It’s neat to remember stories like this, but I want to note that this shouldn’t necessarily update scientists to criticize novel work less. If an immune system doesn’t sometimes overreact, it’s not doing its job right, and for every story like this there are multiple other stories of genuinely false exciting-sounding ideas that got shut down by experts (for instance I learned about Schekhtman from the Constant podcast, where his story was juxtaposed with that of genuine quacks). Looking back at my experience of excited claims that were generally dismissed by more skeptical experts in fields I was following, the majority of them (for instance the superluminal neutrino, the room-temperature superconductor, various hype about potentially proving the Riemann hypothesis by well-established mathematicians) have been false.
I think there is a separate phenomenon (which was the explanation for the study about funerals), that older high-status scientists in funding-hungry fields will often continue to get funding and set priorities after they have stopped working on genuinely exciting stuff—whether because of age, because of age-related conservatism bias, or simply because their area of expertise has become too well-developed to generate new ideas. In my experience in math and physics, from inside the field, this phenomenon generally does not look like a consensus that only the established people know what’s going on (as in most of the stories here), but either conversely a quiet consensus that so-and-so famous person is starting to go crazy, or alternatively the normal disagreement between more conservative and more innovation-minded people about the value of a new idea. For example the most exciting development in my professional life as a mathematician was Jacob Lurie’s development of “higher category theory”, a revolution that allowed algebraists to seamlessly use tools from topology. There were many haters of this theory (many very young), but there was enough of a diffuse understanding that this is exciting and potentially revolutionary that his ideas did percolate and end up converting many of the haters (similarly with Grothendieck and schemes). Note that here I think math avoids the worst aspects of these dynamics because it doesn’t require funding and is less competitive.
The upshot here is that I think it’s valuable to try to resolve the issue of good ideas being shot down by traditionalists, but the solution might not be to “adopt lower standards for criticizing new / surprising ideas” but rather something more like pulling the rope sideways and looking for better standards that do better at separating promising innovation from hype.
I think the issue here is not so much the disagreement or criticism as it is the mockery and ostracism. Unlike in, say, venture capital, there’s much less opportunity in science for someone to try something different and exciting, get enough funding to see if it really works out, and then, if it doesn’t but you were doing a good enough job trying, still be part of the community and get funding to try something else. (Yes, I know it doesn’t always work that way in the startup community either, but I think the odds are much better than in science)
Thanks for this! Completely agree that there are Type I and II errors here and that we should be genuinely wary of both. Also agree with your conclusion that ‘pulling the rope sideways’ is strongly preferred to simply lowering our standards. The unconventional researcher-identification approach undertaken by the HHMI might be a good proof of concept for this kind of thing.
It’s neat to remember stories like this, but I want to note that this shouldn’t necessarily update scientists to criticize novel work less. If an immune system doesn’t sometimes overreact, it’s not doing its job right, and for every story like this there are multiple other stories of genuinely false exciting-sounding ideas that got shut down by experts (for instance I learned about Schekhtman from the Constant podcast, where his story was juxtaposed with that of genuine quacks). Looking back at my experience of excited claims that were generally dismissed by more skeptical experts in fields I was following, the majority of them (for instance the superluminal neutrino, the room-temperature superconductor, various hype about potentially proving the Riemann hypothesis by well-established mathematicians) have been false.
I think there is a separate phenomenon (which was the explanation for the study about funerals), that older high-status scientists in funding-hungry fields will often continue to get funding and set priorities after they have stopped working on genuinely exciting stuff—whether because of age, because of age-related conservatism bias, or simply because their area of expertise has become too well-developed to generate new ideas. In my experience in math and physics, from inside the field, this phenomenon generally does not look like a consensus that only the established people know what’s going on (as in most of the stories here), but either conversely a quiet consensus that so-and-so famous person is starting to go crazy, or alternatively the normal disagreement between more conservative and more innovation-minded people about the value of a new idea. For example the most exciting development in my professional life as a mathematician was Jacob Lurie’s development of “higher category theory”, a revolution that allowed algebraists to seamlessly use tools from topology. There were many haters of this theory (many very young), but there was enough of a diffuse understanding that this is exciting and potentially revolutionary that his ideas did percolate and end up converting many of the haters (similarly with Grothendieck and schemes). Note that here I think math avoids the worst aspects of these dynamics because it doesn’t require funding and is less competitive.
The upshot here is that I think it’s valuable to try to resolve the issue of good ideas being shot down by traditionalists, but the solution might not be to “adopt lower standards for criticizing new / surprising ideas” but rather something more like pulling the rope sideways and looking for better standards that do better at separating promising innovation from hype.
I think the issue here is not so much the disagreement or criticism as it is the mockery and ostracism. Unlike in, say, venture capital, there’s much less opportunity in science for someone to try something different and exciting, get enough funding to see if it really works out, and then, if it doesn’t but you were doing a good enough job trying, still be part of the community and get funding to try something else. (Yes, I know it doesn’t always work that way in the startup community either, but I think the odds are much better than in science)
Thanks for this! Completely agree that there are Type I and II errors here and that we should be genuinely wary of both. Also agree with your conclusion that ‘pulling the rope sideways’ is strongly preferred to simply lowering our standards. The unconventional researcher-identification approach undertaken by the HHMI might be a good proof of concept for this kind of thing.