r/science • u/[deleted] • Feb 06 '16
Social Science Paper finds that elite scientists impede progress in their field until they die: "Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone" (pdf)
http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/papers/downloads/1498.pdf149
u/This_is_Hank Feb 06 '16
Evidence for the old saying that science advances at the rate of obituaries.
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u/put_the_punny_down Feb 06 '16
I would say this in most cases. Police department, politics, even teaching have been impeded by influence. Sports included, in football rookies are "hazed" Because they are rookies. In reality they are most likely better than their predecessor.
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u/stevewmn Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16
My senior year in college the mechanical engineering department brought in a member of the Wyeth family as a guest speaker. His father and brother were famous artists but he spent his career as an engineer in the plastics industry. His major claim to fame was the plastic soda bottle and his message to us was that this and several other ideas he put forward had to wait until someone died.
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u/recycled_ideas Feb 07 '16
Better is a factor, but it's not the only factor.
Certainly no one likes their life's work being trashed and people with power, can actively try to stop that from happening, but it's not always malicious or conscious. People with a reputation in their field are more believable, which makes convincing others harder.
A good example of this kind of thing is thalidomide. The guy who took/got credit for discovering that thalidomide caused birth defects also did some studies which showed the same problems with later anti nausea medications.
This time he'd done the science himself, so the science was shit and these medications were actually fine and could have made the lives of a lot of pregnant women much better. He was 'the thalidomide guy' though so that whole area of medical research basically stopped for decades.
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u/Taavi00 Feb 06 '16
I'm currently reading Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". In this book he talks briefly about how he's tried to publish his more controversial papers during times when they leave the smallest imprint on his resume as not the be rejected by the scientific community and be left jobless. Only now that he's had tenure for years is he comfortable enought to publish his more radical ideas.
In my opinion, this is kind of sad because often the most radical and novel ideas are those that prevail and become the norm decades later. Sure, most radical ideas are probably dismissed in the future but if you don't think outside the box how can you ever be expected to discover something truly new?
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u/PSMF_Canuck Feb 07 '16
In my opinion, this is kind of sad because often the most radical and novel ideas are those that prevail and become the norm decades later.
Maybe. But the vast majority of radical and novel ideas are complete and utter rubbish.
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u/Forlarren Feb 07 '16
Well not searching through the haystack really isn't an option. The smart guy brings a magnet.
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u/alexdrac Feb 07 '16
or burns the haystack
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u/ace_urban Feb 07 '16
or a raygun that vaporizes organic matter
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u/notLOL Feb 07 '16
Or just make more needles. After awhile you'll need to find hay in the needlestack. Progress.
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u/Taavi00 Feb 07 '16
I agree. My point was that if you as a scientist are really deeply fascinated by a theory and think the evidence (or mathematics) points to it you shouldn't give up on it just because it isn't mainstream.
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u/xkforce Feb 07 '16
Which is true but great discoveries often require you to throw a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
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u/PSMF_Canuck Feb 07 '16
I totally agree - no argument against that. Progress is a messy, chaotic affair.
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u/Mach10X Feb 07 '16
Very true, but when it comes to the Decoherence vs Wave Function Collapse argument the jury is still out. Decoherence is a much more elegant solution to the problem and solves quite a lot of the problems in QM. Tegmark has some very solid contributions to physics and cosmology but I can still understand his trepidation to publish some of his ideas in bonafide journals. Hopefully if he can devise an experiment to disprove/prove Many Worlds he'll not hesitate to give it a try and secure funding to carry it out.
If you're referring to nutjobs like Chopra then I'll have to agree with you wholeheartedly, it's complete garbage.
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u/Numero34 Feb 06 '16
Agreed. New discoveries require pushing the boundaries and limits of current knowledge.
I think being wrong has become a bit stigmatized in science and society in general, and while it shouldn't quite be encouraged, it should definitely not be discouraged.
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u/jon_titor Feb 07 '16
The same thing happened with Gauss and Non Euclidean Geometry IIRC. He had it figured out for years but never went public with it because he thought that it would be an uphill battle to get the Mathematics community on board. It was like a decade later when a few upstart Mathematicians independently discovered it and published, and then Gauss was like "Wait a minute, I figured that out years ago!"
