[HN Gopher] Ortega hypothesis
___________________________________________________________________
Ortega hypothesis
Author : Caiero
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-10-08 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Even minor papers by the most eminent scientists are cited
| much more than papers by relatively unknown scientists_
|
| I wonder if this is because a paper with such a citation is
| likely to be taken more seriously than a citation that might
| actually be more relevant.
| observationist wrote:
| It's a status game, primarily - they want credibility by
| association. Erdos number and those type of games are very
| significant in academia, and part of the underlying dysfunction
| in peer review. Bias towards "I know that name, it must be
| serious research" and assumptions like "Well, if it's based on
| a Schmidhuber paper, it must be legitimate research" make peer
| review a very psychological and social game, rather than a
| dispassionate, neutral assessment of hypotheses and results.
|
| There's also a monkey see, monkey do aspect, where "that's just
| the way things are properly done" comes into play.
|
| Peer review as it is practiced is the perfect example of
| Goodhart's law. It was a common practice in academia, but not
| formalized and institutionalized until the late 60s, and by the
| 90s it had become a thoroughly corrupted and gamed system.
| Journals and academic institutions created byzantine practices
| and rules and just like SEO, people became incentivized to hack
| those rules without honoring the underlying intent.
|
| Now significant double digit percentages of research across all
| fields meet all the technical criteria for publishing, but up
| to half in some fields cannot be reproduced, and there's a
| whole lot of outright fraud, used to swindle research dollars
| and grants.
|
| Informal good faith communication seemed to be working just
| fine - as soon as referees and journals got a profit incentive,
| things started going haywire.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I'm sure status is part of it but I think it's almost
| certainly driven by "availability."
|
| Big names give more talks in more places and people follow
| their outputs specifically (e.g., author-based alerts on
| PubMed or Google Scholar), so people are more aware of their
| work. There are often a lot of papers one could cite to make
| the same point, and people tend to go with the ones that
| they've already got in mind....
| dimatura wrote:
| There's definitely a "rich get richer" effect for academic
| papers. A highly cited paper becomes a "landmark paper" that
| people are more likely to read, and hence cite - but also, at a
| certain point it can also become a default "safe" or "default"
| paper to cite in a literature review for a certain topic or
| technique, so out of expediency people may cite it just to
| cover that base, even if there's a more relevant related paper
| out there. This applies especially in cases where researchers
| might not know an area very well, so it's easy to assume a
| highly cited paper is a relevant one. At least for conferences,
| there's a deadline and researchers might just copy paste what
| they have in their bibtex file, and unfortunately the
| literature review is often an afterthought, at least from my
| experience in CV/ML.
|
| Another related "rich get richer" effect is also that a famous
| author or institution is a noisy but easy "quality" signal. If
| a researcher doesn't know much about a certain area and is not
| well equipped to judge a paper on its own merits, then they
| might heuristically assume the paper is relevant or interesting
| due to the notoriety of the author/institution. You can see
| this easily at conferences - posters from well known authors or
| institutions will pretty much automatically attract a lot more
| visitors, even if they have no idea what they're looking at.
| NullHypothesist wrote:
| > the opposing "Newton hypothesis", which says that scientific
| progress is mostly the work of a relatively small number of great
| scientists (after Isaac Newton's statement that he "stood on the
| shoulders of giants")
|
| I guess the Ortega equivalent statement would be "I stood on top
| of a giant pile of tiny people"
|
| ...Not quite as majestic, but hey, if it gets the job done...
| otikik wrote:
| It's still giants. Giant accumulated effort from many
| individuals.
| antognini wrote:
| "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants have
| been standing on my shoulders." --Hal Abelson
| d--b wrote:
| People in humanities still haven't understood that pretty mich
| everything in their fields is never all black or all white.
|
| It's a bizarre debate when it's glaringly obvious that small
| contributions matter and big contributions matter as well.
|
| But which contributes more, they ask? Who gives a shit, really?
| eszed wrote:
| Humanities? Why'd you drag humanities into this?
|
| (I agree with your point, by the way.)
| d--b wrote:
| the guy who coined the term Ortega Analysis is a sociologist.
| This is the branch of humanities that studies behaviors in a
| scientific setting.
| oytis wrote:
| > it's glaringly obvious that small contributions matter
|
| Not at all obvious to me. What were the small contributions to
| e.g. the theory of gravity?
| saalweachter wrote:
| The measurements of the movements of the stars and planets,
| perhaps?
|
| I guess Kepler got by just using Brahe's observations, but
| for more modern explorations of gravity there's a boatload of
| people collecting data.
| d--b wrote:
| Well Newton made a huge contribution for sure, but to be able
| to state his theory he clearly had to use a bunch of math,
| not all of which came from reknowned mathematicians.
|
| And Einstein didn't pull out special relativity out of his
| brain alone. There were years of intense debate about the
| ether and things I totally forgot by now.
|
| And take something like MOND, there has been tons of small
| contribution to try to prove / disprove / tweak the theory.
| If it ever comes out as something that holds, it'd be from a
| lot of people doing the grind.
| dleeftink wrote:
| > People in humanities still haven't understood that pretty
| mich everything in their fields is never all black or all white
|
| I think most would be very open to be checked on their priors,
| but I would be very surprised if those could be designated a
| single color. In fact, the humanities revel in various hues and
| grays rather than stark contrasts.
| skinner_ wrote:
| > But which contributes more, they ask? Who gives a shit,
| really?
|
| Funding agencies? Should they prioritize established
| researchers or newcomers? Should they support many smaller
| grant proposals or fewer large ones?
