[Link] Distance from Harvard

GLaDOS

This post is from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.

Of course this does not always work – distance is useful, but not sufficient.. Indonesia is pretty far from Harvard, but is a vast wasteland, intellectually. Ideally, you want a country full of people drawn from the populations that actually produce creative thinkers (Europeans, mostly) instead of the populations that ought to but don’t. And it should be really, really far away.

With the Internet and cell phones and all that, psychological isolation is harder to find. Once even California had some thoughts of its own, but that day is long past. If we want to keep progress from stalling out, we need people that don’t get sucked into to the usual crap – because they can’t.

The only real solution is interstellar colonization: the speed of light is your friend. A generation ship might do the job - even if it never arrived. It would be out there for hundreds of years, years in which the inhabitants could go their own way. Some of the ships would be boring, some of them would go crazy – but at least they’d be different.

This post is from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.

Of course this does not always work – distance is useful, but not sufficient.. Indonesia is pretty far from Harvard, but is a vast wasteland, intellectually. Ideally, you want a country full of people drawn from the populations that actually produce creative thinkers (Europeans, mostly) instead of the populations that ought to but don’t. And it should be really, really far away.

With the Internet and cell phones and all that, psychological isolation is harder to find. Once even California had some thoughts of its own, but that day is long past. If we want to keep progress from stalling out, we need people that don’t get sucked into to the usual crap – because they can’t.

The only real solution is interstellar colonization: the speed of light is your friend. A generation ship might do the job - even if it never arrived. It would be out there for hundreds of years, years in which the inhabitants could go their own way. Some of the ships would be boring, some of them would go crazy – but at least they’d be different.

All this an no mention of the benefits of many minds working together on a common pile of information and hypotheses? There is a human intellectual bias to notice some secondary effect and completely miss the dominant effect.

Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data. They were more exposed to the data in their own back yards, and may or may not have benefited from not being so close to the sphere of influence of Harvard's authority. But even this is a weak hypothesis, is there some reason to think that if Harvard had set up a remote campus in South Africa that it would not have been a Harvard geologist who revived continental drift?

As a counterexample to this all, consider the BIg Bang. Before the Big Bang, the common belief among astronomers was a steady state universe that went on and on. Was the big bang theory thrown over by astronomers remote? No, it was thrown over by astronomers and physicists at Princeton and Bell Labs,, neither of which could be imagined as anything but central and authoritative in the fields in which they participated.

We have PLENTY of people that don't get sucked into the usual crap. In fact many of them, like the Indonesians as described in the OP, don't get sucked into the good stuff either! In my opinion, we need to encourage more people to work hard to LEARN the 'usual crap' more fully before thinking they have much of use to add by being independent.

Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data.

He wasn't proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn't that much in academic circles, I've seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.

His basic argu... (read more)

1jsteinhardt13y

I don't think most humans do this; it seems particular to LessWrong and related subcultures.

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