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"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 Planck

Makes me think of that Feynman commencement speech - hopefully we can get better:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

While it's a nice story, I seem to remember that it isn't true.

There was some article a while back that talked about the fact that measurements from the oil drop experiment pretty much moved as the input data got better.

As far as I know, the story is true. If the input data just got better, you'd expect measurements above and below the real value.

IIRC, the experimental value went in one direction, from Millikan's to the currently accepted value.

Values were both above and below:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...

Interesting but not fully convincing. I am sure I've seen a plot of values over time from the original to the 1950s or so. I must try and find it...

The linked SE question is relevant. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...

Please provide a source, otherwise your comment does not provide any value.

Citations already exist in sibling comments. The linked StackOverflow questions also have further sources where people are trying to track down time-limited original sources.

You clearly couldn't be bothered to put in even a minimal amount of effort to follow the citations that have existed for 12 hours prior to your useless post.

I will give your post as much consideration as you gave mine.

What's the quote that's similar but about political change? Haven't been able to find the correct attribution.

Or in this case, when a global pandemic makes it abundantly clear that those rejected ideas actually had merit.

> She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful.

You cannot even realize how many people in academia are running for wild and fanciful ideas. Don't blame the scientists, they are probably the most open-minded to the new ideas. But filtering out bad ideas is a part of their job, and they grew thick-skinned from constant bombardment of fancy ideas, we cannot pursue them all.

So I'd say this story is pretty traditional in the history of revolutionary ideas (e.g. a similar story of John Snow vs. cholera -- how many years and lives it took).

As an aside, this is maddening: "Published April 8, 2021 Updated Oct. 2, 2023, 9:59 a.m. ET"

The original article is gone!

Just an constantly evolving page that likely has things deleted for reasons other than accuracy (e.g., like narrative coherency).

Just write another article! Damn!

Interesting. I diffed the original with the current. They added this paragraph:

> On Monday, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research.

And added "Long Overlooked" to the title.

Of course they are.

Almost every groundbreaking idea that surfaced went through a period of obscurity and dismissal.

Are you saying this is a fact of life, or that it is true by definition? Like, "any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories".

It's surprisingly difficult to look at an idea and figure out from first principles if its any good. Most of the scientists (and people really) rely on comparing it with what they have already seen and using their experiences from things they know to judge the new idea.

So, its really difficult to judge a revolutionary theory. Crackpot theories are easier to judge however. They often have very provable falsehoods.

"any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories"

This is an interesting insight. Yeah, I think you are onto something here.

Groundbreaking ideas, as opposed to new technologies, tend not to have obvious real world applications/results for years. As such, they aren't easily distinguishable from random crackpottery.

We tend to validate ideas by their later applications, or, at the very least, a heap of corroborating evidence. Both takes a lot of time to aggregate.

It's practically a tautology, if the idea was easily distinguishable from 'random crackpottery' then it wouldn't be so groundbreaking, because it necessitates that the other party in a 30 to 60 minute meeting could confidently distinguish it.

“It’s true because it has always been true”

It mostly shows that gov. funded research grants are broken and just fund echo chambers.

Even if it was not easy pharmaceutical companies finally did invest.

> It mostly shows that gov. funded research grants are broken and just fund echo chambers.

No, it shows there are weaknesses in the government-funded research grants. But it is far from clear which other system would be better overall not just in this case.

The pipeline for fundamental biology research is much longer and more complex compared to pure tech. This is the reason why there are so many fewer bio-tech start-ups. The same can be said about hardware vs software in pure tech. There must be 100x start-ups in software, compared to hardware. The greatest hope for more break-thrus that can be commercialised is an increase in gov't research funding (say: 10x) and/or the gov't offering bounties with guaranteed contracts for commercial products. Example: If you can create a malaria vaccine with 75% efficacy for children under 12, then US/EU/Japan/UN will guarantee an order for 25B USD or 1B doses. (Something enormous, to really move the needle.)

Wiki tells me that she started publishing about mRNA in 2005. The first mRNA vaccine was not approved until Dec 2022. That kind of timeline is impossible for private investment to fund. It needs to come from gov'ts and non-profits.

YC is basically a non-entity when it comes to such startups.

For good reason. YC has no business investing in biotech because that’s how we get shit like Theranos. The biotech VC industry is mature with as much or more deal flow in dollars than software VC every year, with tons of people with experience in science and entrepreneurship.