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Some other hypothesis:
|
| - Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on
| the shoulders of giants. This seems true if you look at citations
| alone. See https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis
|
| - Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful
| observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding
| and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so
| they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of
| papers. https://researchonresearch.org/largest-study-of-its-kind-
| sho...
|
| If I was allowed to speculate I would make a couple of
| observations. First one is that resources play a huge role in
| research, so overall progress direction is influenced more by the
| economics rather than any group. For example every component of a
| modern smartphone got hyper optimized via massive capital
| injections. Second one is that this is a real world and thus
| likely some kind of power law applies. I don't know the exact
| numbers, but my expectation is that top 1% of researches produce
| way more output than bottom 25%.
| Qem wrote:
| > Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on
| the shoulders of giants.
|
| Leibniz did the same, in the same timeframe. I think this lends
| credence to the Ortega hypothesis. We see the people that
| connect the dots as great scientists. But the dots must be
| there in first place. The dots are the work of the miriad
| nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans. Once the dots
| are in place, somebody always shows up to take the last hit and
| connect them. Sometimes multiple individuals at once.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Which raises the question of whether there are any results so
| surprising that it's unlikely that any other scientists would
| have stumbled onto them in a reasonable time frame.
| interroboink wrote:
| I've heard Einstein's General Relativity described that
| way.
|
| Special Relativity was not such a big breakthrough.
| Something like it was on the verge of being described by
| somebody in that timeframe -- all the pieces were in place,
| and science was headed in that direction.
|
| But General Relativity really took everyone by surprise.
|
| At least, that's my understanding from half-remembered
| interviews from some decades ago (:
| oytis wrote:
| > The dots are the work of the miriad nameless
| scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans
|
| That is not plausible IMO. Nobody has capacity to read the
| works of a miriad of nameless scientists, not even Isaac
| Newton. Even less likely that Newton and Leibnitz were both
| familiar with the same works of minor scientists.
|
| What is much more likely, is that well-known works of other
| great mathematicians prepared the foundation for both to
| reach similar results
| Qem wrote:
| > Nobody has capacity to read the works of a miriad of
| nameless scientists
|
| It gets condensed over time. Take for example Continental
| Drift/Plate Tectonics theory. One day Alfred Wegener saw
| the coasts of West Africa and East South America were
| almost a perfect fit, and connected the dots. But he had no
| need to read the work of the many surveyors that braved
| unknown areas and mapped the coasts of both continents in
| the previous 4-5 centuries, nautical mile by nautical mile,
| with the help of positional astronomy. The knowledge was
| slowly integrated, cross checked and recorded by
| cartographers. Alfred Wegener insight happened at the end
| of a long cognitive funnel.
| XorNot wrote:
| That's what review papers are for, and they're published
| regularly.
|
| One of the ongoing practices of science is people putting
| out summaries of the state of different parts of fields of
| work (and reviews of reviews etc.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, Leibniz did a different thing, with a similar part.
|
| What does not go against the hypothesis. Both of their works
| were heavily subsided by less known researchers that came
| before them. But it's not clear at all if somebody else would
| do what they did on each of their particular field. (Just
| like it's not clear the work they built upon was in any way
| "mediocre".)
|
| It's very hard to judge science. Both in predictive and
| retrospective form.
| ajross wrote:
| > Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on
| the shoulders of giants
|
| Giants can be wrong, though; so there's a "giants were standing
| on our shoulders" problem to be solved. The amyloid-beta
| hypothesis held up Alzheimer's work for decades based on a
| handful of seemingly-fraudulent-but-never-significantly-
| challenged results by the giants of the field.
|
| Kuhn's "paradigm shift" model speaks to this. Eventually the
| dam breaks, but when it does it's generally _not_ by the sudden
| appearance of new giants but by the gradual erosion of support
| in the face of years and years of bland experimental work.
|
| See also astronomy right now, where a never-really-satisfying
| LCDM model is finally failing in the face of new data. And it
| turns out _not_ only from Webb and new instruments! The older
| stuff never fit too but no one cared.
|
| Continental drift had a similar trajectory, with literally
| hundreds of years of pretty convincing geology failing to
| challenge established assumptions until it all finally clicked
| in the 60's.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| As with all things - both are probably true.
|
| It might be that we attribute _post hoc_ greatness to a small
| number of folks, but require a lot of very interested /
| ambitious folks to find the most useful threads to pull, run
| the labs, catalog data, etc.
|
| It's only after the fact that we go back and say "hey this was
| really useful". If only we knew ahead of time that Calculus and
| "tracking stars" would lead to so many useful discoveries!
