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.
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.