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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
I went to the Wikipedia "timeline of science" page and sampled a bunch of 20th-century advances. Maybe about 10. Not one of them had anything to do with anyone being forced to change fields.
I have no idea who Peter Borden is (nor for that matter any idea whether he actually said it: "Most quotations on the internet are made up" -- Abraham Lincoln) but I would at this point suspect him of being too ready to believe things merely because they sound good.
It was a convenient quote, but I admit it overstates its case. A more defensible version would probably sound like "A disproportionate amount of advances in science comes from outsiders to the field".
The three names which pop into my head without going to Google are Schliemann (and Calvert), Wegener, and Sokal :-)
So, Schliemann and Calvert were indeed amateurs. Wegener seems to have been as much polymath as field-switcher (aside from continental drift, he worked in meteorology and astronomy). Sokal's work in mathematics and physics seems (1) not particularly, ah, boundary-transgressing and (2) not especially notable, so I guess you are referring to his foray into bullshit-hunting; that was indeed successful but I don't see that it was a major advance in science.
This doesn't seem like a disproportionate amount. In fact, I would naively expect quite a lot of major advances to come from that sort of cross-fertilization, and I was rather surprised to find no field-switchers in my sample. So perhaps we can amend it to "Somewhat fewer scientific advances than one would expect come from people switching fields for any reason"?
As I said, this was just off the top of my head without any Google assists. I suspect at least part of this idea goes back to Popper and his necessity of periodic revolutions to clear out the deadwood and establish the new base for advancing further.
I don't expect that trying to make a hard fact out of my observation is going to be useful. For one, to make it at least falsifiable we'd need hard definitions of "disproportionate" and "advances", plus we're already talking of expectations, so it's going to be either a mess or a pedantic slog. If you think the observation is misleading, well, it's not the first time we disagree on fuzzy things :-)
I also don't expect that trying to make a hard fact out of the observation is going to be useful; but not because some of the words in it are fuzzy, but because any halfway reasonable definition of them is going to make it flatly wrong. At any rate, I hope we can agree that the original claim in the original quotation is flatly wrong.