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful
| observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more
| funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more
| exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on
| a lot of papers.
|
| There's a ton of this among all historical figures in general.
| Any great person you can name throughout history, almost
| without exception, were born to wealthy connected families that
| set them on their course. There are certainly exceptions of
| self made people here and there, and they do tend to be much
| more interesting. But just about anyone you can easily name in
| the history math/science/philosophy were rich kids who were
| afforded the time and resources to develop themselves.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I am instantly skeptical of hypotheses that sound nice and
| egalitarian.
|
| Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers
| probably might as well not exist.
| pryelluw wrote:
| But without the 80%, how would the 20% exist?
| hobs wrote:
| And more specifically, if you knew which science to fund
| ahead of time we'd never have anything but 100% successes,
| science is often random and huge parts of it are not
| obviously useful ahead of time, some of which later becomes
| enormously useful.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Conversely, without the 80% the 20% might be unencumbered.
|
| Imagine 2 Earths : one with 10 million researchers and the
| other with 2 million, but the latter is so cut-throat that
| the 2 million are Science Spartans.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_hegemony
|
| > Due to their mistrust of others, Spartans discouraged the
| creation of records about their internal affairs. The only
| histories of Sparta are from the writings of Xenophon,
| Thucydides, Herodotus and Plutarch, none of whom were
| Spartans.
|
| A good example, but perhaps not the point you wanted to
| make.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Either way the word "spartan" now connotes an aversion to
| cruft
| umutisik wrote:
| You still need the other 80% of the folks to get the remaining
| 20% of the work done :)
| ihm wrote:
| > Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers
| probably might as well not exist.
|
| What does this even mean? Do you think in an ant colony only
| the queen is needed? Or in a wolf pack only the strongest wolf?
| thmsths wrote:
| It's not that everyone contributes equally. It's that
| everyone's contribution matters. And while small contributions
| are less impressive, they are also more numerous, much more
| numerous which means that it's not out of the question that in
| aggregate they matter more; which means they should not be
| discounted. As Napoleon allegedly said "quantity has a quality
| of its own".
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Moreover, the researchers _are_ the contributing 20% (or more
| like 2%). It 's probably fractal, but if you zoom out even a
| little, there's a long tail of not-much in any group.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| "Might as well not exist" - what should be done of the bottom
| 80% of society then? I'm sure this applies to SWEs too.
| captainbland wrote:
| The Pareto principle gets "interesting" when you involve
| hierarchical categories. For instance, the category of
| "researchers" is arguably arbitrary. Why not research labs? Why
| not research universities? If we write off 80% of universities,
| 80% of labs in that top 20% of universities and 80% of
| researchers within that top 20% of labs then actually the
| number of impactful researchers would in fact be .2 * .2 *.2 or
| 0.8% of researchers which seems extreme.
|
| That said if we took 20% of all working people are doing useful
| work, then can you guarantee not all research scientists are
| within that category?
|
| And indeed there are different fields and the distributions of
| effectiveness may be incomparable.
|
| I think the nature of scientific and mathematical research is
| interesting in that often "useless" findings can find
| surprising applications. Boolean algebra is an interesting
| example of this in that until computing came about, it seemed
| purely theoretical in nature and impactless almost by
| definition. Yet the implications of that work underpinned the
| design of computer processors and the information age as such.
|
| This creates a quandary: we can say perhaps only 20% of work is
| relevant, but we don't necessarily know which 20% in advance.
| thmsths wrote:
| Your last point reminds me of that joke about Hollywood: a
| bunch of Japanese executives are touring a studio they just
| purchased. The manager is trying to describe the business
| model to them: "You have to understand we make 10 movies a
| year but only 1 of them will make money." When they hear that
| the executives get agitated and huddle together. Eventually
| one of them turns toward the manager and says "Please only
| make that 1 profitable movie".
| oytis wrote:
| Also the evidence for Newton hypothesis seems so much stronger.
| Like, how do you even measure the invisible influence of
| mediocre scientists?
| ozim wrote:
| I don't see it as egalitarian -- you need 80% people doing
| ground work so that you can send couple guys to the moon.
| Without those 80% digging the trenches you have nothing.
| elicash wrote:
| I was disappointed to read he didn't name it after himself in an
| ironic display of humility.
|
| ("Ortega most likely would have disagreed with the hypothesis
| that has been named after him...")
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's probably like venture capital. There are many scientists who
| test many hypotheses. Many are bad at generating hypotheses or
| running tests. Some are good at one or the other. Some are good
| at both and just happen to pick the ones that don't work. Some
| are good at all.
|
| But you can't tell ahead of time which one is which. Maybe you
| can shift the distribution but often your pathological cases
| excluded are precisely the ones you wanted to not exclude (your
| Karikos get Suhadolniked). So you need to have them all work.
| It's just an inherent property of the problem.
|
| Like searching an unsorted n list for a number. You kind of need
| to test all the numbers till you find yours. The search cost is
| just the cost. You can't uncost it by just picking the right
| index. That's not a meaningful statement.
