[SEQ RERUN] The Failures of Eld Science
Today’s post, The Failures of Eld Science was originally published on 12 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
A short story set in the same world as “Initiation Ceremony”. Future physics students look back on the cautionary tale of quantum physics.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Many Worlds, One Best Guess, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Just jumping into the Seq Rerun right now, so I missedall the stuff that came before. It might just reflect badly on my intelligence, but it usually takes me more than five minutes for an original thought. Maybe I have different standards about what constitutes originality.
I also think there’s enough scarcity in science. The people who work in academia find plenty of open questions, and try to answer them. I don’t deny that peer review, grant seeking etc. play a certain role, but most of the people working in academia that I met genuinely care about their research more than about status.
I think you may be misinterpreting what he means by “takes five whole minutes to think an original thought”. You may well have to sit thinking for considerably longer than five minutes before you have an original thought, but are you truly spending that whole interval having the thought, or are you retracing the same patterns of thought over and over again in different permutations?
I think the implication is that, since the new thought itself only takes a few minutes, training for and expecting better performance could cut down the amount of “waiting for a new thought” time.
Yes, your interpretation makes more sense. When the teacher said “Assume,...” I noticed that I don’t share that assumption, and decided to comment on this. I missed the part about how the student decided how to think—which supports the implication you saw.
I’m not saying this is necessarily the case for the people you’ve met, but remember that appearing to care more about research than status is high-status in academia.