Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on.
I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.
This is the kind of thoughtful comment I come here for - it's given me some ideas to go research on my own.
For a modern viewpoint it might seem like Newton was "hedging his bets" by contributing to several totally different fields, but I don't think it was seen like that at the time. It was all "philosophy".
Other "philosophers" in the early modern period had similar interests. For example Tycho Brahe is remembered as an astronomer with a strong focus on empirical observation, but actually was just as focused on astrology, alchemy and medicine (which was connected to alchemy and astronomy because of the same philosophy).
Newton was a "renaissance man".
Other than hydrogen, some helium, and a very small amount of lithium, all other elements were born of stars, through either normal fusion (helium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, ...), supernovae (heavier atoms: nickle, iron, ...), and for the heaviest including gold, neutron-star collisions.
No, the models assumed by alchemists weren't right, but the central nugget was pointing in the right direction. And studying the metals does provide insight into the dynamics of stars.
(And yes: on Earth, helium and several other elements are found not formed by stars directly, but through the radioactive decay of heavier elements, though those are of stellar origins.)
No, they just remember people for their contributions rather than their mistakes.
Could you give a few examples?
When Alexander Fleming discovered that penicillin fought bacteria, he was not mistaken at all. He was spot on- it did kill bacteria. Sure, its discovery may have been caused by a mistake, but what he learned about penicillin was correct, as far as I know.
But I'm still sure that there are/will be times when great discoveries are proven to be mistakes. Barring practical ones like penicillin, there has been numerous 'discoveries' proven wrong much later; Newton's colour theory comes to mind, and of course the rather famous its-a-particle-no-a-wave ping pong.
As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge converges over time, but religion diverges.
It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.
First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.
Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.
But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.
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Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.
Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.
(Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, defined a decadent period as one which has an objective which it wants to reach, which it could reach if it made the sort of changes which it has made in the past, and which it fails to reach nonetheless. I forget where I heard it, but there's an idea that there's social technology as well as physical -- and social technology is easier to lose.)
For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.
Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.
The value of contrarians is not in the things they're wrong about, it's in the things they're right about. I'm pretty sure that was also the point of pg's mini essay.
I encountered his ideas (10 years back!) at a time when my default way of thinking was very intuitive instead of systematic and analytical thinking (which many of my high-performing peers had developed over the course of engineering education). Perhaps because of this, I took to his ideas like duck (swan) takes to water. I never acquired a systematic(analytical) thinking approach despite being in academia till mid twenties though I could hack decent academic performances. It was in an engineering profession that I realized the advantage and importance of systematic thinking and tried to consciously develop it.
Strangely, the use of systematic thinking has also actually increased my appreciation of his ideas after a period of wavering doubt. The systematic (analytical) way of thinking is too seductive and it's successes too apparent that it appears far superior to my earlier intuitive way of thinking. However, I am gradually coming to realize that the intuitive way of thinking has a deep logic of it's own which is not visible or may not even be decipherable. It's logic can only be inferred by its effect which ofcourse a critic can also be ascribe to luck!
I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....
In addition, It's not too infrequent that you'll find another scientist who wrote about the same thing 30 years earlier, or in Newton's case with Leibniz, concurrent.
Rarely do we take a big view of the species, a creature that has been alive and thinking much longer than us, winding its way through time.
I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.
Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups.
I'm curious what's scummy about them to you?
I say this to reinforce Paul's statement, "But that's because we know how things turned out." "How things turned out" includes reclassification of what he was working out as belonging to different fields. I suspect that at the time, he didn't consider himself to be moving from one field to another but rather to trying to build upon his previous work.