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MartinB comments on Qualia Soup, a rationalist and a skilled You Tube jockey - Less Wrong
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Being a scientist vs. being heard by other scientists. I wonder how the surfer dude with his E8 based Theory of everything does in that regards?
The way current scientists inter act is error prone - but it gets some results. And eventually ideas get heard. For every Wegener there are thousands of Homeopaths, Snake Oilers and physics cranks that spread noise.
The surfer dude, Garrett Lisi, has an institutional affiliation, Lee Smolin's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Basically the people trying to save physics from string theory. His arXiv post wasn't ignored and wasn't something that came from outside the high energy physics subculture, if that's what you mean. Paper on arXiv, discussion in the HEP blogs, vitriolic abuse from Lubos Motl, nothing unusual. That appears to be (from what I can tell as an outsider) how ideas are floated and initially looked over by peers in the HEP field.
The E8 theory appears not to have worked out - despite the media friendliness of "surfer dude wins physics." But, these things happen.
(I know nothing of the actual subject matter and the maths turned my brain to putty, but I wrote a parody of the media story and so did what journalistic research I could into how the story propagated. And then discovered that Dr Lisi and I know people in common, thus demonstrating how everyone knows everyone.)
Thinking about the issue i would suggest a few hypothesis.
(1) It is way easier to get an education in a specific field than ever before. (2) It is harder to find new genius level insights. (3) Good stuff eventually gets heard
It seems like a safe bet that anyone outside of a field claiming new insights into the field is probably a crank. Anyone who is not will be aware of the index (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html), and be capable of avoiding it.
If someone were to find out something new and amazing, while also being ignored by the mainstream scientists he could go about getting the credentials eventually, or trying to build something useful with the ideas he has.