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komponisto comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
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I predict that we will indeed see this before too long, now that we have the internet; and it will thus turn out that some of the best people were being filtered out. Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.
And of course, if you're willing to look a century back instead of just a half-century, you find the salient example of Einstein -- who didn't even have the internet, but still managed to advance science from outside the "establishment" (which was a sizable apparatus in his time and place, just as it is in ours).
Access to labs, equipment, technicians, funding is an even greater factor. Only mathematicians can really afford to work from home. (And now, computer scientists and computational-xxx people have joined them.)
Yes, all my predictions about people working at home should be interpreted to refer to fields in which that is physically possible.
(In fact, in these discussions I am pretty much always thinking specifically of mathematics, and possibly the most theoretical kinds of physics.)
It's not quite so dire. You can't do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
Yes, but in most fields someone can't participate by only interpreting experiments from home. It's useful, but you can't build a career from it. Normally you really want to also be able to influence experiments in the lab to get the new data you want.
I am willing to bet that none of the high-profile open problems in physics, such as quantum measurement, high-temperature superconductivity, dark energy origins, extensions to the standard model etc., will receive a meaningful contribution from outside of people trained in academia, at least not in the next 10 years. The reason is that the cream-of-the-crop people who are able to advance the leading edge stand out enough to be recognized and integrated into the system.
This is a myth. While he had trouble fitting in, he certainly did jump through most of the usual hoops.
If a person is recognized and integrated into the system only after making a contribution, that counts as being "outside the system". E.g. Einstein, who didn't get his first academic position until 1908, three years after the annus mirabilis, which had occurred while he was a patent clerk. Indeed, he didn't even get his Ph.D. until the annus itself -- his thesis consisted of one of the famous papers!
He got his undergrad degree in 1900, so, inside the system. He was a lecturer (part time) between 1900 and 1902, though not at a high level. He did indeed develop his SR ideas while dealing with electromagnetic applications while working at the patent office (which paid the bills), though still in touch with other scientists, most notably Marcel Grossmann. His thesis was not related to relativity at all, not that it matters. All of his work on GR was inside the system. Not that he needed the system much by then.
So, the popular view of Einstein as an outsider is blown way out of proportion to reality.
Whatever the "popular" view, all that matters for my purposes is that Einstein was not employed by a university in 1905 when he developed SR, and thus was, by my definition, an outsider. Yes, of course he became an insider later -- that's the dream of of every outsider!
Having an undergrad degree -- or a degree of any kind -- does not make one an insider. What counts is employment: whether one is paid to do the work in question. If you're not (as Einstein wasn't in 1905), you're an outsider.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all got PhDs, but invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, i.e. not while employed by universities. I think the "jump through the usual hoops" description shminux is using is a more useful one than the "outsider" description you're using.
As I stated in the grandparent, the relevant distinction is whether or not you are paid to do the research, or whether you are forced to do it in your "spare time".
On Bell Labs specifically, see Scott Aaronson:
Thus, the people you mention were, I assume, doing their actual jobs when they invented the transistor, which makes them analogous to academics, and not analogous to Einstein in the patent office.
The modern analogue of Einstein would be someone dropping out of grad school, becoming a software developer (or something), and within a few years posting groundbreaking papers on the arXiv that they wrote for the fun of it. You can call such a person an "insider" if you like because of their (unfinished) education, but I guarantee you they sure as hell won't feel like one in the years before their paper comes out. (They won't have library privileges, won't get invited to physicist parties, and generally won't be taken seriously because...they're not a physicist, they're a software developer.)
More useful for what, exactly?
I apologize, it appears I didn't read the post in question carefully enough; the criterion of if you're paid to research is a useful one.
But although Einstein is salient, I can't think of too many other examples. The two that leap to mind are Green (working in the early 1800s) and Lavoisier (working in the late 1700s), but from that I would expect "household name scientist who was an outsider" to be something that shows up once or twice a century. (I'm counting Lavoisier because he was funded by his tax farming, but he was definitely part of the 'establishment' of the day.)
(And you do see contemporary outsider contributions if you know where to look, like Gary Cola or Jack Andraka, but not at the household name level- probably because there aren't that many household name scientists!)
Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan. I'm having trouble thinking of anyone recent; the closest to come to mind are some computer scientists who didn't get PhD's until relatively late. (Did Oleg Kiselyov ever get one?)
Again, I don't care whether the person remained an outsider for their entire life; all they need to have done is to have made a contribution while outside. Thus Einstein in the patent office fully counts.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Ramanujan was brought to England by the ultra-established G.H. Hardy, and even Heaviside was ultimately made a Fellow of the Royal Society. So even they became "insiders" eventually, at least in important senses.
In Einstein's first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I've read Pais's biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn't have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we're discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn't guaranteed -- in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.