| theurerjohn3 wrote:
| there is blog post somewhere i read, i cannot find it at the
| moment, that discusses the idea of "doctor problems" vs
| "musician problems". Doctor problems are problems where low
| quality solutions are deeply bad, so you should avoid them even
| if it involves producing fewer high quality solutions, while
| musician problems are ones where high quality solutions are
| very very worth it, so you should encourgage as many tries as
| possible so you get the super high quality wins. This seems a
| useful frame of reference, but not really the Ortega Hypothesis
|
| it seems clear to me that the downside of society having a bad
| scientist is relatively low, so long as theres a gap between
| low quality science and politics [0], while the upside is huge.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
| ckemere wrote:
| I think citations are an insufficient metric to judge these
| things on. My experience in writing a paper is that I have formed
| a well defined model of the world, such that when I write the
| introduction, I have a series of clear concepts that I use to
| ground the work. When it comes to the citations to back these
| ideas, I often associate a person rather than a particular paper,
| then search for an appropriate paper by that person to cite. That
| suggests that other means for creating that association - talks,
| posters, even just conversations- may have significant influence.
| That in turn suggests a variety of personality/community
| influences that might drive "scientific progress" as measured by
| citation.
| derbOac wrote:
| I agree completely.
|
| My own experience in watching citation patterns, not even with
| things that I've worked on, is that certain authors or groups
| attract attention for an idea or result for all kinds of weird
| reasons, and that drives citation patterns, even when they're
| not the originator of the results or ideas. This leads to weird
| patterns, like the same results before a certain "popular"
| paper being ignored even when the "popular" paper is incredibly
| incremental or even a replication of previous work; sometimes
| previous authors discussing the same exact idea, even well-
| known ones, are forgotten in lieu of a newer more charismatic
| author; various studies have shown that retracted zombie papers
| continue to be cited at high rates as if they were never
| retracted; and so forth and so on.
|
| I've kind of given up trying to figure out what accounts for
| this. Most of the time it's just a kind of recency availability
| bias, where people are basically lazy in their citations, or
| rushed for time, or whatever. Sometimes it's a combination of
| an older literature simply being forgotten, together with a
| more recent author with a lot of notoriety for whatever reason
| discussing the idea. Lots of times there's this weird cult-like
| buzz around a person, more about their personality or
| presentation than anything else -- as in, a certain person gets
| a reputation as being a genius, and then people kind of assume
| whatever they say or show hasn't been said or shown before,
| leading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of
| patterns of citations. I don't even think it matters that what
| they say is _valid_ , it just has to garner a lot of attention
| and agreement.
|
| In any event, in my field I don't attribute a lot to
| researchers being famous for any reason other than being
| famous. The Matthew effect is real, and can happen very
| rapidly, for all sorts of reasons. People also have a short
| attention span, and little memory for history.
|
| This is all especially true of more recent literature. Citation
| patterns pre-1995 or so, as is the case with those Wikipedia
| citations, are probably not representative of the current
| state.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. One example of people mindlessly mass citing some
| random paper is this: Chain of thought (CoT) prompting was
| used in the past to greatly enhance the reasoning ability of
| LLMs. Usually this paper is cited when CoT is discussed:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
|
| It has over 20,000 citations according to Google Scholar. But
| clearly the technique was not invented by these authors. It
| was known 1.5 years earlier, just after GPT-3 came out:
|
| https://xcancel.com/kleptid/status/1284069270603866113#m
|
| Perhaps even longer. But the paper above is cited
| nonetheless. Probably because there is pressure to cite
| _something_ and the title of that paper sounds like they
| pioneered it. I doubt many people who cite it have even read
| it.
|
| Another funny example is that in machine learning and some
| other fields, a success measure named "Matthews Correlation
| Coefficient" (MCC) is used. It's named after some biochemist,
| Brian Matthews, who used it in a paper from 1975. Needless to
| say, he didn't invent it at all, he just used the well-known
| binary version of the well-known correlation coefficient.
| People who named the measure "MCC" apparently thought he
| invented it. Matthews probably just didn't bother to cite any
| sources himself.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Citations are ripe for abuse . I have seen it especially in
| computer science , where authors will cite and coauthor each
| other's mediocre papers. The result is very high citation and
| publication counts, because the work has been divided among
| many people.
| qrian wrote:
| This sounds like the concept of 'normal science' in paradigm
| theory.
| rcpt wrote:
| > Ortega most likely would have disagreed with the hypothesis
| that has been named after him, as he held not that scientific
| progress is driven mainly by the accumulation of small works by
| mediocrities, but that scientific geniuses create a framework
| within which intellectually commonplace people can work
| successfully
|
| This is hilarious
| robomc wrote:
| To me this kind of sounds like the other side of the same
| thing. Lunchpail scientists accumulate data within an area of
| research made interesting by a landmark work by a big name.
| Future big names make breakthroughs by drawing together a lot
| of the lunchpail work. etc etc
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Smart people know how to aggregate and apply relevant data that
| others worked to bring to fruition.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| Are Ortega and Newton mutually exclusive? Isn't the case much
| more likely that both:
|
| - Significant advances by individuals or small groups (the
| Newtons, Einsteins, or Gausses of the world), enable narrowly-
| specialized, incremental work by "average" scientists, which
| elaborate upon the Great Advancement...
