I always try to avoid doing this myself and ask how they came to their conclusion. If the answer is "do your own research" however, as is very popular with the 'skeptic' community, I discard it immediately.
Essentially, I think people desperately cling to what they know. You can lose your job, your spouse, and your hair, but you know what you know. You (hopefully) will always have that. So when someone tries to take away something that was supposed to be yours forever, people get extremely defensive. I have witnessed this in politics a lot in the past decade.
Some amount of resistance to crazy ideas is appropriate. If the idea works the resistance will be overcome eventually. If we accepted every crazy idea enthusiastically a lot of effort would be wasted.
Like 50-60 years in this case :-(
I don't think that distinction is the relevant one. The point is that it extended existing thought, rather than overturning it.
> If he told someone about the idea behind the proof in the initial phase without anything concrete and was not able to finish the proof, do you think the idea would be perceived?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. There's a reason mathematics journals are only interested in finished theorems rather than idle speculation, but I don't see how that's relevant.
Examples of a developments that rocked the boat would be the theory of evolution, quantum mechanics, and irrational numbers. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number#Ancient_Gree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles#Awards_and_honour...
There was a long time where he didn't have a proof yet, but it was OK, because he told no-one that he was actually working on one. If he had told people openly that THIS what he chose to spend his time on, without actually having the proof yet, he would have been ridiculed, because it seemed like such an utterly hopeless enterprise at the time.
Wiles' discovery was a tremendous breakthrough, but it didn't upset anyone. Another example of an entirely uncontroversial breakthrough is [0]. This is in contrast to the three examples of controversial discoveries that I gave above.
> If he had told people openly that THIS what he chose to spend his time on, without actually having the proof yet, he would have been ridiculed, because it seemed like such an utterly hopeless enterprise at the time.
I'd hope the field would be supportive of 'long shot' projects like this, but sure, I could believe many mathematicians would be skeptical.
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-break-tra...
But sometimes (and the quote suggests that this happens way more frequently) the reason is that other people noticed that before you, and for some reason they all concluded "this is not going to work", and went looking elsewhere. You were "merely" the first person who continued searching in the same direction, and succeeded to finally find something useful.
In the latter case, when you announce your invention, the people who previously looked in the same direction and gave up, are likely to reiterate their reasons for giving up. Sometimes they genuinely believe that what you did is impossible, i.e. that your results are wrong, and you only made some mistake or fraud that makes it seem to work. (In their defense, people make mistakes and frauds all the time, so it makes sense to assume that you most likely are another one.) Sometimes it's that they backed "this is not possible" with their professional prestige, so accepting your invention would mean lessening their prestige. (This is a wrong reason to oppose you, but people who will oppose you for this reason will often be very powerful.)
Plus there is the usual resistance of people against trying to do new things, when the old things seem to work okay, and the new things seem like a lot of work or learning.
a) they see the immediate benefit b) it fits into their belief system c) it is socially validated
Original stuff usually violates all three points.
See Semmelweis, Galileo, et al.
I am not Galileo when I argue that our linear pricing model is an active blocker to product adoption and that we need to move to sublinear one asap in a bullshit corp meeting.
I wish I was. Lots of good ideas get lifted all the time, in the context of the Aiken quote, new is outside of the overton window, it flips problems on their heads. Some of the new ideas actually do have to get shoved, because also in this definition of new, it isn't really about quality. It is about newness.
We should solve the metaproblem of people not accepting the Scientific Method. It ultimately comes down to proof, verifiability, falsifiability and the techniques we choose to get there. Ridicule and rejection of concepts because they are new, I think are wholly human social traits.
How do we get answers to questions we can't even think of asking? And how do we expand the ways in which we ask questions?
The individual "stealing" them did their best to make sure no one knew where he was getting his ideas, which robbed me of the benefits of sharing those ideas as volunteer.
He also badly botched them all.
This is in line with the meme that "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Me saying "You should do X!" utterly failed to result in X actually happening by someone not who was not me. That pithy one-liner failed to convey sufficient information to result in the production of the X I was envisioning when I said it.
