[lrossi]

Personally, I think it’s best if scientists lean towards the conservative/skepticism side, to filter out scams or bad science. But there should be a balance between that and allowing new ideas to surface. Do you think it’s taken too far?

[ramraj07]

I think the opposite - hold the highest standards for the quality of the data and it's interpretation, but we need to allow the wildest of hypotheses to be tested without judgement. Conservatism at the hypothesis step is the biggest reason science today sucks if you ask me. I'll say the job of being conservative belongs to engineers, and is one of the main differentiators between science and engineering.

The most amazing discoveries even in the recent times often come from scientists testing some of the wildest hypothesis - a rotation student in Andrew Fire's lab thinking he's injecting RNA into the gonad of a worm when he was stupidly injecting them into its mouth, or when a young Yamanaka had no clue basically and did a random experiment in his new lab adding a bunch of genes to cells to see if they do something.

I've sat through sessions seeing scientists laughed at for their wild hypotheses, by what I can only call as old, over-congratulated high school valedictorians who are only actually good at playing politics and writing grants, with a self professed love of science and discovering things that's as genuine as a Republican saying he is all for facts.

Let the crazies risk their lives on the wildest hypotheses. Fund them as long as they are systematic and methodical in their efforts to prove them. That's how you make science take the leaps it needs to be truly transformative for civilization. That's how I intend to do science and I learned clearly that I don't belong in academia. I have no intention of even swinging the science bat if I'm not at least trying to shoot for the moon!

[cycomanic]

The large problem is the limited funding. If there is only funding for 10% of applications and a large portion of the success hinges on previous success and your experience on this topic, then you automatically breed conservatism.

[rramadass]

Exactly Right! I think this mindset is fundamental to advancing Science. One of the reasons i feel that "doing" Science has fallen out of favour with the public is because the "Researchers" are not being daring and brave enough to "dream up" far fetched hypotheses and in general not pushing the envelope. Most are just regular "salaried employees" with no great dreams/ambitions.

[sitkack]

The same exact process you painted has a direct analog in tech businesses right now.

I think the problem is the hierarchy.

A development organization is an amplifier that brings a new capability into existence. Currently, organizations have to get big to amplify what their qualities. But to get big to achieve its goals it needs to be hierarchical, and because the hierarchy and the practitioners are the same folks, the org structure becomes the product.

The goal of the organization is to maintain its structure. Innovation happens when you have less structure. How do we scale, and maximize the organizational power while enabling create autonomy?

[throwawayboise]

At the same time, labs and researchers and equipment cost real money. There are opportunity costs. There some good reasons to not spend money on wild conjectures.

[hyperpallium2]

UBI can free scientists from grants, but democratization of hypotheses will become populistization.

Also, engineering leads science at time: this works but we don't know why.

[senderista]

How much effort do you think we should put into testing homeopathy?

[refurb]

If someone wanted to test the ability to shrink tumors through prayer that shouldn’t be judged?

[dekhn]

Yes, it's taken too far. Multiple times in RNA biology people have made legitimate discoveries and were required to implement heroic methods to make their case. The first two I think of are Tom Cech whose grad student demonstrated that RNA can be an enzyme with extremely reliable evidence but they had to put in a few years of work to actually get the community to agree. Similarly, Harry Noller had very strong evidence the heart of the ribosome was an RNA machine and it took 40 years and a crystal structure before the community finally accepted it. A similar case happened with DNA with the Avery experiment which was as good a proof as you'll ever get in biology, but it wasn't until Hershey Chase that the general community overcame the skepticism that DNA could be the molecule of heredity.

[stocknoob]

Scientists should be skeptics of their own conservatism. Much "conservatism" is in the name of defending egos.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” - Max Plank

It'd be nice to not wait a generation.

[lrossi]

Right, there are plenty of such examples from physics. I was wondering if biology is the same. But it actually sounds worse.

I think computer science is doing much better nowadays. The “NoSQL” movement for example was particularly impressive, it’s something that wouldn’t fly in most other sciences.

[XorNot]

Great, got literally anything which is making a testable prediction to advance physics? No? Then come back when you do.

Physics isn't advancing because everything is degenerate to the standard model - any bold new idea still fails to predict an accessible experimental regime which would rule out alternatives.

