It's even more stark when you come to realize how big the pyramid is just under a new scientific breakthrough. But there are also examples of people that stayed the course against common wisdom (and sometimes while being derided) who eventually succeeded in what they were doing. This is to me the kind of science that is most deserving of prizes, to encourage others to keep looking even when the answers are far from obvious.

I feel that way about string theory. I am merely an airmchair physicist, though I did have a physics minor in college, but it just feels... wrong. Ever more layers of complexity to explain away holes, and no real predictive power. But at least as of ~10-15 (and maybe still today, I have lost touch with that world) years ago, saying this in any serious setting would not make you any friends, nor get you any funding. It feels to me that we have likely squandered decades of brain power going down that hole.

I hope there are still those toiling away doing unpopular work, that can make a breakthrough....

I'm far outside of these social circles nowadays, but I stumbled across this youtube video of a phd candidate talking about string theory recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E), and it seemed to imply that the pendulum in those social circles is swinging back again.

The presentation style for a science topic is off putting: "they lied to us" "just my opinion"

If there is an evidence then there is no "my opinion"--provide it. If you can't provide it, then don't make loud disparaging statements.

Such style should be left for social media "influencers" where "controversy is cash"

Two independent research groups, one from Japan and one from the US, simultaneously published their discovery of the NdFeB magnet in the same issue of the same journal.

I don't know this particular story, but — FWIW — it's common for different teams working in the same field to be aware of each other's manuscripts and impending submissions. When two teams are about to submit papers with the same discovery, they'll often work with an editor to put it in the same journal issue.

By coordinating a simultaneous publication they can get extra publicity for the discovery, both get the first-mover advantage in citations (both papers get cited by everyone), and also get breathing room to be fully rigorous and write the best possible paper.

that is a nice resolution of the prisoner's dilemma

Another example that might be of interest is the use of neural networks in Monte Carlo Tree Search. In 2017 there were two papers published showing how effective the combination of NN’s and MCTS are for planning in board games.

One is an algorithm called ExIT published by Anthony et al, it showed excellent performance on a somewhat obscure board game called Hex. The authors using a typical academic lab setup to achieve this. It has a very impressive 300ish citations.

The other paper is AlphaGo, which has about 10k citations and a Netflix documentary. There are some algorithmic differences that probably make AlphaGo strictly better than ExIT but the big difference seems to mostly be that one group had like a thousand GPUs for a month.

Another big difference is Google's name and marketing behind it. It had its own website.

If this is the Hex game I know, the one on Wikipedia, I think you're kind of sweeping a lot under the rug by equating Go and Hex.

By the way, that's one important problem with patents.

A community of giants. Winner takes all is not fair, but it is very motivating to the vanity of human nature. i.e. untrue, but effective

Quite similar is Darwin and Wallace presenting their evolutionary theories together. Darwin had been working on his for much longer, but spurred by the possibility of losing priority, he presented Origin of Species as a book rather than waiting for formal review + journal publication.