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darius 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).
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.