New candidates: Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren on Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers, Ada Lovelace’s idea of a general-purpose computer, Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognition theory, Joseph Altman’s adult neurogenesis, Dan Shechtman’s quasicrystals.
Purported common threads: Unconventional background, polymathic skillsets, working in relative isolation.
Hasn’t really been insightful for me, but dropping it here in case it’d be useful for someone else.
Semmelweis, Lister, and Pasteur are great examples. Early adopters of Germ Theory and related issues like sanitation and antiseptics, disbelieved by everyone around them. But you can’t say that they didn’t have impact due to the disbelief—Pasteur was definitely influenced by Lister and Semmelweis, and Pasteur really got the purposefully made vaccines down (whereas with smallpox we lucked out with cowpox happening to already exist). So unlike others whose ideas are sufficiently strange as to be rejected (thus giving good evidence of counterfactual discovery, e.g. Mendel whose work was only rediscovered about when the actual content was being refigured out.), they managed to create huge counterfactual impact.
So I guess, if you can’t convince most people, at least manage to convince a handful of early adopters well positioned to reap the rewards of your ideas?
I’ve tried pointing Deep Research at this, doing a three-turn search. Here’s the result, including a GPT-4.5 summary at the end.
Repeat mentions[1]: Einstein, Mendel, Ignaz Semmelweis’ antiseptic handwashing, Wegener’s continental drift, Cantor’ set theory, Emmy Noether, McClintock’s transposons.
New candidates: Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren on Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers, Ada Lovelace’s idea of a general-purpose computer, Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognition theory, Joseph Altman’s adult neurogenesis, Dan Shechtman’s quasicrystals.
Purported common threads: Unconventional background, polymathic skillsets, working in relative isolation.
Hasn’t really been insightful for me, but dropping it here in case it’d be useful for someone else.
As in, those already mentioned by people in this post’s answers.
Semmelweis, Lister, and Pasteur are great examples. Early adopters of Germ Theory and related issues like sanitation and antiseptics, disbelieved by everyone around them. But you can’t say that they didn’t have impact due to the disbelief—Pasteur was definitely influenced by Lister and Semmelweis, and Pasteur really got the purposefully made vaccines down (whereas with smallpox we lucked out with cowpox happening to already exist). So unlike others whose ideas are sufficiently strange as to be rejected (thus giving good evidence of counterfactual discovery, e.g. Mendel whose work was only rediscovered about when the actual content was being refigured out.), they managed to create huge counterfactual impact.
So I guess, if you can’t convince most people, at least manage to convince a handful of early adopters well positioned to reap the rewards of your ideas?