Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades.
Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.
My Post-doc colleague during my PhD@MIT was explaining this trick he does to get his system working that he never publishes (one very small step of 100 steps). He was concerned that if he published the step, it would hurt his chances at getting a professorship.
It’s exactly the same logic behind why code is not published.
Because ethically you can ‘hand wave it away’ as obvious to other experts and not worth publishing.
Another is recommending trans-fat based margarine over butter. That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.
Once the group-think machine gets going in a direction, it has a tremendous amount of inertia.
I think this was more a case of lobbying by certain agricultural producers than ignorance. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14823257_Food_Lobbi...
Sadly history is full of such occurrences.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfi...
"Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory."
-- Hermann Weyl
1. A is not the empty set
2. A is not the set of all rational numbers
3. A is closed downwards, meaning if x is in A and y < x, then y is in A
4. A has no greatest element, meaning for all x in A, there is a y in A such that y > x.
And each Dedekind cut is in one-to-one correspondence with a real number. You can define the usual arithmetic operations on them, show that every rational number has a corresponding Dedekind cut (for any rational q, we have {x in Q | y < q } as the corresponding cut). I haven't seen a proof of the uncountability of Dedekind cuts using the diagonalization argument, but you can prove there is a one-to-one correspondence between Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences of rational numbers, which is another construction of the reals. And there is a fairly straightforward proof that those are uncountable using diagonalization.
But as you can see, you don't need any sort of repetition to do the construction, it's just a set of sets of rational numbers satisfying a few simple properties. For more information, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
Also Plate Tectonics...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_development_of...
Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends. Too much and good ideas get neglected or squashed for far too long. There is a cost to both.
> Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends.
Much time is supposed to be spent on dead ends anyway. That's the way the corpus matures, not to mention an inevitable result of peer review (no need to review anything if all the research product is perfect). Research is a search; imagine running BFS without expecting to encounter dead ends.
Given the current scenario we are certainly not sure if we are ever going to achieve it! Though that achievement can work wonders. Any thoughts how you see that change can be made possible?
Doesn't she deserve to be heard? By labeling her a antivaxer and ignoring her based on that label you effectively are closing your mind to her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community.
> He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.
But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.
It's not a homogenous demographic, and it doesn't have a substantial overlap. So there is a very large (super-majority) of medical doctors who have absolutely no training in research, statistics etc. Because it's not what they do - they are not scientists. Their training is about their obligations to follow current developments in best practice, drug prescriptions etc. (or the same but for surgical technique) and apply it. They do not do science, they don't even necessarily particularly understand the scientific method.
So it is absolutely incorrect to imply that all medical professionals are "the scientific community". They're not. Those which participate in and publish research are but that is not even a significant fraction of their population.
Comparisons about what general population surgeons and medical doctors historically reacted to changes in practice does not say anything about the idea that these people represent a peer-reviewed scientific consensus, because they didn't. They represent the equivalent of a mechanic rejecting manufacturer recommendations on fuel quality and complaining about it to their colleagues.
The nice, pretty scientific method we learn about in school is largely an idealized myth
Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible?
Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.
It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.
Agreed, but self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and outright fraud are also tools in the toolbox and if you don't have strong enough defensive tools, you are open to attacks from those. Obviously, they can be misapplied. Humans are not perfect. But without powerful social tools like ridicule and shunning, science becomes essentially a honeypot for charlatans like Andrew Wakefield.
Happens all the time. Academia is a snake pit and this is low hanging fruit.
The pollution would vastly outlive the polluters, so it would be detectable for some time after their demise, especially if anything they automated also polluted. That stuff would continue to pollute after its creators all died, at least a bit.
Also, it seems that the chance of detecting pollution would increase linearly as we continue to discover more planets.
...hopefully my point is made, now. I can't give details because they don't exist.
If a species produces sufficient pollution that it kills that species, it is a reasonable assumption that it was also produced at a rate far higher than the planets natural ecosystem could absorb it. It is also reasonable that the pollution also kills one or more species which were consuming or absorbing the pollution, slowing the rate at which it can be removed, or maybe even stopping that process completely. Pollution does not disappear at the same time pollutants stop being introduced into the atmosphere.
There will be a time after which no pollutants are produced and before no pollutants are detectable. That is a non-zero amount of time. That is why I say that pollution could one day be detected on a planet that has not had a living civilization for "a long time." "A long time" being "more than five minutes" if you really want me to nail it down.
Right. And if the argument depends on those details, then it's not a very convincing argument.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle#Capacities_and_fl...
Pollution doesn't vanish when it isn't being made anymore.
So, if there is so much pollution that it both kills life on the planet, it will take a good amount of time (millions of years? How big of a planet are we talking about?) to be cleansed back to undetectable levels.
An alien society may produce pollutants which last a million years. Plastics can last millions of years.
Sufficient pollution could cause climate change severe enough to keep all kinds of things airborne for who knows how long. We are constantly surprised by what we learn about other worlds. It is silly to me to presume that anything we know about Earth pollution will be a given on a planet from another star system.
We were able to detect dinosaurs on our own planet 65 million years after they went extinct, and they didn't even pollute anything.
To your point getting strictly negative results would not necessarily mean anything one way or the other.
What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock?
The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up.
So what exactly is requiring us to start from "it might be aliens" in order to get funded?
If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look?
Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.
People weren't not looking for them, but by their nature no one knows a way to find them reliably (other then, find all the things, look for anything which has a hyperbolic trajectory relative to the sun).
Same problem with an intercept plan: we would like to do it, but the problem is not particularly tractable with our current space technology. Up until we saw Oumuamua we didn't even have a baseline for what we might expect the behaviour of objects to be - which is a problem when you're coming up with a propellant budget for a space mission, since you have no idea how much fuel or weight you can afford for an intercept.
As it stands, we probably need to see a couple more Oumuamua-like objects to develop a reasonable expectation of the frequency of different classes and come up with a mission-profile which we can reasonably expect we'd be able to launch at one in the next 20-40 years. Or a way of establishing a permanent capability (which is not focused research its "yes, let's build the lunar gateway station and develop a long-term La Grange point mode for the Starliner - which is also something which you'd do if you were colonizing Mars).
This is my point: nothing here benefits from "it was aliens" as a starting point. In fact, all of this useful work is pretty explicitly "it's probably not aliens". Because if aliens have gone to the expense and trouble to scout the solar system, then we basically don't need to do any of it - "it was aliens" closes research paths. If we're sure it's aliens, then a much more cost-effective strategy is waiting for them to send another probe that assuredly would move in to study the most interesting thing in Sol - us. Which will be much easier to see because we look closely for Earth-orbit objects.
Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career.
As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect oxygen on exoplanets, which is not conclusive evidence of life, but to search for industrial pollution is a non starter for exactly this reason. But that would yield much more interesting results (both for negative and positive results.)