DanArmak comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong

71 Post author: alyssavance 06 July 2012 01:34AM

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Comment author: komponisto 05 July 2012 04:11:13PM 8 points [-]

While [negative selection] filters out some good people, it probably does not reject the very best, otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.

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).

Comment author: DanArmak 05 July 2012 06:30:51PM 5 points [-]

Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.

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.)

Comment author: komponisto 05 July 2012 07:35:20PM 3 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: pnrjulius 06 July 2012 10:58:49PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 July 2012 12:56:25PM 0 points [-]

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.