|
| - ... And then those small achievements form the body of work
| upon which the _next_ Great Advancement can be built?
|
| Our potential to contribute -- even if you're Gauss or Feynman or
| whomever -- is limited by our time on Earth. We have tools to
| cheat death a bit when it comes to knowledge, chief among which
| are writing systems, libraries of knowledge, and the compounding
| effects of decades or centuries of study.
|
| A good example here might be Fermat's last theorem. Everyone
| who's dipped their toes in math even at an undergraduate level
| will have at least heard about it, and about Fermat. People
| interested in the problem might well know that it was proven by
| Andrew Wiles, who -- almost no matter what else he does in life
| -- will probably be remembered mainly as "that guy who proved
| Fermat's last theorem." He'll go down in history (though likely
| not as well-known as Fermat himself).
|
| But who's going to remember all the people along the way who
| _failed_ to prove Fermat? There have been hundreds of serious
| attempts over the four-odd centuries that the theorem had been
| around, and I 'm certain Wiles had referred to their work while
| working on his own proof, if only to figure out what _doesn 't_
| work.
|
| ---
|
| There's another part to this, and that's that as our
| understanding of the world grows, Great Advancements will be ever
| more specialized, and likely further and further removed from
| common knowledge.
|
| We've gone from a great advancement being something as
| _fundamental_ as positing a definition of pi, or the Pythagorean
| theorem in Classical Greece; to identifying the slightly more
| abstract, but still intuitive idea that white light is a
| combination of all other colours on the visible spectrum and that
| the right piece of glass can refract it back into its
| "components" during the Renaissance; to the fundamentally less
| intuitive but no less groundbreaking idea of atomic _orbitals_ in
| the early 20th century.
|
| The Great Advancements we're making now, I struggle to understand
| the implications of even as a technical person. What would a
| memristor really do? What do we do with the knowledge that
| gravity travels in waves? It's great to have solved _n_ -higher-
| dimensional sphere packing for some two-digit _n_... but I 'll
| have to take you at your word that it helps optimize cellular
| data network topology.
|
| The amount of context it takes to understand these things
| requires a lifetime of dedicated, focused research, and that's to
| say nothing of what it takes to find _applications_ for this
| knowledge. And when those discoveries are made and their
| applications are found, they 're just so abstract, so far removed
| from the day-to-day life of most people outside of that
| specialization, that it's difficult to even explain why it
| matters, no matter what a quantum leap that represents in a given
| field.
| nhatcher wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know there was such a thing (despite having
| read quite a lot of Ortega y Gasset).
|
| Compare this with paradigm shifts in T. S. Kuhns The structure of
| scientific revolutions:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
| roughly wrote:
| Strongly recommend The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - I
| actually think it ties a bow pretty neatly between the Ortega
| and Newton hypotheses.
| throwaway72610 wrote:
| Chronologies toward a working theory of advancing science, which
| is the subject of Orgega's contention for mediocre scholars,
| working on accumulating citations, footnotes, etc. For a proper
| understanding of technical pieces, Cal Newport's concept of deep
| work is essential.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > According to Ortega, science is mostly the work of geniuses,
| and geniuses mostly build on each other's work, but in some
| fields there is a real need for systematic laboratory work that
| could be done by almost anyone.
|
| That seems correct to me. Imagine having a hypothesis named after
| you that a) you disagree with, and b) seems fairly doubtful at
| best!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Ortega hypothesis_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247092 - June 2019 (1
| comment)
| btilly wrote:
| I believe that this hypothesis is wrong.
|
| More specifically, I believe that scientific research winds up
| dominated by groups who are all chasing the same circle of
| popular ideas. These groups start because some initial success
| produced results. This made a small number of scientists achieve
| prominence. Which makes their opinion important for the
| advancement of other scientists. Their goodwill and
| recommendations will help you get grants, tenure, and so on.
|
| But once the initial ideas are played out, there is little
| prospect of further real progress. Indeed that progress usually
| doesn't come until someone outside of the group pursues a new
| idea. At which point the work of those in existing group will
| turn out to have had essentially no value.
|
| As evidence for my belief, I point to
| https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva....
| It documents that Planck's principle is real. Fairly regularly,
| people who become star researchers, wind up holding back further
| process until they die. After they die, new people can come into
| the field, pursuing new ideas, and progress resumes. And so it is
| that progress advances one funeral at a time.
|
| As a practical example, look at the discovery of blue LEDs. There
| was a lot of work on this in the 70s and 80s. Everyone knew how
| important it would be. A lot of money went into the field. Armies
| of researchers were studying compounds like zinc selenide. The
| received wisdom was that galium nitride was a dead end. What was
| the sum contribution of these armies of researchers to the
| invention of blue LEDs? To convince Shuji Nakamura that if that
| was the right approach, he had no hope. So he went into galium
| nitride instead. The rest is history, and the existing field is
| lost.
