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DanArmak comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
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I agree with most of it, though the point about academia is a bit contrived.
True, there is a lot of negative selection before you get a cushy job the usual way, but you can certainly bypass quite a few obstacles if you are exceptionally good. For example, solve any of the open problems in math or physics, post a preprint on arxiv.org (well, you may need someone to vouch for you, but that's not really an issue) and you are all set.
Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single discovery in physics in the last half a century that was not made by someone who jumped through the usual hoops. I have met, however, an occasional person who learned grad school-level stuff on their own, but they did not manage to go any farther. My suspicion is therefore that all that negative selection in science, while annoying, does not do a lot of harm compared to potential alternatives. While it 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).
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.