* [insert every example of "15 year old unknown vulnerability in X found" here]
* have to be a bit vague here, but while working as a research scientist for the US Department of Defense I regularly witnessed and occasionally took part in scenarios where a radical idea turned "expert advice" on its head, or some applied thing completely contradicted established theoretical models in a novel or interesting way. Consistently, the barrier to such advancements was always "experts" telling you that your thing should not / could not work, blocking your efforts, withholding funding, etc., only to be proven wrong. Far too many experts care more about maintaining the status quo than actually advancing the field, and a concerning number are actually on the payroll of various corporations or private interests to actively prevent such advancements.
* over the last 30 years in the AI field, there have been a few major inflection points, Yann LeCun's convolutional neural networks and his more general idea that ANNs stood to gain something by loosely mimicking the complexity of the human brain, for which he was originally ridiculed and largely ignored by the scientific community until convolution revolutionized computer vision; and the rise of large language models, which came out of a whole branch of AI research that had been disregarded for decades and was definitely not seen as a thing that might ever come close to something like AGI, natural language processing.
* going back further in history there are plenty of examples, like quantum mechanics turning the relativistic model on its head, Galileo, etc etc. The common theme is a bunch of conservative, self-described experts scoffing at something that ends up completely redefining their field and making them ultimately look pretty silly and petty. This happens so frequently in history that I think it should just be assumed at all times in all fields, as this dynamic is one of the few true constants throughout history. No one is an expert, no one has perfect knowledge of everything, and the next big advancement will be something that contradicts conventional wisdom.
Admittedly, I derived these beliefs from some of the Socratic teachings I received very early in life, around 6th grade or so back in the late 90s, but they have continually borne fruit for me. Question everything. When debugging, question your most basic assumptions first., "is it plugged in?" etc, etc
It's sort of at a point these days where if you want to find a fruitful research idea, probably best to just browse through conventional wisdom on your topic and question the most fundamental assumptions until you find something fishy.