|
| Let's take an example that is still going on. Physicists invented
| string theory around 50 years ago. The problems in the approach
| are summed up in the quote that is often attributed to Feynman,
| *"String theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses." To
| date, string theory has yet to produce a single prediction that
| was verified by experiment. And yet there are thousands of
| physicists working in the field. As interesting as they found
| their research, it is unlikely that any of their work will wind
| up contributing anything to whatever future improved foundation
| is discovered for physics.
|
| Here is a tragic example. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. Very
| large amounts of money have gone into research for a treatment.
| The NIH by itself spends around $4 billion per year on this, on
| top of large investments from the pharmaceutical industry.
| Several decades ago, the amyloid beta hypothesis rose to
| prominence. There is indeed a strong correlation between amyloid
| beta plaques and Alzheimer's, and there are plausible mechanisms
| by which amyloid beta could cause brain damage.
|
| After several decades of research, and many failed drug trials,
| support the following conclusion. There are many ways to prevent
| the buildup of amyloid beta plaques. These cure Alzheimer's in
| the mouse model that is widely used in research. These drugs
| produce no clinical improvement in human symptoms. (Yes, even
| Aduhelm, which was controversially approved by the FDA in 2021,
| produces no improvement in human symptoms.) The widespread desire
| for results has created fertile ground for fraudsters. Like Marc
| Tessier-Lavigne, whose fraud propelled him to becoming President
| of Stanford in 2016.
|
| After widespread criticism from outside of the field, there is
| now some research into alternate hypotheses about the root causes
| of Alzheimer's. I personally think that there is promise in
| research suggesting that it is caused by damage done by viruses
| that get into the brain, and the amyloid beta plaques are left by
| our immune response to those viruses. But regardless of what
| hypothesis eventually proves to be correct, it seems extremely
| unlikely to me that the amyloid beta hypothesis will prove
| correct in the long run. (Cognitive dissonance keeps those
| currently in the field from drawing that conclusion though...)
|
| We have spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades on
| Alzheimer's research. What is the future scientific value of this
| research? My bet is that it is destined for the garbage, except
| as a cautionary tale about how much damage it can cause when a
| scientific field becomes unwilling to question its unproven
| opinions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > To date, string theory has yet to produce a single prediction
| that was verified by experiment.
|
| What a funny example to pick. See, "string theory" gets a lot
| of attention in the media, _and nowhere else_
|
| In actual physics, string theory is a niche of a niche of a
| niche. It is not a common topic of papers or conferences and
| does not receive almost anything in funding. What little effort
| it gets it gets because paper and pencils for some theoretical
| physics is vastly cheaper than a particle accelerator or space
| observatory.
|
| Physicists don't really use or do anything with string theory.
|
| This is a great example of what is a _serious_ problem in
| science.
|
| The public reads pop-sci and thinks they have a good
| understanding of science. But they verifiably do not. The
| journalists and writers who create this content _are not
| scientists_ , do not understand science, and do not have a good
| view into what is "meaningful" or "big" in science.
|
| Remember cold fusion? It was never considered valid in the
| field of physics because they did a terrible excuse for
| "science", went on a stupid press tour, and at no point even
| attempted to disambiguate the supposed results they claimed.
| The media however told you this was something huge, something
| that would change the world.
|
| It never even happened.
|
| Science IS about small advances. Despite all the utter BS
| pushed by every "Lab builds revolutionary new battery" article,
| Lithium ion batteries HAVE doubled in capacity over a decade or
| two. It wasn't a paradigm shift, or some genius coming out of
| the woodwork, it was boring, dedicated effort from tens of
| thousands of average scientists, dutifully trying out hundreds
| and hundreds of processes to map out the problem space for
| someone else to make a good decision with.
|
| Science isn't "Eureka". Science is "oh, hmm, that's odd...." on
| reams of data that you weren't expecting to be meaningful.
|
| Science is not "I am a genius so I figured out how inheritance
| works", science is "I am an average guy and laboriously applied
| a standardized method to a lot of plants and documented the
| findings".
|
| Currently it is Nobel Prize week. Consider how many of the
| hundreds of winners whose name you've never even heard of.
|
| Consider how many scientific papers were published _just
| today_. How many of them have you read?
| lumost wrote:
| I'm very curious if anyone has tried to control for the natural
| hierarchies which form in Academia. e.g. A researcher who rises
| to the top of a funding collaboration will have a
| disproportionate number of citations due to their influence on
| funding flows. Likewise, those who influence the
| acceptances/reviewers at major conferences will naturally attract
| more citations of their work either by featuring it over other
| work or correctly predicting where the field was heading based on
| the paper flows.
| nyeah wrote:
| This is interesting but how could we really determine the answer?
| It seems very difficult not to get pulled into my own opinions
| about how it "must work".
| karmakaze wrote:
| There are plenty of examples on both sides. There's no need for
| one to be true and the other false. Geniuses get recognition, so
| it makes sense for the smurfing contributors to also get a nod.
|
| AlexNet for example was only possible because of the developed
| algorithms, but also the availability of GPUs for highly parallel
| processing and importantly the ImageNet labelled data.