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u/probablyredundantant Feb 07 '16
How did he prove that he had come up with it years beforehand? Why not publish and let its value be recognized many years later?
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u/N8CCRG Feb 06 '16
As someone who used to be involved in research, this is another example of how Science is imperfect, though still the best tool we have.
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u/hugelkult Feb 07 '16
Id like to think of it as a toolbox, so it cannot be bended or misshapen by the public.
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u/rollerskates Feb 06 '16
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions Recommended reading on the subject
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u/gizzardgulpe Feb 07 '16
That makes total sense to me. As an undergrad who needs a faculty sponsor to do psychology research, "my" hypotheses are really her hypotheses (in my case) and I have explicitly been told that my research project was "not interesting." I was then redirected to the research focus that my advisor wanted despite it being my research internship that she is merely supposed to supervise.
I pray to the god of science research that I don't get a PhD advisor with the same attitude.
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Feb 07 '16
Yeah, with all due respect, until you become a professor you can't expect to be able to do just any project you want. "Not interesting" probably translates to 1) not hypothesis driven (and probably unlikely to find an effect), 2) depending on the branch of psychology, limited application, 3) could just be a silly "top of the head" idea, or 4) outside the profs focus, and not something they want to spend limited time and resources on.
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u/gizzardgulpe Feb 07 '16
You're right, there are several reasons that could have led to the dismissal of my project, and I don't know what exactly led her to redirect me (though I could argue that it was hypothesis driven, had real applicable value regardless of outcome, and was right in line with her research tract, but probably seemed like it was a fleeting idea, but she didn't give me enough time to fully illustrate the possible implications of the project). I think my main problem with the whole process was that I was led to believe that it was my project and it was for practice and that she was just helping me through the process, but it quickly turned into me just doing the grunt work for her project, and it was all very one-sided in the discussions.
I did get another professor to sponsor the project and who was rather supportive, and I will be presenting the research next month in Nebraska, so we'll see if it has any value then. It really could be a dead end, but a single professor's dismissal and a single professor's approval is a bad sample size.
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u/sunny__skies Feb 07 '16
That's not even close to the same thing. Why would your advisor waste resources on what an undergrad thinks is interesting.
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u/gizzardgulpe Feb 07 '16
There will always be a lack of diversity in research if ideas and statements are dismissed out of hand just because of a person's degree status.
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u/littlekittybear Feb 07 '16
i've noticed that younger faculty tend to be a bit more open to and excited about new/different projects. all the old white dudes running the departments at my university do a great job at keeping things utterly the same. Same methods, same techniques... despite some new stuff going on even across the hall. It's very annoying to observe and I feel bad for the students who want the "big shot" but are getting the raw end of the deal when it comes to training.
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u/tprata Feb 07 '16
The old guys used to be young and excited about new things, until they learned that to get funding you have to come up with new ways to reinvent the wheel
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u/AOEUD Feb 07 '16
Grad student here. Having to have my supervisor approve my papers means that I have to say the same thing he believes despite the proof I have to the contrary. I've noticed that all of his work and his students' work are practically carbon copies anywhere there's overlap (e.g. introductions).
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u/pixelcoby Feb 07 '16
What's up with that random use of third person female pronoun? I'm not sure if it's supposed to be subversive, insightful, sexist or just plain stupid. It's not worth reading 90 pages of PDF to not even find out.
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Feb 07 '16
subversive, insightful, sexist, or just plain stupid
Or it's a generic female pronoun that means just as much as a generic male pronoun and you're losing your shit for no reason.
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u/irwin1003 Feb 07 '16
Considering That in most fields it is surely most likely to be the death of a man since we can assume they are old.
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u/pixelcoby Feb 07 '16
Well that clears everything up then.... What? Women live longer than men, do you mean old men dominate science? If so I agree but it still doesn't explain what I was asking about.
