Thank you SO MUCH! I never understood why Watson and Crick were so worshiped. They didn't discover DNA, they didn't discover that it was life's code, they didn't figure out how it worked. They were the kings of PR.
Thanks for the kind words! To be totally honest, I wrote that passage in a fit of whimsy some time ago and now I can't seem to figure out how to remove it.
Woo. Just exactly so. Is the original fault in the primate's yearning to be daddy's best primate? Can the primates just not tolerate the complexity involved in valuing collaboration? Why does everybody want to rule the world? ♫
If you aspire to be a scientist, it is best to do so because you want to understand the universe, not because you want to be a Nobel Prize-winning famous bigshot. Ninety nine point nine percent of scientists will never be famous. Yet most of us keep doing it because we love it and could not imagine anything else that is as fun while also providing a decent living.
Yes, there are pathological, fame-seeking personalities in science. And there are scientists who make celebrated discoveries because they were "lucky" enough to be in the right place at the right time. Let them have their awards and fame. I don't begrudge them.
To sum up, I'm not convinced there is a problem here that needs fixing. Is fame so valuable and important that it really matters whether scientist A is famous while scientist B who almost made the same discovery, or who laid important groundwork for future discoveries, is not?
There may not be a problem that needs fixing, but I wouldn't think about it from the perspective of rewarding scientists "fairly" (which is super debatable) but rather if incentives are optimally tuned to encourage progress.
Even so, the answer may be that there is no problem worth fixing! It could be that Nobel prizes are so rare that they don't provide any serious incentive, and that their real purpose is to celebrate science and be inspirational, and that the current system is ideal.
My feeling is that if there is any serious incentive problem it lies more in the incentives for normal workaday scientists to publish and get cited, etc. In my opinion those incentives are very powerful and important. But I also don't have any concrete proposal for improving them!
It's completely amazing why this trend has become more than just a norm. Undoubtedly, most researches and other Academic influences bow to this standard. A significant number of ideas had failed to show up as a result of this development. Should doing it first be praise worthier than doing it better? Absolutely, no. Thus, I'm with the opinion that a paradigm shift will serve this planet best.
Great essay, thank you. I think the strength of the reasons you give for the current state of affairs mean that fixing its disadvantages might be too difficult - unless the solution is more damaging than the problem. Disputes about priority and narratives of heroic scientists emerged have been with us as long as science itself. There's no doubt that they've become more ridiculous as science has become larger and more complex, but the simplicity of Big Thing Happened. Why? Big Man Did It. Now You Do Next Big Thing. You Become Next Big Man! has driven a lot of progress. Any attempt to steer people away from it is unlikely to be as compelling.
I'd almost be more concerned about the opposite problem to the one you're addressing - the BTHW?BMDINYWNBTYBNBM! narrative is obviously sillier than it used to be, so we're seeing less of it. How many famous scientists are there now, as compared to a hundred or fifty years ago? Both in the sense of famous to the general public, and famous to amateurs with an interest in science, I think the answer is that there's been a huge decrease. The Large Hadron Collider and other particle physics experiments, or the various space telescopes/expeditions/projects, are better known than any individual scientist is now. And I think it's likely (though I've got absolutely no evidence for this) that the absence of Big Men and Big Women does diminish the incentives for breakthrough science in general. Though whether to an extent that would make an appreciable difference to scientific progress, I've no idea.
I know you're arguing for reallocating credit rather than diminishing it, but I think that's hard to do. If you're reallocating credit away from a compelling and clear narrative towards one that is harder to grasp intuitively, then the effect will be that the net amount of general interest, and therefore the value of the credit given, will be diminished - even if that wasn't your intention. Attention will drift towards other fields where Big People still stride the Earth. The gaze of the modern Newton will alight on Musks and Zuckerbergs, rather than on Galileos and Keplers, and the world may be the poorer for it. Not sure what you can do about this, given that the change is driven by the changing reality of modern science. I suppose you could the Nobel Prize rules so that it's only ever given to one person, and in years where there hasn't been an awesome step forward to celebrate, a Nobel isn't awarded. Might make a small difference.
Franklin discovered that the DNA was a double helix - i don’t think this is disputed. Her lab director Wilkins showed her work to Watson snd Crick before Franklin published. Even Watson admits this. Franklin was an expert on crystallography.
Thanks, my intention was to just say that Watson and Crick were the first to *publish*, not necessarily the first to *discover* which is tricky to precisely define. Based on your comments, I decided to change the line "It's certain that Pauling or Franklin or someone else would have figured out the true structure soon anyway" to "It's certain that Pauling or Franklin or someone else would have published the true structure soon anyway".
Intellectual piracy should also be addressed: changing the nomenclature of an argument without attribution. Such plagiarism of ideas is tolerated de facto for a simple reason: almost never can one prove that the pirate was exposed to the logical chain lifted. When one can prove exposure, and retraction still does not occur, the Publisher should be held criminally liable for the false advertising of journal policy against the plagiarism of ideas.
I agree 100%. It seems like most discoveries or inventions were "in the air" at the time they were published and the "inventor" was just a short time ahead of others.
Is there a list somewhere of truly novel discoveries that were decades ahead of their time or even better might never have been discovered/invented by someone else?
Thank you SO MUCH! I never understood why Watson and Crick were so worshiped. They didn't discover DNA, they didn't discover that it was life's code, they didn't figure out how it worked. They were the kings of PR.
Hello Dyno,
I have been reading your substack for a while now and I have no idea what it is about, what you do, who you are...
Today I decided I was going to support it... only to find a message I somehow never noticed before: dynomight is unsupported. Crazy.
