[jacquesm]

> This is why outsiders are so frequently the people who make major breakthroughs in a field, and "genius" is correlated with eccentricity.

That would be nice, if it were true. But it isn't.

Those are the stories that everybody likes though, a bit like the kid with a 25c fishing rod out-fishing adults with 100's of $ worth of gear.

But in practice, most progress in most fields is made by insiders, one tedious bit at a time.

[CuriouslyC]

I didn't say most progress, I said breakthroughs. Let's look back at some of the biggest breakthroughs in history. Newton was by all accounts a profoundly odd human being who was highly secretive and kept to himself. Faraday came from poverty and made his discoveries with no grounding in the math of the day. Einstein made his big breakthroughs as a patent clerk working on his own. Darwin was also an outsider who worked on his own to develop his theory of evolution.

I'm not discounting the work of insiders, but their role is typically to tame the wilds first explored by the outsiders.

[edanm]

I don't think we can reasonably call Newton or Einstein "outsiders". Einstein might have been working in a job on the side as a young man while trying to get recognition, but as I understand it, the year in which he published his major groundbreaking works was the year in which he got his PHD. In fact, one of his groundbreaking papers was his PHD thesis, I think.

Newton, likewise, was in the university when he made his breakthroughs, IIRC.

Let's not forget that while all the pictures of Einstein are of an older professor, he was quite young when he made his biggest contributions, as was Newton. They weren't "establishment professors" or something because they were too young!

It has been argued, btw, that nowadays too much background is necessary for people to make breakthroughs so young.

[throwaway90840]

I don't know if that is possible these days though. Ideas even from (relatively unknown) insiders are often termed "lacking in scope" and outright rejected. I can only think of one outsider having accomplished anything of value in math in the past 20 years (and even that guy wasn't really an outsider).

Academia has turned into a social game that is painful, and where the rewards are terrible (unless you're in CS I suppose). I think post-WW II has solidified the cult-like feeling of place, and also the increased the number of kooks. This contrasts starkly with the PR that is put out: hermits seeking truth.

It's generally hard to put this point across, since most people don't see the ground details, and the whistle-blower costs are rather high. I've previously found posts by Mark Tarver (creator of Shen) on c.l.l and on his blog to be informative, though.

Life, I fear, is no different than lord of the flies, except that the characters are rather a bit more polite.

[leggomylibro]

I dunno; we have access to all kinds of fascinating and exciting technologies today. You could get going with CRISPR for 5 large, if you do your research and buy secondhand equipment. We have 50F capacitors today in a package that would only fit a few mF in the past. You can order a few square inches of custom-designed PCB for about $1.00 these days, including shipping.

I guess that CRISPR requires extensive research and planning to target genes, pick out restriction enzymes, make gRNA, etc etc, but that's all freely available through public resources like the NCBI. When it comes to taking advantage of a global supply chain and centuries of incredible innovation, we are really standing on the shoulders of giants. And how long will it be before someone takes advantage of that low barrier of entry? History says: "not long."

[imranq]

I guess you are referring to Yitang Zhang who created the first bound on the twin-prime conjecture. These days mathematics has become so specialized that its rather difficult to come up with anything new that is noteworthy and not already discovered. Just browsing through the graduate math library the other day and the stacks and stacks of journals dating from the 1700's and from various parts of the globe made me realize just how much math is out there.

Still, like Ian Stewart said in his "Letters to a Young Mathematician", math is an inverted pyramid - when a problem is solved, it leads to more branches to be solved. So maybe breakthroughs are possible from a determined amateur.

[dredmorbius]

New and novel ideas are often rejected.

One of the better examples is the theory of continental drift, now known as plate tectonics. The suggestion goes back a while, though it was a German meterologist, Alfred Wegner, who made the first serious proposal in 1912. He was rejected by a large part of the geological establishment, and died without seeing his ideas accepted. But the evidence mounted, both of the record that drift had happened (fossils, geological structures, magnetic reversals), and most importantly, a mechanism and sufficient time both made apparent by radioactivity and radioactive decay. By the 1950s the age of the Earth was known to be 4.5 billion years, and by the mid 1960s, Wegener's theory was geological fact.

It's now considered the central concept of geology, by at least one account I've seen, which is quite a feat.

Naomi Oreskes, recently known for her work on the disinformation campaigns against tobacco, lead, asbestos, CFCs, and now CO2 regulations, Merchants of Doubt, wrote several papers and two books on this subject in the late 1990s and early 2000s, specifically about the history of science aspect, and the long rejection (and eventual acceptance) of the theory. Recommeded reading.

I don't disagree with you on academia, though there may be reasons for that as well.

[epalmer]

>Life, I fear, is no different than lord of the flies, except that the characters are rather a bit more polite.

Now that is depressing.

[joe_the_user]

It is possible for most progress in a field to be made by insiders and most breakthroughs to be made by outsiders, if breakthroughs are single moment of uneven development.

If we use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, most progress is in periods of "normal science" and most breakthroughs involve a "paradigm shift".

[zigzigzag]

It is possible to be both an "insider" and to approach problems with a new or unique (or eccentric) point of view.