[HN Gopher] The Balto/Togo theory of scientific development
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The Balto/Togo theory of scientific development
Author : rossvor
Score : 74 points
Date : 2022-10-05 08:33 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Cool name for the concept, and I think making it about dogs helps
| take the political angle out of it.
|
| I think of this in terms of the 'great man' theory of history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
|
| And feel that it's obvious that science works the same way, and
| we should focus on the "science from below" a lot more than we
| do.
|
| Charles Fort talked about "Steam Engine Time" and it gets
| referenced in Discworld:
|
| https://fancyclopedia.org/Steam_Engine_Time_(concept)
|
| There's similarly the book that talks about all the 'genius'
| people that Einstien was surrounded by who we don't generally
| hear about, but I can't recall the name right now.
|
| There's the concept of 'scenius':
|
| https://www.wired.com/2008/06/scenius-or-comm/
|
| And in music/art there's the concept of "The Secret to Creativity
| Is Knowing How to Hide Your Sources" which (appositely) is often
| mis-credited to Einstien.
|
| Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
|
| Basically, I don't think you can look seriously into anything and
| come away with thinking that one individual did it all themselves
| unless you are very prone to that conclusion. And it seems
| human's generally are prone to that bias.
| FabHK wrote:
| For science specifically, the distinction is also known as the
| Newton vs. Ortega hypothesis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortega_hypothesis
| nerdponx wrote:
| I just last night watched a mini-documentary on the origins
| of calculus in the work of Newton and Leibnitz, focusing
| specifically on how they came to be interested in the idea
| and their very earliest thoughts on it, often quoting
| directly from their notebooks.
|
| The doc is on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/ObPg3ki9GOI
|
| It was very clear that Newton in particular was building
| incrementally on work that other mathematicians had done
| before him. Leibniz was also making incremental improvements,
| but was apparently somewhat more visionary in his work. The
| Youtube comments are also interesting, including anecdotes of
| ancient Egyptian land surveyors using the same "sum of lines"
| technique (what Leibniz generalized into our modern
| antiderivative) in order estimate the areas of unevenly-
| shaped land plots along waterways for taxation.
|
| Leibniz in particular was fascinating because it shows the
| incrementality of science continuing _after_ him as well.
| Apparently Leibniz had built several computing machines, 150
| years before Babbage, and was deliberately trying to work
| towards general and abstract paradigms for solving
| mathematical problems, 300 years before Hilbert, Church,
| Godel, and Turing!
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the Newton - Ortega distinction is slightly
| different. Maybe it coincides with the Balto-Togo metaphor to
| some extent, but I think part of why the Balto-Togo metaphor
| resonates with people here is because it recognizes the role
| of the citers as well as the cited.
|
| Your mention of the Newton-Ortega distinction is the first
| I've heard of it by those names, so I'm not entirely familiar
| with its scope, but in reading the Wikipedia entry it seems
| to assume the contributions of the scientists in question are
| somehow known, and it's a matter of "does science progress
| with lots of little contributions or a few big
| contributions?"
|
| You can turn this on its head though, and suggest that
| "contribution" really means "discussion in the literature"
| which is a property of the _citers_ and not the _cited_. So,
| if say, a Newton comes along and has a brilliant discovery,
| but no one understands it or it goes into the wrong outlet
| and isn 't read, then there will be no impact. Conversely,
| though, if something comes along and there's a rush of
| recognition of a concept, and someone publishes it first, is
| that because this "big innovation" was associated with that
| first publisher, or because the readers all had the same
| collective idea, and they're just citing the first to goal?
|
| The issue is that scientific development is not actually a
| property of the discoverer -- the discovery is necessary but
| not sufficient -- and the "size" of a discovery and who makes
| that discovery aren't really the same thing either.
|
| I think that e.g., (1) finding that science progresses in big
| leaps rather than small steps, and that (2) there is a "first
| post" phenomenon doesn't mean that the big leaps are
| necessarily _due_ to the first poster.
|
| My personal experience is that all of this bibliometric
| research is a little distorted because so much rapid change
| in process has happened even in the last 20 years, and much
| of what actually happens in science and scientific credit is
| much more complex than bibliometric models allow. It's
| difficult to study big versus small contributions accurately
| when political maneuvering and social dynamics is such a big
| part of what happens.
|
| It's interesting to think about, in any event.
| mandevil wrote:
| This is true not just for science, but for engineering. The
| Wright Brothers did some fabulous engineering work and
| documented their work thoroughly, and none of the other
| claimants to first flying are nearly as well documented,
| but let's say that some day conclusive proof turned up that
| someone else built a heavier than air flying machine that
| did get into the air and was somewhat controllable before
| the Wright's did it on December 17th, 1903 at Kittyhawk.
