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Consider this next time you have a good idea and everyone in the room very loudly questions you.
> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Carl Sagan.
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A lot of truly terrible ideas are also initially rejected. Rejection is not an indicator for the merit of an idea.
The point is the contrapositive: if your idea is not initially rejected, it's probably quite pedestrian.
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But how do you know the ideas were/are great? Rejection isn't evidence of quality.
Well, that's a very valid question. My point is that with time, you can look back at ideas that turned out to be great and recall how they were initially received.
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The problem is that impossible seeming results tend to get rejected out of hand no matter how carefully they were done, or how easy to replicate. This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored.
> This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored. This is a terrible sentiment and it needs to stop spreading with these articles about Nobel rejections. Noticing that your data is in conflict with theory is the best way of realizing that you have made a mistake. Go back to you…
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> This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored. This is a terrible sentiment and it needs to stop spreading with these articles about Nobel rejections. Noticing that your data is in conflict with theory is the best way of realizing that you have made a mistake. Go back to you…
It is true that most impossible results are experimental error of one sort or another. But it is a systemic failure that biologists broadly rejected a result out of hand that had been successfully replicated many times, at multiple labs, over decades. And the attitude that you describe is part of why it happened. Data that does not fit in existing paradigms should be scrutinized with extra care, not rejected out of h…
It's inspiring to observe how long the path can be between initial forays (or even middle-career forays) and publicly-recognized success. This seems a relatively universal truism with only rare exceptions (too rare to bet one's future on, certainly). I'm reminded of the video of Lin Manuel-Miranda performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009 [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE ]. The work he presented w…
* Then again, people do it in TV format, like Flight of the Conchords and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
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That's a tough questions. When you put it like that, no, obviously not, or at least not always. On the other hand, a lot of academia is predicated on the idea that the quality and impact of research and by extension, the researcher, is immediately apparent, so we're "correctly" selecting and rewarding the best people. Stuff like this suggests that we're not, and the moves towards relentless up-or-out pipelines (with…
I think there are many things that, when published in the context of the day, are not distinguishable from other work in terms of "Nobelity". It seems like most impact is measured decades after an initial technology is discovered, reported, and published. CRISPR seems like a relative outlier (once the basic technique was perfected, it went from "nothing" to "everything" in just a few years, and has now completely cha…
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*Nobel, and for what it's worth, the peace prize was added after Alfred Nobel's death and is considered by many not to serve the same purpose at the other Nobel prizes, and so it has a different reputation. It is sometimes used as a nudge to people who have the power to do good things, rather than as recognition after the fact.
All of the Nobel prizes were established after his death.