Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

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Brian Josephson received his nobel prize for a discovery he made at age 22 while being a PhD student. The accompanying paper is just two pages long [1]. Without diminishing his achievement I'd wager that thousands of bright PhD students could've come up with the same solution given the right circumstances.

I no longer work in academia but what I observed when spending time in top-tier research groups is that it's at least as important where you work as how smart you are. You can be the most gifted researcher but if you work in a backwater university in a third-world country your chances of being noticed or doing well-recognized work are very dim. On the other hand, if you're a smart person working in a top-tier environment your chance of doing noteworthy work are much higher.

Now of course smart people will usually find ways to get into better environments, but from my experience there's still a lot of elitism involved. For example, where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists, some of them leading research institutes. I always thought that it would be extremely unlikely to observe such a concentration if the selection process was really unbiased. Not saying my colleagues weren't gifted, but of course they had a lot of advantages as compared to gifted students from poor families as their parents knew exactly what to do to get them into the elite programs (in France you have to prepare for this for many years, starting with picking the right school for your children). So being in the right place and having the right pedigree is still a huge factor for getting a good shot at being really successful.

[1]: http://hacol13.physik.uni-freiburg.de/fp/Versuche/FP1/FP1-11...

> where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists

You'll see this across all professional areas in the world. Medical students overindex on parents being doctors, law students on parents being lawyers. Heck, even young 10-year-old motorcycle racers at your local mini moto track almost all have a Dad back in the pit who is wrenching on their bikes and who comes from a moto background. It's literally everywhere you look.

The reality is that most of us can be successful in several different professional paths, and that we'll often choose the path that we're most familiar with from our upbringing.

On that note, whenever I meet someone who successfully broke their "family mold," I appreciate their success that much more.

This is partially why I decided not to go the PhD-> try to become a professor route. It really is an incestuous community these days. I also noticed that a very large portion of the people at the “top” of the pipeline into academia have connections to academia in the US (eg a parent professor) who can help them get or navigate getting a lot of these early “prestige” markers. If you don’t have that, even if you’re just as smart, you’ll have a hard time breaking in.

For example a lot of those kids will start doing “research” in HS, obviously in 99% of cases very closely directed by their mentor, who may be a parent. This gets them those fancy “17 year creates clean drinking water for $0.002/L” news coverage and possibly helps them win a nationally recognized science fair. Then they can also get tutored for Olympiads - unless you have a Von Neumann level intelligence you basically need a lot of special studying to be able to get far in those. Then they get into accelerated programs with local universities with the help of their parents, obviously get into whatever college they want, get the best research opportunities starting freshman year, and it continues to snowball from there.

Not saying this system doesn’t make great scientists, or that the people who benefit from it aren’t smart or qualified. Just, ultimately there are only so many professorships to go around, so good luck becoming a professor in STEM at an acclaimed R1 university without this kind of pipelining, even if you’re just as smart.

This may be off-topic, but it's incredible how Brian Josephson went off the rails with his paranormal quantum theories.

A fascinating read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

The list is full of people who are obviously 'smart' in some way, but somehow also incredibly full of bad ideas. It's possible that being insightful also requires you to have bad ideas as well - as if they're fountains of ideas, good and bad.

Crucially though, these Nobel Laureates possess a lack of critical thinking to filter out the bad ideas (that are often outside their field of expertise). They're definitely not unique among scientists.

I think this happens for the same reason they win their Nobel in the first place: to just go wherever their curiosity takes them, without having a pre-conceived notion about whether that is good or bad. If you open fifty thousand ugly oysters you're sure to find some gems, maybe even a priceless one. But you're also going to find a lot of junk. So you are likely on to something there, and the lack of a filter is definitely an issue.

You see this in other fields as well: at some point having an opinion is about name recognition. If you are some unknown person and you have a bullshit opinion about something the world will ignore you. But if you're a Nobel prize winner, and actor or media personality, a well known athlete, a business person or a venture capitalist with a lot of money then people will pay attention to what you say and will treat it with both more weight than they would otherwise and they will burn you down far worse than would ever happen compared to an unknown person.

The Dutch have a proverb about this (we have proverbs for everything, so this should be no surprise), that roughly translates as 'tall trees catch a lot of wind'.

>I think this happens for the same reason they win their Nobel in the first place

You are absolutely right. As they say There is a Thin Line Between Genius and Insanity. The very intensity of their out-of-the-box thinking which got them the Nobel prize in the first place is also what makes them prone to go off in many other directions without regard to Social Standing, Ethics and Morality.

IMO, this is not a fault but Genius applied to the wrong beliefs/ends which does not invalidate any of their other achievements. I will take the Genius with all their faults over the Common Average any-day.

PS: Relevant two-part article - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-habits-ge...

> Examples Of Otherwise Good Scientists Who Were Consumed By Their Pet Theories Despite Weak/Contradictory Evidence?

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/aoh607/exam...

Interesting, I had not heard of that. For an older example, Isaac Newton spent most of his life researching alchemy.

Same problem in industry. It often matters more that you have $prestigious_school or $prestigious_company on your resume than how smart or hard working you are. Not to mention having the "right" people in your network or the right parents. I wish we wouldn't attach so much signal to these vanity attributes.

There's probably a way to make money exploiting this.

For example, develop a hiring process to hire smart people with non prestigious backgrounds.

Similarly, I read once that ugly people pay higher interest rates on loans despite being more likely to repay them.

That's a golden opportunity if I ever saw one, legal regulations permitting.

> Similarly, I read once that ugly people pay higher interest rates on loans despite being more likely to repay them.

Tinder loansharking.

"Hey there. It looks like Saturday night will be another lonely one since nobody is attracted to your ugly mug. But here's good news: you've been pre-approved for a $20,000 loan at a special introductory rate of 40% APR!"

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