|
| But whomever that was, was necessarily a dead-end- they
| inspired no one to build and no improvements came from
| their work. It was the Wright's work in 1905-7 with their
| demonstration pilots doing their airshow flying in their
| Model A's- that was what inspired thousands of other people
| to get into flying, into building airplanes, and into
| aerodynamic research and led to the rapid improvement (65
| years and one day between Kittyhawk and Apollo 8 leaving
| Earth to orbit the moon). So even though we trace flying to
| the 1903 Wright Flyer, it is really the Flyer III and the
| Model A in 1904-6 that we trace all modern airplanes to.
| Therefore, it was what the Wright's did in 1906 that makes
| their flight in 1903 matter. But in a lot of cases those
| two steps were different people- someone makes the very
| first, another person or team makes the first practical one
| you can sell. And so who is more important?
| nautilius wrote:
| Hardly, unless the Wrights also inspired development of
| the Time Machine that allowed Prandtl to found the first
| aerodynamics research lab in 1904, or Lilienthal's
| studies on the aerodynamics of stork wings, that he used
| to build and fly his own heavier-than-air gliders with,
| which the Wrights heavily relied on.
|
| Many countries (UK, Brazil, France, etc) had similar
| local flying heroes that inspired advances in those
| countries. Your view is simply US-biased.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Im oppossed to the great man theory. In my mind the better
| analog is a damn across a river. Knowledge piles up, that goes
| unexplained, the pressure on the explenation rises, strange
| "subvertive" theories gain traction bypassing the dogma, but
| still deformed by the shape of the dogma. Finally one break
| through is made and the whole of knowledge tears through the
| old dogma, taking material with it for the next "hold-up".
|
| Inkremental research flourishes again, exploring every nook and
| crevice of the newly discovered basin.
|
| How to get the personal that does the final break through? Hire
| exotic characters who are uninfluenced by societys dogmatic
| powers. Heretics, Insane Prophets and Grifters, force them to
| be days filled with the material, so it fills the subconcious.
| Finally add some dogmatic priests to the mix, stand clear of
| the explosion.
| ripe wrote:
| Love your analogy! Very visual. Makes sense, too. "Stand
| clear of the explosion," lol!
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I think this is one of the least understood elements of
| technological advancement. We tend to think of it as linear, but
| often, the major visible breakthroughs are dependent on a whole
| bunch of less glamorous advancements being brought together.
|
| The game Civilization was really great at representing this. Tech
| advancement is a DAG, rather than a chain or a tree. Reality is
| like this, but much, much more granular.
|
| For instance, I'm acquainted with the inventor of the electret
| microphone. I'm sure that mic brought together a whole bunch of
| advancements, and once I was aware that miniaturizing microphones
| was nontrivial, it became clear that, for example, pocketable
| cell phones would not exist if not for tiny microphones.
|
| I see this disconnect all the time in how we think about
| technology, and which innovations actually lead to major cultural
| changes. We get wowed by impressive inventions, like blockchain,
| but to date, it is largely not penetrating society outside of its
| own expanding hype bubbles. It's pretty clear to me that
| blockchain is not, of itself, transformative. Nor is it the final
| link in enabling a society-changing breakthrough. The question
| I'd ask is whether that's because other boring adjacent
| developments are missing? Or is it a relative dead end? I'm
| picking on blockchain, but a lot of other innovations could be
| chosen here.
|
| In trying to predict the socio-technological future, it is
| important to become attuned to the boring, enabling technologies.
| And if I were an investor, I would _also_ have to understand
| whether the economics of a potential enabling technology are
| attractive for achieving returns. I think of all the fiber that
| was laid in the 90s. Investors were right that it would
| eventually become really important, but they wrong that it would
| be lucrative for them to invest in.
| mandevil wrote:
| A great example of this is the Sagnac Effect. In 1913, French
| Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and
| found interference bands. He thought that this disproved
| Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out
| that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence
| of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier,
| so 10 points for Einstein. (Note that the named credit for the
| effect went to the experimental physicist who found it, even
| with a wrong theory, rather than the theoretical physicist who
| worked earlier and correctly predicted it.)
|
| For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a
| minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek
| and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build
| this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented
| lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of
| the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of
| work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation
| where fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes
| and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do. But
| all sorts of things with scary names like "anti-Shupe winding"
| had to be invented and then perfected to get these fiber-optic
| gyros to be so good, and that was the result of many people,
| who probably all knew each other through the conference circuit
| and in meetings, sharing ideas and then improving on each
| other's ideas. So who gets the credit for the Fiber-Optic
| gyros? Sagnac? Laue? Macek and Davis? Shupe? What about Ring-
| Laser, which is different in engineering but also based on
| Sagnac interferometry?
|
| So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long
| time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even
| knew about. But a century later- and with the hard work of
| hundreds to thousands more people- the world depends on it.