| Jegber wrote:
| Thomas Kuhn has entered the chat
| alphazard wrote:
| Now that the internet exists, it's harder to reason about how
| hard a breakthrough was to make. Before information was
| everywhere instantly, it would be common for discoveries to be
| made concurrently, separated by years, but genuinely without
| either scientist knowing of the others work.
|
| That distance between when the two (or more) similar discoveries
| happened gives insight into how difficult it was. Separated by
| years, and it must have been very difficult. Separated by months
| or days, and it is likely an obvious conclusion from a previous
| discovery. Just a race to publish at that point.
| jasperry wrote:
| To me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that
| they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science
| going forward, you need enough people who understand the field to
| generate a sufficient probability of _anyone_ putting together
| the pieces of the next major discovery. That 's the sense in
| which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.
|
| Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not
| enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground
| of understanding.
| rook_line_sinkr wrote:
| agreed!
|
| there's a nice short story along those lines, by Scott
| Alexander
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
| kibwen wrote:
| Yep. Human civilization is fundamentally predicated on the
| transmission of ideas through time. Without old ideas to build
| upon (Newton's "shoulders of giants"), there's no long-term
| advancement. Transmitting established knowledge is just as
| important to civilization as generating new knowledge.
| kulahan wrote:
| An interesting example, in my opinion:
|
| In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not
| at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make
| sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit
| restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks.
|
| Why do we keep making them? Because you _need_ people who, on
| day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can 't spend
| months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be
| ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people
| making tanks for "no reason".
| XorNot wrote:
| This is also why US shipbuilding is a dumpster fire: lack of
| a consistent order book for warships means they're more
| expensive to produce and the process is chaotic.
|
| It's one of the great reasons to cultivate a collection of
| close allies who you support: it keeps your production lines
| warm and your workforce active and developing.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| It would help if there was a active civilian shipbuilding
| industry. Easier to pivot than building up something from
| nothing.
|
| But that industry has been taken over by asia.
| kulahan wrote:
| I hadn't considered this - it must be a nightmare to try
| and find experienced aircraft carrier engineers. We have
| like 14 of em, right? Probably like 70% the same crew on
| each one, but I don't remember the last time we built one.
| I wonder if the expertise is still there, and maybe I'm
| just missing these stories.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The last time we built aircraft carriers in the US? Has
| there ever been a one year period when we haven't been
| building aircraft carriers (or ships which other nations
| would consider carriers)?
|
| Certainly there are many we're currently building and
| many we will build after that. Biggest in the world kind
| of stuff.
|
| Gerald R Ford class.
| hollerith wrote:
| Ditto destroyers, the current class or model of which the
| US has been building continuously since 1988, as shown by
| the dates in this table:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-
| class_de...
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Why do we keep making them?_
|
| Didn't you answer your question in the above sentence? They
| are used to protect US foreign interests by sending them to
| allies. It's not because people will somehow forget how to
| make them. It's based off of an assembly line and blueprints.
| I don't see how this would be forgotten, any more than it
| would be possible for society to forget how to build a CRT TV
| just because they are not used anymore.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I wonder how much we've learned from the Saturn V project
| where the majority of the crucial knowledge (including for
| the machines that build the parts for the machines that
| build the parts) was undocumented. Hopefully a lot but
| maybe we just forward evolve instead.
|
| I'm always impressed that America's moribund manufacturing
| industry nonetheless makes prodigious amounts of expensive
| vehicles. It feels like one year I was hearing about the
| terrible failure that the F-35 was and the next year I
| looked up and we've got more than a thousand of them -
| enough to dwarf any other conventional air force.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important
| than the genius factor.
|
| Numbers game doesn't work in the idealized way you think it
| does. if you let too many mediocre or bad people become
| scientists, some of them engage in fraud or ill- considered
| modelmaking, which wastes the time of good scientists who are
| in the place of having to reproduce results that were never
| going to work.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Pretty impossible to compensate for or prevent. The day
| doctor or phd because a prestigious title; the first
| fraudsters were born. If the title becomes even more
| prestigious, the more damage can a bad actor be able to evoke
| with its influence.
| jasperry wrote:
| I didn't say more people should become career scientists; the
| incentives of that are all messed up from trying to measure
| research output like it's a product. IMO the best way to
| prevent junk science is to teach more people to tell good
| science from bad. Better understanding is empowering
| regardless of career.
| vladms wrote:
| Would you have any reference of why it matters the number of
| people doing something for some to engage in something
| nefarious? I would expect to happen no matter the number of
| people.
|
| I feel it is more connected to the culture (for example I
| would expect to happen more in a hierarchical culture than in
| an egalitarian culture, or more in a believing culture than
| in a critical culture).
