it seemed like such an utterly hopeless enterprise at the time.
I'd hope the field would be supportive of 'long shot' projects like this, but sure, I could believe many mathematicians would be skeptical.
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-break-tra...
Some amount of resistance to crazy ideas is appropriate. If the idea works the resistance will be overcome eventually. If we accepted every crazy idea enthusiastically a lot of effort would be wasted.
Like 50-60 years in this case :-(
It's funny about the magnesium in the article- getting the Mg concentration right when working with delicate nucleic acids is absolutely key to good results.
>Other researchers “rolled their eyes in horror” when he presented his theory, Jacob recalled in his memoir, The Statue Within. “With a little encouragement, my audience would have jeered and left,” he wrote.
Skepticism and contempt are distinct and disparate feelings.
The most amazing discoveries even in the recent times often come from scientists testing some of the wildest hypothesis - a rotation student in Andrew Fire's lab thinking he's injecting RNA into the gonad of a worm when he was stupidly injecting them into its mouth, or when a young Yamanaka had no clue basically and did a random experiment in his new lab adding a bunch of genes to cells to see if they do something.
I've sat through sessions seeing scientists laughed at for their wild hypotheses, by what I can only call as old, over-congratulated high school valedictorians who are only actually good at playing politics and writing grants, with a self professed love of science and discovering things that's as genuine as a Republican saying he is all for facts.
Let the crazies risk their lives on the wildest hypotheses. Fund them as long as they are systematic and methodical in their efforts to prove them. That's how you make science take the leaps it needs to be truly transformative for civilization. That's how I intend to do science and I learned clearly that I don't belong in academia. I have no intention of even swinging the science bat if I'm not at least trying to shoot for the moon!
20% of the former, 80% of the latter.
> And how much money should go into one before you move on?
3% of the available funds each year.
Hope this helps!
So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?
My larger point is that you're treating this like there are just a couple wild conjectures that need just a bit of money. There are vast amounts of alternative ideas, and often the necessary experiments will not be cheap. While ridiculing them isn't right, the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.
Ridiculous like feeding people mold to see if they get sick less, or injecting people with the pus of other people to inoculate them?
The discovery of antibiotics alone has paid for all the moonshots you can fund, even if none of them work out.
And you severely underestimate the number of moonshots there are. Imagine trying to find penicillin by the method you describe. There are thousands of species of mold, many of which are harmful to humans. The genus penicillium alone has over 300 species. Such a study would take decades while costing a fortune before reaching any results.
And they all feed back on each other. Then some other idea might enable us to discover penicillin by some entirely other serendipitous route. There isn't a single path to the future.
You need basic research to move science and technology forward. And you need to accept that the majority of the research will have no direct result for a long time or ever.
The history of flight spans back 2000 years.
Semi conductors date back to the late 1800s. And don’t forget that to even get to the beginnings of understanding semi conductors, a bunch of basic stuff needed to be figured out first.
Darwin took 2 decades collecting evidence and writing On the Origin Of Species.
And at some point we stopped trying to make fake birds wings to flap our way to flight, as our understanding grew to the point where we knew it was incredibly unlikely to work.
Yes, basic research is necessary and developments sometimes take a long time. That doesn't mean you should keep following a route that repeatedly leads to a dead end. And every hypothesis isn't equally deserving of funding.
Those "salaried employees" started life as curious people, yeah some of them might be looking at the world with a blurrier lens. But they were constructed, the system made those people. While they make the problem worse, they are symptom not a cause.
The problem with homeopathy is not that it's a crazy idea. It's that it's been extensively shown not to work and is still being pushed as a good idea.
This is going off-topic, but I really think it depends on your definition of "not to work".
If people essentially throw in low-cost placebos to cure themselves of headaches and other minor ailments, while believing that this is exactly what they need, I consider this a net-positive for society compared to giving them actual medication that costs more with potential side-effects/harms.
