Science advances one funeral at a time

post by Cameron Berg (cameron-berg), Judd Rosenblatt (judd), Diogo de Lucena (diogo-de-lucena), AE Studio (AEStudio) · 2024-11-01T23:06:19.381Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

1 comment

Major scientific institutions talk a big game about innovation, but the reality is that many of the mechanisms designed to ensure quality—peer review, funding decisions, the academic hierarchy—explicitly incentivize incremental rather than revolutionary progress.^[1] 

Thomas Kuhn's now-famous notion of paradigm shifts was pointing at precisely this phenomenon. When scientists work within what Kuhn called "normal science," they're essentially solving low- to medium-stakes puzzles within their field's accepted framework. While it's fairly easy to evaluate the relative quality of work that occurs within any given paradigm, Kuhn argued it's nearly impossible for scientists to reason about the relative power of different paradigms for a given field—especially when they have already drank the paradigmatic kool-aid.

Max Planck captured this idea succinctly in his biting statement that "science advances one funeral at a time."^[2]

There is no shortage of examples of this occurring throughout the history of science:

• Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors wash their hands between patients. The medical establishment ridiculed and ostracized him until his career was destroyed. Today hand washing is basic medical practice.
• Barbara McClintock discovered genes could jump between chromosomes in maize in 1948. Geneticists dismissed her work for decades as it didn't fit their tidy theory of inheritance. She won the 1983 Nobel Prize for the same research they rejected.
• Barry Marshall grew confident that ulcers came from bacteria, not stress. When no one would listen, he drank H. pylori in 1984 to prove it. Won the 2005 Nobel Prize for work doctors had called absurd.
• Katalin Karikó lost her position and funding at UPenn in 1995 for pursuing mRNA research. She kept working on the "fringe" technology despite the setbacks. That same technology became the basis for the COVID-19 vaccines.
• Alfred Wegener proposed continents move across the Earth. Geologists mocked him until his death in 1930. Plate tectonics became accepted theory in the 1950s when the evidence became overwhelming.
• Lynn Margulis argued mitochondria evolved from ancient bacteria. Multiple journals rejected her paper before its 1967 publication. Her "crazy" theory is now the cornerstone of cell biology.
• Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals in 1982 and was told by double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling "there are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists." They kicked him out of his research group. In 2011, he got his own Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• Ludwig Boltzmann argued matter was made of atoms when most physicists believed in continuous matter. The ridicule contributed to his suicide in 1906. His atomic theory became physics canon within years.

The takeaway here is quite relevant (and not all that unfamiliar [LW · GW]) for alignment research. The still-young field attracts brilliant people who want to help solve the problem—and, by virtue of their technical chops, also care about their career capital. In attempting to check both of these boxes, many naturally gravitate toward "safer," already-somewhat-established research areas. However, when we polled [LW · GW] these very researchers, most acknowledged they don't think these sorts of approaches will actually solve the core underlying problems in time. This seems quite familiar to the old story of incentives driving forward incremental work when what is desperately needed are breakthroughs.

The alignment innovations that will be most-critical-in-hindsight will have come from people who were willing to step outside the bounds, question the premises everyone took for granted, and pursue ideas that initially sounded ridiculous. 

Got a crazy hunch that doesn't fit nicely into the current alignment landscape? Come talk to us at EAG Boston—or apply to work on your idea with us here.

1. ^{^}

   This is not to say that incremental progress is unimportant or that revolutionary progress is all that matters—only that mainstream science is mostly in the business of operating under established paradigms rather than creating new ones.

2. ^{^}

   While this is the better-remembered variant, Planck's actual statement was "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." But this would have made for too long a title.

1 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.