[cycomanic]

The scientist fighting against the establishment is always a popular twist on a discovery. That's why popular science articles often emphasise this aspect. The reality is much more complex and the above happens very rarely. Regarding physics for example, give me the last theory that went against the establishment and took a generation to be accepted. I really can't think of any in the last 80 years. Maybe EPR, or Bells inequality, but that took so long, because experiments could only be done quite recently. I would also argue it is not really a case of research against the establishment.

Also let's remember that the researchers mentioned by others above, were all running successful labs despite their ideas not being widely accepted. The reason why these theories take so long to be accepted is more a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" than "we don't like the theory".

[deepnotderp]

Indeed. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions lays this out well

[heriol]

I think there's a wide gulf between healthy skepticism and mockery or dismissal. It should be totally acceptable (if not laudable) to investigate unpopular or long-tail ideas. Sure, a lot of them will not amount to anything, but you also have a chance of discovering something totally unexpected.

[readflaggedcomm]

From the article:

>Other researchers “rolled their eyes in horror” when he presented his theory, Jacob recalled in his memoir, The Statue Within. “With a little encouragement, my audience would have jeered and left,” he wrote.

Skepticism and contempt are distinct and disparate feelings.

[pid_0]

conservative and skeptical are not the same thing

Science should be absolutely progressive in that ALL questions are asked and ALL hypotheses are tested, with a significant amount of skepticism and critical analysis.

[lrossi]

Right, maybe “conservative” was not the best choice of word as it has many meanings. I was thinking about “cautious”, not “traditionalist”. Sorry for the confusion, I’m not a native speaker.

[gnramires]

The dichotomy of 'skepticism' vs 'open-mindedness' doesn't capture all that is important about scientific inquiry (specifically, both of those are important of course).

One approach to Science I think is really illustrative is Wheeler's[1] 'radical conservatism': you should accept, and seek, radical ideas, under a skeptical, formal, foundation.

So for example, if someone proposes a "free-energy" device with some outlandish explanation, that a priori isn't radical conservatism, because while the proposal is radical, it clashes with the conservative basis of local energy conservation of all modern physics (or maybe with the 2nd law of thermodynamics).

However, for example in General Relativity, the question of energy conservation at extremely large scales is not well settled. So that's something you could explore, without letting the fear of ridicule stop you (for breaking energy conservation), as long as you retain solid foundations[2]. Not only that, but this kind of outlandish idea is often how science moves forward, not by making the most obvious hypotheses about established theories (which we already largely know the answer for!) -- but it's difficult to naively distinguish from crackpottery.

By solid foundations, I mean you can even revise your physical principles, as long as they explain available evidence and you're able to formalize them to a good degree. Also by 'radical' it is meant that we shouldn't judge ideas by whether they are outlandish or not (Feynman writes extensively about this in his talks) -- Nature doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with seeming outlandish[3]. So to get rid of this bias, you can flip the coin and go after outlandish ideas (ideally simply unbiased, but it's a strategy).

See Kip Thorne's memoir, which I haven't read to completion but I'm sure is good:

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1901/1901.06623.pdf

[1] (the great friend from Feynman and with enormous contributions)

[2] In GR there is some very non-intutive large scale behavior: you can move without reaction mass in vacuum, which naively would seem radical, and violating conservation of momentum. However, it's allowed, and proven!:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/886/swimming-in-...

[3] In reality, what defines what's "bizarre", "outlandish", "unintuitive" for us, are (1) Our previous experiences in the world, (2) Our coded instincts and neural architecture. There's no guarantee those will be valid when extrapolated to a different domain: objects at very small scales, very large scales, very high energies, etc.

[ukj]

What's the "right balance" between Type I and Type II errors when assessing the quality/potential of new research?

[marvin]

I disagree almost 100% with this. The most novel scientific ideas are so wild they're almost in crackpot territory. Novel ideas in general are ideas no one has ever explored before. And while most science is incremental, most science is also...not very useful or interesting. I'm sure that scientific funding could be cut 50% without any noticeable negative impact, assuming the right 50% were cut. (That is of course the difficult question, so I'm not literally advocating this).

Conservativism is a very bad trait to have in scientific roles. It's not as bad as being dumb, not being curious or not intensely seeking the truth, but on a system level it will steer the ship in the wrong direction.

Paul Graham recently wrote some essays that explored these ideas in a much clearer and more precise way. To me they were just nagging in the back of my mind for a long time. Recommended reading if you've got a few minutes. http://paulgraham.com/think.html