This always occurs to me. How many great ideas are out there, that our future will accept as totally normal, but are now just "crackpot" ideas being pursued by weird people. (and a shout out to all the weird people pursuing crackpot ideas: I have no idea how you handle this much rejection, but I'm glad you can).
And how many never got accepted, despite being right? How many times has Academia failed the scientific process and rejected a correct hypothesis?
That's not even the full content of the frequency cell. What you also need to know are the people who left or were dissuaded because of what they ran into. Eg the mRNA researcher made it clear she almost left; you can be guaranteed if she didn't, others did. It's not the papers that were rejected, it's the ones never written.
We still have this sort of just world narrative about science that I no longer see as warranted. Maybe it was true in the past but not anymore.
Agree completely. Unfortunately expressing any doubts about "Science" these days gets you lumped in with the deniers and anti-vaxxers. Trying to explain "no, I'm totally with the Scientific Method, it's just I don't think Academia does a good job of following it" doesn't seem to cut through that.
And how many never got accepted, despite being right? How many times has Academia failed the scientific process and rejected a correct hypothesis?