

Why are modern scientists so dull? - bootload
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull.html

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tokenadult
I've mentioned before here on HN problems with this source,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961305>

which are that the source itself is notorious for lack of empirical back-up or
peer review for anything submitted to it. (The Medical Hypotheses blog is
associated with the journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by the same person who
posted the blog post I link above, and he runs the journal, and evidently the
blog as well, to post ideas of his own that cannot obtain peer-reviewed
publication elsewhere.) I have read several of the articles and reviews he
cites in this submitted blog post, and most have nothing to do with what he is
writing about in the blog article, but are simply there to pad his reference
list.

But I must, for completeness of response, mention that the book

N.J. Mackintosh, IQ and human intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford
(1998)

[http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-N-
Mackintosh/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-N-
Mackintosh/dp/019852367X)

in his reference list is the best book on its subject, still amazingly current
a decade after it was published (because the author is completely familiar
with current research and was looking ahead to research that was still
underway as he wrote his book). Even though the book is cited in a blog post
that isn't supported by the book, the book itself is well worth reading.

~~~
mixmax
Thank you for that Tokenadult. Comments like this are unfortunately becoming
rarer on HN, but they are truly appreciated. Civil discussion backed up by
facts.

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baguasquirrel
You know what's kind of dull? Talking to "normal" people in a bar. All they
talk about is football and the daily grind. To each his own.

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hnhg
This is utter rubbish if it's meant to be taken seriously. I'm not even
disagreeing with the assertion that scientists are largely dull. Good science
needs a dispassionate and objective attitude, and it's often solitary. I guess
those don't make for fertile breeding grounds for what most people find to be
interesting in other people. Sadly I believe the author to be serious in his
'analysis' - I'm left shaking my head at the crackpot pretentiousness of it
all.

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jsz0
Are they really dull? I don't know that to be true. I think the general public
is no longer well equipped to appreciate their work so they tend to be clogs
in the machine just doing their job like everyone else. You have no chance to
escape a stereotype of being dull if you have no audience that understands and
appreciates you work.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes

      > ... they tend to be clogs in the machine ...
    

Fascinating typo ... from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage> ...

    
    
      > [sabotage] derives from the Netherlands in the 15th
      > century when workers would throw their sabots [clogs]
      > into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break
      > the cogs, feeling the automated machines would render
      > the human workers obsolete.
    

So being "clogs in the machine" is rather apposite for people who are feeling
ground down and unappreciated.

------
yungchin
While pretentiously written in scientific-journal format, the paper doesn't
seem to have any hard data supporting the assertion that modern scientists are
really dull.

~~~
rbanffy
It is, nevertheless, quite funny.

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araneae
My expectation when I went to grad school would be that I would have more
freedom to do what I was interested in than I ever had before. What I found
was that what I had to do was far more constricting than undergrad; I had take
take courses on things I was completely uninterested, do research I couldn't
care less about, and teach undergraduates stuff that I got a D+ in when I was
an undergrad, because it was so boring.

That said, I am probably not cut out for being a scientist anyway. But what
drew me to science was the lure of following my intellectual interests, and it
turns out I'd have to do the very opposite.

------
shrikant
It's likely that scientists were always dull, and the newspapers of yore just
reported on the significantly out-of-the-ordinary. Viewed discretely, their
lives and personalities seemed idiosyncratic and 'interesting'.

Blogs and Twitter and open resources such as arXiv give the world a continuous
look at scientists (and their work), which, as is more often than not, seems
mundane and incremental, instead of path-breaking and revolutionary.

Also, the levels of noise on the Internet makes it singularly hard to be
'interesting' in your own unique way.

~~~
rbanffy
If scientists were always dull and newspapers used to report on the more
interesting ones, nothing prevents our society to breed them for the
"interesting" trait.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
How are newspapers and society affecting the breeding of scientists? From
personal experience I can tell you that getting press coverage more often than
not damages your career.

Scientists are regarded as successful if they get funding for their employer.
That means publishing papers. Being "interesting" tends to lead you down paths
with significantly more risk, and the pressure is to reduce that risk by being
plodding and incremental.

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danohuiginn
No particular comment on the article (which looks, er, dull). What I do like
is Bruce Sterling's take on this topic: "<i>Artists are interesting people
with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas</i>"

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Alex3917
Older discussion of the same article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666440>

~~~
rms
IMO something older than 6 months is old enough that it shouldn't be killed,
but I don't intentionally submit dupes that are less than a year old.

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blhack
Because of the internet. It makes it a lot harder to be crazy when accounts,
pictures, and videos are going to show up online.

~~~
dgordon
Has this been going on long enough to have an effect? Also, is the kind of
crazy made harder by the nascent fear of online exposure actually the kind of
crazy referred to as "psychoticism" in the article? (Possibly. It does include
"thrill-seeking" and "impulsiveness.")

I'm also not quite sure whether internet exposure will (or, indeed, has) made
people more conformist, or more secretive, or perhaps even more tolerant (by
provoking conversation about "open secrets" for instance.) Probably all three,
to different extents in different people. Is the pressure against doing "crazy
things," assuming it's even the relevant kind of crazy, significantly
affecting the people who would otherwise have the best chance to become
revolutionary scientists?

~~~
jey
> Also, is the kind of crazy made harder by the nascent fear of online
> exposure actually the kind of crazy referred to as "psychoticism" in the
> article? (Possibly. It does include "thrill-seeking" and "impulsiveness.")

I really doubt it. There's a lot of room between "unoriginal confirmist" and
"whacked-out nutjob".

I liked this article because it supports my personal biases, but it's worth
noting that Medical Hypotheses is a unique journal that's not peer reviewed
(despite being published by Elsevier), and is devoted to providing "a forum
for unconventional ideas without the traditional filter of scientific peer
review."

But, I agree with the article that the institutions of science bias too far in
favor of the staid and obediently unoriginal type of student. I get the
impression that there's too much emphasis on short-term incremental research,
and not a whole lot of true curiosity-driven creativity.

~~~
sid-
In the world of both software and entrepreneurship, people recommend starting
with a basic vision and relentlessly and incrementally improving it. So whats
wrong with that approach applied to science.