|
| In an alternate dimension, I got a Ph.D in this sort of stuff-
| I am truly fascinated by it. But I decided to try and be one of
| the engineers today rather than documenting what the engineers
| of the past did.
| dynamic_sausage wrote:
| Annoying as it may be, this situation is somewhat ubiquitous in
| the history of human knowledge.
|
| Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about
| the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity
| is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize
| mentioned the photoelectric effect and _not_ relativity.
|
| Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the
| path of scientific progress is usually anything but. This is ok.
| The main thing is the knowledge itself, not who came up with it
| after all.
|
| And yet it is very frustrating!
| roywiggins wrote:
| See: Stigler's Law, and Boyer's law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare,
| which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect
| and not relativity.
|
| That doesn't add up because there was no Nobel prize at all for
| relativity to anyone. Searching online the consensus seems to
| be a mix of things:
|
| * general confusion that his photoelectric Nobel was for
| relativity.
|
| * the experimental proof of relativity came at a time when
| anti-semitism was on the rise and so there was enough of a fig
| leaf of "there's disagreement / dispute of it being proven".
|
| * Einstein didn't attend the ceremony because of a prescheduled
| lecture tour in Japan (But also possibly because of a fear for
| personal safety as his name was on a hit list by the
| perpetrators of a successful assassination). This made it seem
| like he snubbed the prize committee (which maybe he also did
| because he probably should have had 3 Nobels for all his
| contributions and felt like that prize wasn't handed out on
| merit).
|
| Certainly by 1945 special relativity was proven as otherwise
| there wouldn't be an atomic bomb and yet still no Nobel for
| anyone.
| dhimes wrote:
| I was taught (in the 1980s) that the reason didn't win the NP
| for Relativity was because it was so controversial at the
| time and it took decades to be fully accepted.
| derbOac wrote:
| This part seemed a little more significant than maybe the author
| recognized:
|
| "Jasen would go so far as to argue that shining a beacon in
| unknown territory that inspires explorers to look for treasure in
| the right place makes you the Togo, racing through fractured ice
| rapids social ridicule and self-doubt to do the real work of
| getting an idea considered at all."
|
| It was in the discussion of Wegener, which muddies the waters a
| bit, but that "explorer" role leads to a lot of selection bias in
| science. That is, that "social ridicule" can be extended pretty
| far to "career ends" or "ostracism" so you end up in a situation
| where it's not just that people doing that work get less credit,
| it's that they might be driven out even when they were on the
| right path.
|
| There's lots of examples of this with the pandemic. E.g.:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-c...
| c7b wrote:
| > I was pretty sure Alfred Wegener (...) is a Balto.
|
| > Jasen would go so far as to argue that [some difficult
| achievements] makes [Wegener] the Togo
|
| The more apt conclusion from the article is probably that the
| Balto/Togo theory simply isn't as good a model for the scientific
| discovery process as the author was hoping.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I think you have to read it more as a story than a theory, and
| also that the conclusion is more subtle.
|
| My takeway is not that Togo is a better choice for the hero
| than Balto, it's that there is no correct choice. Balto, Togo,
| and a lot of other dogs were part of a group effort. Balto
| became the mascot. But humans need a simple story, so they
| confuse a mascot with a hero.
|
| America is named like that because someone named Amerigo
| claimed columbus was wrong in thinking he was in India. People
| had to name it something, so they shortened 'Amerigo's
| continent' to America. Was he worthy to name a whole continent?
| Probably not, but still he has a continent named after him.
| c7b wrote:
| Ok, but that should just make us further question whether the
| Balto/Togo story really has anything in common with the
| history of tectonics. There isn't a clear obvious hero and a
| hidden hero (both of whom somewhat undeservedly singled out
| from the group effort), there's just one well-known name, and
| it's not even clear which of the two characters he'd
| correspond to.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| I agree that the Balto/Togo story doesn't fit quite so
| neatly into the Wegener story, but I also think the article
| brings up a good broader point that credit is often given
| to people/dogs that seem undeserving when you dig a little
| deeper.
| c7b wrote:
| It is, and the phenomenon has a name already: c7b's law
| "every scientific discovery is named after the wrong
| person" (yes, that is the correct way to name it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy)
| tombert wrote:
| In the interest of pedantry, wasn't Balto made by Amblin
| Entertainment, not Disney?
| tantalor wrote:
| So confused, did the author watch a different movie maybe?
|
| > Disney later made a movie about him that makes no mention of
| Balto for the first 90%
|
| The character appears at the 5 minute mark!
| tombert wrote:
| Maybe it's one of those things that they saw 20+ years ago
| and barely remembers it, and didn't bother looking anything
| up?
|
| I'm certainly guilty of doing that, so I can't judge.