The example I typically give is the word "chair." If I say "chair," what kind of chair do I mean? Am I thinking of a wooden kitchen chair while you are thinking of an overstuffed living room wing chair?
I had a similar thing happen at my corporate job where a new manager met very privately with me, implemented my proposal without giving me credit and bastardized it so badly that I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with her terrible, terrible program that completely missed the point of what I had proposed.
Years ago, I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. We use the same word -- "idea" -- to talk about radical new theories and to talk about more prosaic details of how to get things done, business-wise: "It was my idea to paint it blue, not green."
I think we really need better ways to make such distinctions.
As an aside....etc etc
As an aside, I generally bring up Semmelweis and the like because I'm one of those unfortunate souls the world has decided is a loon. I don't have any answers for you because my methods for discovery and proof of concept fall outside of accepted scientific methods.
Silly me: I wasn't trying to make a scientific discovery backed up by evidence. I was just trying to not die and to be less tortured by my defective body.
People can basically take my word for that or not. Most people choose "not."
I don't have a ready solution for that.
Sounds wonderful! An IDE for concepts and definitions. Now it would have to have a visualizer and a bunch of NLP.
And when I say, "the colorless green ideas sleep furiously" it could synthesize an abstract picture of ideas (shapes) being various shades of grey, the ideas a new (green) and growing but the pace at which they stir starts to grow. A colorless idea is one which describes a technique or a capability but without a goal or context. To hammer, a hammer, a specific hammer, a specific hammer to build a house ... join, flatten, temporary, permanent, to move.
I could see a system like this being used in very delicate negotiations. It never occurred to me how difficult bidirectional translation could be with all the semantic nuance, history, idioms, etc. And then have personalities and intellects involved. The translators are the true heros of non-war.
Always enjoy your take.
I did a bit of work on the project back in November and since talking with you I have done some updates and made it public. There isn't much there at the moment but I think I know what I am doing now, which I didn't know five years or so ago.
W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out, so you'll have to fill me in. I would make an initial distinction, though. The first is that once a theory achieves widespread acceptance, it's not surprising that honest people will be slow to absorb something that they can't account for. It takes time to process evidence. Think how absurd it would be to just throw away something that's made sense up until now. You have to reconcile new observations and do the work of accounting for everything accounted for by the previous theory plus the new thing. Throwing it away just like that leaves you with nothing to work with. The second distinction is that a lot of people build their egos out of knowing something and the feeling of dominance they get from it. "I'm hot shit and superior to you because I know X." Then you get these little cliques and cults of affirmation which adds another barrier because now you face the Lomanesque risk of no longer being liked.The coward cannot bear that possibility so he "defends" his tribe to protect himself. Of course, he isn't really acting for his own good or the good of others, just his own comfort.
But in general, yes, academic fads and prejudices do exist. Try being a conservative at a major university today, especially in a humanities department.
He was subjected to house arrest for advocating for a "new" idea. We now accept heliocentrism as the correct answer. It's not terribly important to me if it was, in fact, his idea...etc. etc. He's the best known example of "scientist says something we now currently accept as scientific fact -- and there is hell to pay for him during his lifetime."
W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out,
He was a physician in charge of two clinics who had studies backing up his "crazy" idea that physicians should properly sterilize their hands before delivering babies if they wanted to reduce mortality rates. He was essentially driven crazy, thrown in an insane asylum and beaten to death by the guards in short order.
I view it in simpler terms as "He was effectively murdered." because although he had studies, he had no explanation for how and why, so it was rejected out of hand.
This was maybe two decades or so before we accepted germ theory and modern sterilization techniques for surgeries and so on.
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment
Other than the goal being "seeds of doubt", manipulating someone into thinking something untrue is really not far from gaslighting.
> The goal of gaslighting is to gradually undermine the victim's confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from delusion, thereby rendering the individual or group pathologically dependent on the gaslighter for their thinking and feelings.
Is the described behaviour manipulative? Sure. But compared to everything I know of gaslighting and the intents behind it I don't see much similarity, not with more context than a single sentence at least. Did the manager do it to help people's careers? Did he try to lure them into a satanic cult? There's a wide range of unknowns.
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -Howard H. Aiken