> Think about how difficult it is to make a significant contribution in your particular field of expertise that is not about to be done right now anyway because the time is right.
I independently reinvented my entire field of research by accident, because I didn't know it existed; and I'm pretty sure I did a better job. There are a few puzzle pieces and key insights it probably would've taken me a few years (or decades) to discover, without which I couldn't demonstrate (or, if I'm being honest, know) the immense superiority of my approach, but I'm pretty sure the majority of the field is obsoleted by the ideas I've had.
Oh, look at me, I'm so clever… right? Good guess, but actually no. When I ask the right questions to my peers (outside the field), they usually propose a similar approach. (The main differences can be attributed to the fact I've thought about this for years, and they've thought about it for minutes: a few of the obvious things don't work, but then things get elegant when you replace them with ones that do.)
That must mean the time's right, then? I did suspect it was this… until I found a few dozen publications by a widely-respected expert, from half a century ago, talking about a (slightly underdeveloped, idiosyncratic) version of the approach like it was common sense, remarking that people were a lot more receptive to this idea than they used to be, but still it was not being adopted.
A minor application of this approach to a different field would completely revolutionise it (even moreso than it does my field). I briefly fantasised about doing that, before dismissing as "something to investigate later" (i.e. "a childish fantasy I haven't found the holes in yet"). But not only does that application work, it was implemented and trialled. The results were published 26 years ago, in a paper that concludes by confusedly asking why nobody was doing this. After reading the paper (which I found completely by accident while looking for something else), I felt much the same way. (Still nobody is doing it, in case you're wondering. It's been cited six times – once in its field, two years after publication, and five times in other fields in papers where it isn't really relevant.)
In physics, parts of chemistry, and parts of mathematics, there is room for revolution. I'm not sure any of the softer fields (counting mathematics qua philosophy as soft) are particularly good at being revolutionised. (Economics is particularly bad: nearly every economist knows that economics is wrong, and yet it persists.) And it's not because new ideas are slow to be adopted: at least 10% of my field's practitioners dropped everything to try to solve its Hard Problems with LLMs. (Those I know, I talked out of this, by describing – with non-rigorous theoretical arguments – what they would find. After years of work, the best result I've seen is only slightly better than the bound I predicted.)
I'm sure there's some way to solve this problem, but I don't know it. I wouldn't be surprised if the solution has been identified, written down, published, forgotten, independently reinvented, tested, found to work, published again, ignored…
I don't say this to cast aspersions on science, or the academic system; nor to blame people or institutions for their failings. This problem is well-known. It's not a matter of people being stuck in their ways: if anything, academics are too credulous, too willing to believe that things work which don't. But I don't think adjusting the "credulity" dial, or the "speed" dial, or the "try novel approaches" dial, is a solution. Science, as it stands, cannot be done faster, because the system doesn't know how.
All I'm saying is, watch out for this. Support people who think they have a better way, check the literature for interesting things (and then confirm them, if you can). Question not whether your current approaches are good, but what they actually do – and ask whether that is really what you want to be doing, or a proxy goal that everybody's lost sight of.
And if you find yourself along with your peers, dismissing something out-of-hand without having tried it, maybe don't lend your voice to the snubbing crowd. Maybe it's bogus, maybe its proponents are wrong about its merits, but it might have merits. We can't afford not to know.
Also: Don't get so enamoured by the idea of incremental progress, of scientific legacy, that you can scarcely imagine the idea that everybody you know might have taken a wrong turn 30, or 50, or 400 years ago. Science is the study of what is _not_ true, of falsification: how _not_ to cure a patient, how _not_ to go to the moon. It says nothing about what _is_. (That's the domain of engineering.)
The discovery of germs did not prove the non-existence of prions.
I independently reinvented my entire field of research by accident, because I didn't know it existed; and I'm pretty sure I did a better job. There are a few puzzle pieces and key insights it probably would've taken me a few years (or decades) to discover, without which I couldn't demonstrate (or, if I'm being honest, know) the immense superiority of my approach, but I'm pretty sure the majority of the field is obsoleted by the ideas I've had.
Oh, look at me, I'm so clever… right? Good guess, but actually no. When I ask the right questions to my peers (outside the field), they usually propose a similar approach. (The main differences can be attributed to the fact I've thought about this for years, and they've thought about it for minutes: a few of the obvious things don't work, but then things get elegant when you replace them with ones that do.)
That must mean the time's right, then? I did suspect it was this… until I found a few dozen publications by a widely-respected expert, from half a century ago, talking about a (slightly underdeveloped, idiosyncratic) version of the approach like it was common sense, remarking that people were a lot more receptive to this idea than they used to be, but still it was not being adopted.
A minor application of this approach to a different field would completely revolutionise it (even moreso than it does my field). I briefly fantasised about doing that, before dismissing as "something to investigate later" (i.e. "a childish fantasy I haven't found the holes in yet"). But not only does that application work, it was implemented and trialled. The results were published 26 years ago, in a paper that concludes by confusedly asking why nobody was doing this. After reading the paper (which I found completely by accident while looking for something else), I felt much the same way. (Still nobody is doing it, in case you're wondering. It's been cited six times – once in its field, two years after publication, and five times in other fields in papers where it isn't really relevant.)
In physics, parts of chemistry, and parts of mathematics, there is room for revolution. I'm not sure any of the softer fields (counting mathematics qua philosophy as soft) are particularly good at being revolutionised. (Economics is particularly bad: nearly every economist knows that economics is wrong, and yet it persists.) And it's not because new ideas are slow to be adopted: at least 10% of my field's practitioners dropped everything to try to solve its Hard Problems with LLMs. (Those I know, I talked out of this, by describing – with non-rigorous theoretical arguments – what they would find. After years of work, the best result I've seen is only slightly better than the bound I predicted.)
I'm sure there's some way to solve this problem, but I don't know it. I wouldn't be surprised if the solution has been identified, written down, published, forgotten, independently reinvented, tested, found to work, published again, ignored…
I don't say this to cast aspersions on science, or the academic system; nor to blame people or institutions for their failings. This problem is well-known. It's not a matter of people being stuck in their ways: if anything, academics are too credulous, too willing to believe that things work which don't. But I don't think adjusting the "credulity" dial, or the "speed" dial, or the "try novel approaches" dial, is a solution. Science, as it stands, cannot be done faster, because the system doesn't know how.
All I'm saying is, watch out for this. Support people who think they have a better way, check the literature for interesting things (and then confirm them, if you can). Question not whether your current approaches are good, but what they actually do – and ask whether that is really what you want to be doing, or a proxy goal that everybody's lost sight of.
And if you find yourself along with your peers, dismissing something out-of-hand without having tried it, maybe don't lend your voice to the snubbing crowd. Maybe it's bogus, maybe its proponents are wrong about its merits, but it might have merits. We can't afford not to know.