| notacoward wrote:
| This reminds me of the "second mover advantage". Time after time,
| it seems that the first company that comes up with a new idea
| and/or does the most to educate people about it will not be the
| same one to benefit most from it. Either bigger companies crush
| them (sometimes followed by showing up first at the resulting
| fire sale) or other companies of any size lap them by taking
| advantage of the related second-system effect. Since transistors
| have already been mentioned, both Shockley/Fairchild and
| Fairchild/Intel could be considered examples. Others could cite
| Edison copying ideas from any of Tesla, Swan, or Volta. The
| Wright Brothers could be put on either side of the equation, at
| different times.
|
| Also, this:
|
| > One difficulty is it's hard to distinguish "ahead of their time
| beacon shining" from "lucky idiot"
|
| The world is _full_ of lucky idiots who are continually attaching
| themselves to one "contrarian" idea after another, in hopes that
| they can claim primacy after somebody else does the hard work of
| developing or popularizing it. No shortage of them here, for
| example. It's a gamble, betting that others will ignore or forget
| the more numerous (and sometimes even harmful) misses accumulated
| in the process. The world could do with a lot less of that, TBH.
| There are already more _credible_ theories than people with the
| knowledge and patience to explore them properly.
| macintux wrote:
| Since I was completely unaware of the incident:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925_serum_run_to_Nome
| [deleted]
| bulatb wrote:
| I've been thinking about something similar. Maybe somebody can
| shoot it down.
|
| For many achievements, most credit belongs to the role, not the
| person. In other words, the counterfactual of "if we didn't all
| agree that somebody will do this" would better prevent the
| achievement than "if one specific person didn't have their
| talent." We have phrases like "the time is ripe" because we know
| this. When conditions are in place, things happen.
|
| The person in the role is who society has given the permission
| and the means to do the thing, whose doing of the thing is
| accepted and even expected, so it's mostly unremarkable when that
| specific person is the one who does it. That's who we supported
| in getting it done.
|
| No one is surprised when every major fire was put out by
| firefighters, every touchdown pass was thrown by the quarterback,
| or every US law was passed by Congress and signed by the
| President.
|
| Maybe Alice is uniquely qualified to be the president, and
| President Bob is a stooge. He's still the one to sign the law,
| though, and the law still gets signed. No amount of merit Alice
| has can change this. Society has still arranged itself to have a
| person in this role and Bob is just the person.
|
| The arrangement (and the unavoidable path-dependence of history)
| is what magnifies the tiny contribution of the individual's
| abilities and makes them seem so necessary to the outcome. Given
| the prerequisites we've hidden in the role are met, the
| individual is all that's left.
|
| Newton was a genius who invented calculus--but so did Leibniz.
| Einstein was a genius who invented relativity, but arguably so
| did others whose work we lump in with his; it makes a better
| story. They all had social institutions to support them achieving
| whatever they could. Their ability to get it done provided that
| support was clearly not unique.
|
| It's more important that the roles to do the work have people in
| them, the conditions are in place for _someone_ to do it, than
| exactly who is in which role.
| laszlojamf wrote:
| I agree with you about all of this, but I have one problem:
|
| Does this mean no more awards? Like, will the Nobel prize
| always go "to the institution" that made the discovery? Should
| biographies be titled POTUS: Period X-Y?
|
| You see what I mean? Part of why we attach credit to people, is
| because people are inherently interesting. Institutions are
| inherently boring, and supposed to be. Storytelling is maybe
| not as important as the actual achievement, but it's not
| nothing either. No child will ever want to grow up to be a
| nameless crank of the system.
| anotheronebites wrote:
| showerst wrote:
| I generally agree but one of your examples is in fact a
| counter-example -- the president and particular congress people
| tend to matter, as lawmaking is rarely the average of voter
| preferences. Does a median replacement president to Obama pass
| healthcare? Does a median LBJ manage to wheel and deal the
| Civil Rights Act? A Trump that just wanted to pass agendas
| instead of infighting would've done 5x more for republican
| priorities.
|
| Certainly those people worked with a groundswell, but it took
| their extreme individual interests (or lack thereof) to
| determine those big outcomes.
|
| I think this is generally true across congress too -- stuff
| that just happens to have a powerful champion goes far, other
| equally popular issues languish. My wife works in hospice
| policy and the selection of members who just happen to have had
| a good (or bad!) experience with a family member in hospice
| really changes which bills happen.
| flurdy wrote:
| Ah, the disrespect of my great-great-uncle's dog Balto! Though to
| be fair Togo was great, but Balto did amazing as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Kaasen#Last_leg_of_the_...
| rcoveson wrote:
| > The worldwide publicity the event received helped spur
| widespread diphtheria inoculations, which greatly reduced
| [yearly deaths].
|
| Seems we messed up by not getting dogs involved in covid
| vaccine delivery.
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