Obviously, the fun ends when quacks prescribe homeopathy for serious stuff that needs actual treatment (in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). But for minor things that aren't too big of an issue even if left untreated, letting people use homeopathy if they're into that - why not.
It is also known, that placebos work better, if people believe; they are medicine.
Thats why Homeopathy "works"
"in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). "
But this, I see actually different. People of clear mind, should have any right to choose their treatment of choice. So informing them on the best options, yes! Telling them of the mechanism of fraudsters who prey on peoples hopes, yes! But in the end maybe not forbidding them if they choose - for whatever reason - less standard methods.
Maybe the placebo works in their case. Maybe the alternative treatment with the roots of plant X had by chance an actual unknown effective drug in it. Who knows. But I know that telling people to follow standards is not allways the best way.
Btw. because if a recent case I know there are homeophatic cancer clinics in germany. So it seems to be legal?
I know of other alternative cancer treatment by the very weird "Dr. Hamer" who cannot be practised in germany if the patient actually has cancer. And I think this is not helping to disprove scams. (because I know people who are into it)
In theory, I agree with you. People should be clearly told "there is evidence that X works, and there is no evidence that Y works, however you are free to try Y at your own risk". And then they would make their choice.
But I am afraid that it wouldn't work so well in practice. First, there is the problem of who is this authoritative voice that tells people "X works, Y does not". Is it government? (Will it not become subject of political fighting? Like, depending on who wins the election, evolution either exists or does not exist, masks either help or do not help against COVID, etc.) Or is it some professional organization of experts? Then the fraudsters will make their own alternative organizations, that for a layman will look exactly the same. -- At the end, the layman has no idea whom to trust.
Second, the fraudster talking to you can be more persuasive than a website you read, simply because they can adapt their argument to your knowledge. Even if the website says "X works, Y does not", the fraudster can explain like "by 'Y does not work' they actually refer to Y1, but what I am selling is Y2 which is not the same thing", and there will be no one there to say "actually, Y refers to both Y1 and Y2" or "Y2 is just Y1 under a new name". For a layman it is difficult to evaluate when two things are or are not the same.
So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal. "Legal, but you have been warned, so use your best judgment" does not work for people with average intelligence and average expertise.
Isn't that a problem with your solution?
"So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal"
(In my scenario common doctors tell people of the treatments.)
Also, people offering alternative treatment are often very convinced that they are offering indeed the superior solution and the others are commiting fraud.
In the ideal world, everything would be replicated and retested at least a few times. Practically, we do not have the resources, and sometimes other interests come into play. For example, those of some industry to fund studies that refute some wild idea that threatens their business. How many studies on safety of sugar are paid by Coca Cola?
That was not my intention. My intention was to say that a single study might not be good enough as a refutation. BTW one of the largest proponents of re-checking studies that were once considered reliable is a medical doctor, John Ioannidis. It is not just soft science that suffers from the problem.
Given that we are really short on money (and, with regard to ideas, always will be - it is cheaper to produce ideas than to test them even cursorily, much less thoroughly), every proposed mechanism will have large downsides. I do not have a proposal.
Also, engineering leads science at time: this works but we don't know why.
No it would not. The money necessary to find a lab is orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable UBI.
What is really expensive and complicated for now is “wet” data collections: it is a finicky process stuffed to the brim with very expensive machinery, consumables, lab space and manual workers. Computing power is not really a limitation nowadays, you can comparably get a whole lot of bangs for your bucks.
Concerning the sharing part, equipment pooling is definitely already happening, at least at the local scale. And what is getting more and more developed is the “platform” concept, where some labs/teams slowly transition from doing research to producing data according to a standardized protocol (genome sequencing, genotyping, ChIP-seq, etc.) for other teams doing the research.
I noticed companies moving into the space, like 23andme, and wondered if they might work in combination to keep consumer prices high...
23andme is not doing sequencing, they're doing genotyping. And they are doing so using relatively old and well-established method; so I highly doubt they will be a force of innovation in the sector for the coming times.
