[mrdrozdov]

I love this provocative title. For clarification, the author's argument is related to a person's ability to follow a path determined by intuition in the absence of proof. The examples given are of scientists who found ultimate success even though they initially only had a kernel of an idea, in contrast to someone who would have found success but at the onset had a clear vision of how they might get there. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, and early in graduate school my cryptography professor gave a concrete example: Diffie and Hellman knew there should be some way to securely exchange a key long before publishing their now famous exchange protocol (I'm paraphrasing heavily what the professor said, but hopefully this illustrates the point).

The "tension between creativity and accuracy" came up in a slightly different context at a party this past weekend. I was discussing with some other recent grads the flawed method of peer review in research journals, especially as it relates to reproducing results of well known papers. The crux of the discussion was whether the progress of science has benefited from the lack of strict guidelines for reproducing results and whether some papers are still important because they described an interesting idea although were later found to be irreproducible or based on false data. I would say that definitely the field has progressed, although there is certainly an intrinsic (and expensive) cost in having papers that are irreproducible and scientists should certainly strive to make their results as easily reproducible as possible. In the absence of necessity, I'd go further to say that having easily reproducible research is so valuable that the contrary is simply not worth it.

Unrelated to "value of research", there is a notion of fairness that should be considered. If being flexible on accuracy is a "competitive advantage" of sorts in research, then it's important that this is made obvious. When the principle of accuracy is implied it becomes a hurdle to newcomers who would follow unnecessarily difficult path given they have no way of knowing a priori that being inaccurate (even slightly) is allowed, possible, or beneficial.