[mandevil]

No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten.

Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.

[jvanderbot]

The stubborn correct few may become famous, but they also had to be stubborn first.

And those who defied something we know to be true now may have also done great work elsewhere before they made that mistake, and that stubbornness served them.

I dislike looking at those who win the fame lottery and trying to say they were never wrong and their opponents were never right. They just got one really big thing really right and stuck with it.

[mandevil]

Oh believe me, that's Gould's main point, and the reason that he kept writing these monthly essays for three decades.

Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to successfully categorize animals (1) reminds us that we are making the same sorts of mistakes, and that a century from now they will look back at our quaint beliefs about X, Y, and Z and say what fools that we are. But this is why stubbornness is a double-edged sword. Sometimes being stubborn means that you can see the truth when no one around you can, and sometimes it means that you are the person whose funeral causes science to advance one Planck unit forward. (2) The only difference is whether you are correct!

1: He didn't realize that Darwinian common descent and evolution were the reasons that his scheme worked for life- those ideas became commonly accepted almost a century after his death- and that rocks, not having any sort of common descent, couldn't be mapped into that sort of hierarchy. He himself didn't spend that much time on the subject, he mostly just asserted that they would fit into the same scheme because he was revealing God's True Law, and it would therefore have to be in rocks just like in living things, but several of his followers spent their lives trying to fit rocks into that same sort of scheme and it just fell apart every time.

2: Stubbornness is not necessarily related to age- there seems to have been no correlation between age and acceptance of either evolution or plate tectonics- so Planck's Principle is a little loose.

[exceptione]

> his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.

It strikes me that nowadays that would result in outrage about "wokeness and cancel culture".