In my case it's both, so instead of teaching I take half-time IT consulting gigs here and there, which pay enough for me to be able to do science even if I had no funding at all. I still get some grants, mostly because you're looked at funny if you don't, but I'm done losing sleep over them, plus if I finally decide to give up academia I'll have an easy transition.
While teaching helps consolidate your own understanding, and is useful and satisfying, it's a matter of degree.
And it would be wildly unethical to use prayer which by any reasonable understanding of cancer biology would not work.
This is one of those instances where judgement is a good thing. Don’t run such a silly trial. Spend the money on something that actually has a chance to work.
I think the problem is the hierarchy.
A development organization is an amplifier that brings a new capability into existence. Currently, organizations have to get big to amplify what their qualities. But to get big to achieve its goals it needs to be hierarchical, and because the hierarchy and the practitioners are the same folks, the org structure becomes the product.
The goal of the organization is to maintain its structure. Innovation happens when you have less structure. How do we scale, and maximize the organizational power while enabling create autonomy?
Science should be absolutely progressive in that ALL questions are asked and ALL hypotheses are tested, with a significant amount of skepticism and critical analysis.
One approach to Science I think is really illustrative is Wheeler's[1] 'radical conservatism': you should accept, and seek, radical ideas, under a skeptical, formal, foundation.
So for example, if someone proposes a "free-energy" device with some outlandish explanation, that a priori isn't radical conservatism, because while the proposal is radical, it clashes with the conservative basis of local energy conservation of all modern physics (or maybe with the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
However, for example in General Relativity, the question of energy conservation at extremely large scales is not well settled. So that's something you could explore, without letting the fear of ridicule stop you (for breaking energy conservation), as long as you retain solid foundations[2]. Not only that, but this kind of outlandish idea is often how science moves forward, not by making the most obvious hypotheses about established theories (which we already largely know the answer for!) -- but it's difficult to naively distinguish from crackpottery.
By solid foundations, I mean you can even revise your physical principles, as long as they explain available evidence and you're able to formalize them to a good degree. Also by 'radical' it is meant that we shouldn't judge ideas by whether they are outlandish or not (Feynman writes extensively about this in his talks) -- Nature doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with seeming outlandish[3]. So to get rid of this bias, you can flip the coin and go after outlandish ideas (ideally simply unbiased, but it's a strategy).
See Kip Thorne's memoir, which I haven't read to completion but I'm sure is good:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1901/1901.06623.pdf
[1] (the great friend from Feynman and with enormous contributions)
[2] In GR there is some very non-intutive large scale behavior: you can move without reaction mass in vacuum, which naively would seem radical, and violating conservation of momentum. However, it's allowed, and proven!:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/886/swimming-in-...
[3] In reality, what defines what's "bizarre", "outlandish", "unintuitive" for us, are (1) Our previous experiences in the world, (2) Our coded instincts and neural architecture. There's no guarantee those will be valid when extrapolated to a different domain: objects at very small scales, very large scales, very high energies, etc.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” - Max Plank
It'd be nice to not wait a generation.
I think computer science is doing much better nowadays. The “NoSQL” movement for example was particularly impressive, it’s something that wouldn’t fly in most other sciences.
Physics isn't advancing because everything is degenerate to the standard model - any bold new idea still fails to predict an accessible experimental regime which would rule out alternatives.
You might accuse me of calling Physicists of being unimaginative but I truly believe that to be the case. The most fascinating topic in this regard is the alcubierre drive; before that concept became famous when I asked any Physicist if we are truly stuck in our solar system for eternity due to light speed limit they said yes, it's actually mathematically absurd to even think of any other possibility. Then this topic comes, and as impossible as it sounds it's at least not absurd mathematically (absurd physically still, sure but I feel theres a difference). So it's wierd that more Physicists are not grabbing at crazy tails like this and truly push what their imagination can conjure up.
Also let's remember that the researchers mentioned by others above, were all running successful labs despite their ideas not being widely accepted. The reason why these theories take so long to be accepted is more a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" than "we don't like the theory".