Your writing blows my mind most of the time. Thanks a lot and lots of love.
> dynomight is unsupported
Thanks for the kind words! To be totally honest, I wrote that passage in a fit of whimsy some time ago and now I can't seem to figure out how to remove it.
I wonder if 'a fit of whimsy' describes the state of some of the scientist mentioned when they came about their discoveries.
Woo. Just exactly so. Is the original fault in the primate's yearning to be daddy's best primate? Can the primates just not tolerate the complexity involved in valuing collaboration? Why does everybody want to rule the world? ♫
Next do paywalls on research.
If you aspire to be a scientist, it is best to do so because you want to understand the universe, not because you want to be a Nobel Prize-winning famous bigshot. Ninety nine point nine percent of scientists will never be famous. Yet most of us keep doing it because we love it and could not imagine anything else that is as fun while also providing a decent living.
Yes, there are pathological, fame-seeking personalities in science. And there are scientists who make celebrated discoveries because they were "lucky" enough to be in the right place at the right time. Let them have their awards and fame. I don't begrudge them.
To sum up, I'm not convinced there is a problem here that needs fixing. Is fame so valuable and important that it really matters whether scientist A is famous while scientist B who almost made the same discovery, or who laid important groundwork for future discoveries, is not?
There may not be a problem that needs fixing, but I wouldn't think about it from the perspective of rewarding scientists "fairly" (which is super debatable) but rather if incentives are optimally tuned to encourage progress.
Even so, the answer may be that there is no problem worth fixing! It could be that Nobel prizes are so rare that they don't provide any serious incentive, and that their real purpose is to celebrate science and be inspirational, and that the current system is ideal.
My feeling is that if there is any serious incentive problem it lies more in the incentives for normal workaday scientists to publish and get cited, etc. In my opinion those incentives are very powerful and important. But I also don't have any concrete proposal for improving them!
At all, no!
It's completely amazing why this trend has become more than just a norm. Undoubtedly, most researches and other Academic influences bow to this standard. A significant number of ideas had failed to show up as a result of this development. Should doing it first be praise worthier than doing it better? Absolutely, no. Thus, I'm with the opinion that a paradigm shift will serve this planet best.
It's crazy how I just finished this Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5) and was wondering how we could optimize for innovation when I got the notification for your post
For humans it’s social structure/system before all else.
Science works the way it does because of our social system.
And that structure is currently neoliberalism.
This is a very bad outcome.
Great essay, thank you. I think the strength of the reasons you give for the current state of affairs mean that fixing its disadvantages might be too difficult - unless the solution is more damaging than the problem. Disputes about priority and narratives of heroic scientists emerged have been with us as long as science itself. There's no doubt that they've become more ridiculous as science has become larger and more complex, but the simplicity of Big Thing Happened. Why? Big Man Did It. Now You Do Next Big Thing. You Become Next Big Man! has driven a lot of progress. Any attempt to steer people away from it is unlikely to be as compelling.
I'd almost be more concerned about the opposite problem to the one you're addressing - the BTHW?BMDINYWNBTYBNBM! narrative is obviously sillier than it used to be, so we're seeing less of it. How many famous scientists are there now, as compared to a hundred or fifty years ago? Both in the sense of famous to the general public, and famous to amateurs with an interest in science, I think the answer is that there's been a huge decrease. The Large Hadron Collider and other particle physics experiments, or the various space telescopes/expeditions/projects, are better known than any individual scientist is now. And I think it's likely (though I've got absolutely no evidence for this) that the absence of Big Men and Big Women does diminish the incentives for breakthrough science in general. Though whether to an extent that would make an appreciable difference to scientific progress, I've no idea.
I know you're arguing for reallocating credit rather than diminishing it, but I think that's hard to do. If you're reallocating credit away from a compelling and clear narrative towards one that is harder to grasp intuitively, then the effect will be that the net amount of general interest, and therefore the value of the credit given, will be diminished - even if that wasn't your intention. Attention will drift towards other fields where Big People still stride the Earth. The gaze of the modern Newton will alight on Musks and Zuckerbergs, rather than on Galileos and Keplers, and the world may be the poorer for it. Not sure what you can do about this, given that the change is driven by the changing reality of modern science. I suppose you could the Nobel Prize rules so that it's only ever given to one person, and in years where there hasn't been an awesome step forward to celebrate, a Nobel isn't awarded. Might make a small difference.
Great essay.
Franklin discovered that the DNA was a double helix - i don’t think this is disputed. Her lab director Wilkins showed her work to Watson snd Crick before Franklin published. Even Watson admits this. Franklin was an expert on crystallography.
Thanks, my intention was to just say that Watson and Crick were the first to *publish*, not necessarily the first to *discover* which is tricky to precisely define. Based on your comments, I decided to change the line "It's certain that Pauling or Franklin or someone else would have figured out the true structure soon anyway" to "It's certain that Pauling or Franklin or someone else would have published the true structure soon anyway".
Intellectual piracy should also be addressed: changing the nomenclature of an argument without attribution. Such plagiarism of ideas is tolerated de facto for a simple reason: almost never can one prove that the pirate was exposed to the logical chain lifted. When one can prove exposure, and retraction still does not occur, the Publisher should be held criminally liable for the false advertising of journal policy against the plagiarism of ideas.
new use for GLM - validating that quoted sources do indeed support the claim being made by the author
I agree 100%. It seems like most discoveries or inventions were "in the air" at the time they were published and the "inventor" was just a short time ahead of others.
Is there a list somewhere of truly novel discoveries that were decades ahead of their time or even better might never have been discovered/invented by someone else?
I've looked for a list, but haven't been able to find one. I would love to see it!