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| it happens no matter the number of people. but if you
| create a directive to dump more people into science than
| the capacity of society to produce scientists, (and there
| isn't an aggressive system to cull fraudsters) you will
| wind up with a linear increase of fraud/bad science, and a
| superlinear negative effect.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Mediocre baseball players take their teams to the world series.
| Mediocre soldiers, not special forces commandos, win wars. Etc.
| The principle is pretty general.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Statistically, most people must be mediocre
| aerhardt wrote:
| Very cool to see Ortega on the frontpage. He was a fine thinker -
| phenomenally erudite and connected to his contemporary
| philosophers, but also eminently readable. He is not technical,
| rarely uses neologisms, and writes in an easy to digest "stream
| of thought" style which resembles a lecture (I believe he
| repackaged his writings into lectures, and vice versa).
|
| I can recommend two of his works:
|
| - _The Revolt of Masses_ (mentioned in the article), where he
| analyzes the problems of industrial mass societies, the loss of
| self and the ensuing threats to liberal democracies. He posits
| the concept of the "mass individual" ( _hombre masa_ ) a man who
| is born into the industrial society, but takes for granted the
| progress - technical and political - that he enjoys, does not
| enquire about the origins of said progress or his relationship to
| it, and therefore becomes malleable to illiberal rhetoric. It was
| written in ~1930 and in many ways the book foresees the forces
| that would lead to WWII. The book was an international success in
| its day but it remains eerily current.
|
| - His _Meditations on Technics_ expose a rather simple, albeit
| accurate philosophy of technology. He talks about the history of
| technology development, from the accidental (eg, fire), to the
| artisanal, to the age of machines (where the technologist is
| effectively building technology that builds technology). He also
| explains the dual-stage cycle in which humans switch between
| self-absorption ( _ensimismamiento_ ) and think about their
| discomforts, and alteration, in which they decide to transform
| the world as best as they can. The ideas may not be life-changing
| but it's one of these books that neatly models and settles things
| you already intuited. Some of Ortega's reflections often come to
| mind when I'm looking for meaning in my projects. It might be of
| interest for other HNers!
| xpe wrote:
| I wonder: where has this hypothesis been operationalized and
| turned into a testable prediction (forward-looking or
| retroactive)?
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Doesn't seem very testable. Doubt we will ever really answer it
| satisfactorily. Its more of a philosophical or ideological
| stance.
| bravura wrote:
| Naturally, the science of science study supporting the
| controvening ,,Newton hypothesis" is pseudo scientific piffle.
|
| My scientific study of the science of science study can prove
| this. Arxiv preprint forthcoming.
| senfiaj wrote:
| I would say modern science is more of a teamwork than it was
| before since nowadays it's too large and overwhelming for one
| person. It's almost impossible to be a solo genius nowadays. But
| both "Newton" and "mediocre" scientists are still needed. Just
| for an analogy, in software we see a similar pattern, programs
| were largely slow, so one person could write an entire game or
| OS, but today it's almost impossible, so today's programs are
| usually written by a large number of average developers. But
| there are still a few number of exceptional people who work on
| key algorithms or architecture. So they are still needed.
| pessimist wrote:
| Plausible. General Relativity was concieved by an extraordinary
| genius, but the perihelion of mercury was measured by dozens of
| painstaking but otherwise unexceptional people. Without that
| fantastically accurate measurement, GR would never have been
| accepted as a valid theory.
| api wrote:
| > The most important papers mostly cite other important papers by
| a small number of outstanding scientists
|
| The question here is: yes most major accomplishments cite other
| "giants," but how many papers have they _read_ and have they
| cited everything that influenced them?
|
| Or do people tend to cite the most pivotal nodes on the knowledge
| graph which are themselves pivotal nodes on the knowledge graph
| while ignoring the minor nodes that contributed to making the
| insight possible?
|
| Lastly -- minor inputs can be hard to cite. What if you read a
| paper a year ago that planted an interesting idea in your head
| but it wasn't conclusive, or gave you a little tidbit of
| information that nudged your thinking in a certain direction? You
| might not even remember, or the information might be background
| enough that it's only alluded to or indirectly contributes to the
| final product. Thus it doesn't get a citation. But could the
| final product have happened without a large number of these
| inputs?
| bccdee wrote:
| It also depends what the "most important papers" actually are.
| What is it that makes something a breakthrough?
|
| Suppose I'm analyzing a species of bacteria with some well-
| known techniques and I discover it produces an enzyme with
| promising medical properties. I cite some other research on
| that species, I cite a couple papers about my analytical tools.
| This is paper A.
|
| Other scientists start trying to replicate my findings and
| discover that my compound really lives up to its promise. A
| huge meta-analysis is published with a hundred citations--paper
| B--and my compound becomes a new life-saving medicine.
|
| Which paper is the "important" one? A or B? In the long run,
| paper A may get more citations, but bear in mind that paper A
| is, in and of itself, not terribly unique. People discover
| compounds with the _potential_ to be useful all the time. It 's
| in paper B, in the validation of that potential, that science
| determines whether something truly valuable has been
| discovered.
|
| Was paper A a uniquely inspired work of genius, or is science a
| distributed process of trial and error where we sometimes get
| lucky? I'm not sure we can decide this based on how many
| citations paper A winds up with.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Yeah, in the same way that CEOs, founders are given all the
| credit for their company's breakthroughs, scientists who
| effectively package a collection of small breakthroughs are given
| all the credit for each individual advancement that lead to it.
| It makes sense though, humans prioritize the whole over the
| pieces, the label of the contents.
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