Everett branches ("many worlds")?
AFAIK, so far nobody has come up with a way to devise a test that could falsify any of the interpretations of quantum theory, which really is required to be a valid scientific theory.
Moreover, there has never been much dogma around interpretations of quantum theory. A highly recommended read is Ghost in the Atom by Paul Davies, which consists of interviews with many physicists about their quantum interpretations. It shows that people have had a wide variety of interpretations for a long time. The many world interpretation has become more popular, but it was already around in the 80s and certainly not being ridiculed.
Conservativism is a very bad trait to have in scientific roles. It's not as bad as being dumb, not being curious or not intensely seeking the truth, but on a system level it will steer the ship in the wrong direction.
Paul Graham recently wrote some essays that explored these ideas in a much clearer and more precise way. To me they were just nagging in the back of my mind for a long time. Recommended reading if you've got a few minutes. http://paulgraham.com/think.html
To go with a clumsy metaphor living wheels and axle style of locomotion cannot be plausibly grown and moved by known organic structures - it would have to use it. Knowing more what can be produced would help figure out what cannot and commonalities. The reaction doesn't make any sense even for protein folding obsessived.
>...the evidence for an RNA world is strong enough that the hypothesis has gained wide acceptance. The concurrent formation of all four RNA building blocks further strengthened the hypothesis.
>Like DNA, RNA can store and replicate genetic information; like protein enzymes, RNA enzymes (ribozymes) can catalyze (start or accelerate) chemical reactions that are critical for life. One of the most critical components of cells, the ribosome, is composed primarily of RNA...
Representing Turing machines as mixtures of chemical in a test tube, and having an RNA strands behavior encode a program is precisely where I see biological computing headed. It was really wild how forward thinking the research seemed, but how primitive the results they could get was due to the limitations of biology.
No. The mRNA has instructions to reproduce part of the structure of the virus. Our immune system creates antibodies to the foreign and inert bits of virus.
Specifically the spike protein that's been talked about everywhere. There is no actual COVID-19 virus involved.
It would be like cloning only your fingers, and using those finger clones to train fingerprint scanners. Later on, when the real human comes along, those scanners would recognize you. Those finger clones wouldn't be able to do anything else meaningful and would eventually decay away.
Sounds like textbook Structure of Scientific Revolutions?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hoo6m8/d_m...
It makes for a good story for the non-scientist, but as a scientist this is how it works. Until you can prove your theory it’s just a theory and it’s the job of other scientists to poke holes in it.
As I mentioned in a comment in the past, I had the chance to be a regular on the radio (90's) and said several times that I officially announced that I will switch the topic of my PhD thesis the moment when someone shows me a physical event that I cannot explain.
Oh boy, I saw my fair share of lunatics and fanatics, I spend nights in haunted houses, with children whose parents claim they have telekinesis capabilities etc.
Unfortunately, I did not switch, ended up with a standard PhD instead of the Nobel-yielding one about telekinesis or homeopathy.
To the people who were saying that we do not want to look at anything outside our comfort zone, I told an old joke:
"John was constantly praying to his god to let him win at the lottery. Day after day, he was praying and praying.
Then one day he saw a bright light and a loud voice said
JOHN, GIVE ME AN OPPRTUNITY, BUY A TICKET!!"
This is more or less this: show something unusual, please!
It was fun, though. You get to meet some very unusual people.
Most people were in the category "I really saw it" and expected to just search "for that".
Some told that they or their relatives had special abilities. When I wanted to witness them they never happened, usually due to my "aura".
I spent a few nights in haunted houses. These were cool, the cracking at night was quite frightening. But ultimately it was not even B-grade horror (no slamming doors or anything). I saw rats once and this is what terrified me.