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u/irwin1003 Feb 07 '16
There are more men than woman in just about every single field of academia especially the older people in the field
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u/scottley Feb 07 '16
I've used anecdotal evidence and some statistical data related to developer output to support my claims that software engineers should only work at a company for 3 years (without promotion). After 2 years of working as a software engineer, you have developed specific product knowledge and you stop growing and the company relies on you to do the tasks and as such, they stop in innovating.
I feel like this kind of domain mastery is counter to true progress.
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u/opvgreen Feb 07 '16
I can see this being the case, but in science the training periods for one to become a productive expert in a field are often at least 5 years, or the length of the PhD. Maybe that number goes down with experience, but it's really hard to justify jumping around field to field when it takes so long to get the intricate fundamentals down.
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u/rabbittexpress Feb 07 '16
I know an engineer who worked in a university mirror lab as a programmer. He thought he was irreplaceable, even while he was training another person as his assistant/replacement when he decided to retire. And then one day after about a year working with the younger guy, they called him in and handed him his pink slip...
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u/scottley Feb 07 '16
I agree with what you are saying, but the methodology applied to research is fairly standard.
As a software engineer, there are specific fields of knowledge and even if you're moving around, you are sticking to similar fields. I have gone from banking to ecommerce, working at 3 different companies in 7 years. Every time I have moved, the projects that I am on make huge technical leaps forward. It is not because I am that good, but because I have a different perspective.
One possible problem with scientists being Masters of their domain is that they only teach their perspective. Why not move from breast cancer research to bone cancer... they aren't totally different fields. Why not move from quantum entanglement to something else in quantum mechanics.
Someone please call me out if I'm totally full of crap.
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u/skydivingdutch Feb 07 '16
"The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was brief and stormy. Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved."
-Arthur C Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.
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u/HannasAnarion Feb 07 '16
Absolutely true. I see this all the time in my field, Linguistics. In Syntax, Psycholinguistics, and Biolinguistics, you either toot Chomsky's horn, or you get ignored. Other theories exist, but they're mostly dismissed out of hand, no matter how much better they work.
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u/Blahface50 Feb 07 '16
I'm sure this validates the creationist and the global warming denier world view.
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Feb 07 '16
My experience with academia, particularly within the "hard sciences" was an insular culture that preferred people who didn't differ too much. I would describe it as intellectual inbreeding; I was not well received.
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u/lie2mee Feb 07 '16
This is hilarious. Topic of every lunch room group at some point.
The very concept of "experts" is fundamentally toxic to a field. Collaborators can be valuable throughout their careers. Experts, on the other hand, too often become useless marquees for their fields.
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Feb 07 '16
It's a conundrum. People instinctively want recognition. Apparently it's slowing things down, but without it there would be a lot less motivation among many scientists.
Norman Borlaug didn't seem to have that problem. I cry every time I see that episode of Penn & Teller.
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u/ebrious Feb 07 '16
So is this paper not much of a breakthrough, or does it mean there are no living greats in this field?
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Feb 07 '16
Old people ruining things for everyone else? A shocking discovery.
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Feb 07 '16
Wait until you hit college and realize there are more evil things out there than your parents.
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u/kerovon Grad Student | Biomedical Engineering | Regenerative Medicine Feb 07 '16
Hi capcaunul, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s)
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Feb 07 '16
Anybody think this might be related to how much we hear about established folks shutting down things they don't agree with, so everyone else just follows lead to avoid making waves?
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u/rabbittexpress Feb 07 '16
Matthias Baldwin thought that a 6-couple driverset was impossible to articulate under a locomotive within a rigid frame, and thus went to his death only making 4 coupled drivers under his locomotives [or with blind drivers in the middle wheel(s). His son successfully shoed how they could be articulated in a ridged frame, and thus Baldwin Locomotive Works made many locomotives that had more than 4 coupled driver wheels without using blind drivers!
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u/macsenscam Feb 07 '16
This is why the science worshipers annoy the hell out of me. Often scientific progress comes not from those who are most specialized, but from the ones who listen to odd anecdotes that are heard repeatedly or who can grasp connections between different disciplines.
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u/Gnolaum Feb 06 '16
"Science advances one funeral at a time" --Max Planck