I met once an energothepeutist (he was "magnetizing" people's heads to cure them). It was on the radio, he came with a lady whom he cured. When he touched her neck, she collapsed. I asked him to touch my neck and make me collapse, he said it was dangerous, I told him that I officially agree to anything and take all the risks, he touched my neck ... (there is no music when you are on air, but the listeners do hear one, it was quite tense) ... I felt his fingers on my neck and yelled "aaaahhh!". He jumped 2 meters away. Of course I did not feel anything.
I particularly dislike the fraud kind (like the one above) who are putting people at risk (the ones that are sick and instead of medicine choose home - similar to the homeopaths). I was making special efforts to show how useless they are.
I had a lot of empathy for people who thought they saw something and wanted to understand whether this was true or not, I once met an old lady who thought that her dead husband was talking to her and I helped her to realize that these were various sounds in her appartement. She was really nice.
Unfortunately, many people will not believe anything even if it jumps to their face. This is BTW the same message I was being given by the ones that were showing me effects I could not objectively see or record.
One thing I did not agree to are "philippin healers" - they tell that they will extract your sick organs without you feeling anything. I did not want to do that because I feared that they would have some cutting devices under their nails (or something similar) and that this could get seriously dangerous.
One of their activities was to look for paranormal activity. It all failed - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI
It was abandoned in the 90's as there were no tangible results.
However, great ideas are often not "obviously" good, because if they were, someone would have done them already. And if they're not obviously good, they'll tend to be rejected when they're first discussed. This is even true when the idea is explained to experts in the relevant field field, because the experts think they know how things are done, and a really great idea is usually sufficiently different from their and habitual modes of thinking that it will seem inconsistent with what they have long "known" to be true.
If you have an idea and it's rejected, it probably should be. But if you have, in fact, thought it through in more depth than anyone else, and actually know more about its part of a field than the most experts in that field do, then it might be right.
You have to take full responsibility for deciding that; during the critical time of an idea's gestation, no one can take that responsibility for you. Eventually, if and when the idea is made real, it will be verified in the real world.
Another interesting person who was thought to be kooky was Douglas Engelbart https://hackaday.io/page/9869-the-mother-of-all-tech-demos-a...
You're describing humans.
What makes science novel is its mechanism for challenging and disproving blowhards without tipping into anarchy. That makes dogmatic incumbents' positions less stable while, remarkably, maintaining the integrity of the system as a whole.
Science doesn't (or shouldn't) claim to negate our worst instincts. Simply to uniquely check them through its method.
Coming up with a hypothesis and then finding some evidence isn’t science any more than alchemy is a form of science. Neither is cherry picking data and then retroactively creating a hypothesis (There was a big scandal surrounding this a few years ago). Even if you are right you need strong evidence of reproducibility for scientific claims to have any credibility. You need extremely strong reproducibility if you expect to make claims that may have implications for the health and safety of others.
Scientific method (mostly) works and bears fruit at longer timescales (40, 60, 100 years, or longer). In the meantime, over short to medium term, a handful of outcast scientists have to face ridicule, be sidelined, be shunned, be mocked, by pretty much the whole scientific community, a massive circle-jerk that exists for the purpose of citing each-other, giving each other awards, sucking up to, networking, and clinking champagne glasses with the handful of agencies doling out the pitiful amount of funding, most of which goes to waste. More often than not those outcasts can't go any longer and their work either disappears, or is usurped in the form of "You did this? ... I did this."
Science is a very carefully defined field that includes little or no controls on the behavior of its members, as long as the behaviors that are controlled appear to be adhered to. We've ended up with Retraction Watch, collusion between journal editors and paper publishers, and endemic #metoo issues throughout the field. I would never voluntarily enter a science field that depends on publishing papers for advancement today, because by definition these concerns are excluded from our current answers to 'what is required to science?'.
As to the scientific methods they often practice in service of those fields, yes, and it's admirable how well those have persisted. We also have a massive reproducibility crisis across all human psych and social fields, so while the theoretical methods do earn credit for not being "anarchy", their implementations clearly aren't being held to the standards that we're praising here today.
Are they safe long-term? Who knows, it's a huge business now. So it's not in the best interest of the aforementioned scientists to look too hard for it might tarnish their current reputation, influence and abilities to receive funding or make profits.
Combined with SPACS, ARK Invest, tech angel investors, sci-hub, Wikipedia, researchers with great ideas don't need to go to boring old conservative investors anymore.
Of course this may not help basic research, but the biotech infrastructure is getting much better.
Maybe you're right. But the stocks are very far from overvalued as long as the bond bubble doesn't pop (which depends on the FED policy).
https://endlessmetrics.substack.com/p/s-and-p-500-m2-money-s...
Also I remember listening to Ark's interview with Moderna's CEO last April when nobody knew about that company.
Your perspective could very well prove right, and mine wrong. Who's to say. Sometimes this time really is different. And us old guys will be the last to realize it.
It's quite common in most fields for success to go to those who are able to sell themselves well.
If there's sleaze involved or dirty tricks that's not right, but if you've a good idea or product and you can't persuade someone to back you then I'm not sure why the complaint should be against those who can, especially with allegedly inferior ones.
The consensus that materializes due to the various pressures at the time might not always be the best for advancement, and at worst it may take decades to overcome.
Example from the 1940's through the 1970's it was believed that facial expressions were _learned_ behavior. The guys that proved that facial expressions are innate endured a lot of blowback and ridicule.
Somehow there is the expectation that someone can sit in their office write down some theory and the world automatically realises the brilliance. That's not how it works, you have to go out into the world present your work, explain it and defend it. You might call it showmanship, but it is an absolutely necessary part of science and always was.
There are many problems in science today, the resistance to just adopt new theories and the requirements to communicate your research are not part of them.
Science is the worst form of knowledge gathering besides all the others.
Kelvin is a good example of a dogmatic blowhard in science. We may have named a unit after him, but all these years later people still remember how much folks like him pushed miasma theory rather than the idea that all the shit in the Thames gave you dysentary.
The folks in power weren’t going to suddenly replace all of the streets of London with proper sewers. And teach everyone to stop shitting in the street. That’s just too _uncomfortable_ to think about. So at first nothing happens. But science allows for the result to be written down, someone else goes “ah fuck shit gives you dysentary” and now blowhards like Kelvin are dead and there’s enough weakness exposed in the power structure, your ideas get put into practice. Cause it’s a good idea, it’s obvious, and a lot of the people who used to have a stake are dead.
It’s highly far from perfect. But there are very few mechanisms that are able to affect change after folks are long dead and buried.
Lets face it, since we are living in one united info space, there are less and less thougth diverity how to do things in same field
The difference is that as science advances, it is becoming harder and harder to simply understand what's going on.
Research on the beginning of the universe involve taking into account huge amount of observation data. Come up with a theory and you are going to get questions like "how do you take into account this spectrum density of that oddball galaxy no one but specialists heard about?". And if you don't come up with a satisfactory answer, then your theory is simply wrong, especially if the official theory explains this.
Global warming? People on TV make is sound easy, far from it. We suspected it long ago but definite evidence is relatively recent. It involves complex statistical models and again, because it is real science, tons of observation. How to tackle it is even harder because you add a political/economic dimension to it. Scientists can say "if we do that, this will happen", and they are not even sure, but if the "solution" involves, say, killing half of the human population, this is clearly unacceptable (and you are going to piss off the Avengers).
Covid19 research is actually a bit looser than usual because of the emergency, but again, hard stuff. But it is interesting to see that scientists tried whacky stuff, and these mostly failed.
This isn't correct at all.
It doesn't matter anymore. Those names will now have switched over to the winning side, probably claiming they were agreeing in secret all along.
There are feuds here and there in scientific fields, and those do not advance science.
However still one has to know technology itself is neutral. Now we can produce a drug that can disappear after its effect, that can patch the system without the main source code involved ...
Is it dangerous? Who stop some outside western governance to make and try getting their piggy stronger ... then accidentally