Comment by nritchie
2 days ago
You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another. One example is John Clauser, Nobel winning physicist, making a downright embarrassing attempt to "debunk climate change." (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGiCUiOMyQ) Another is Elon Musk, who seems to have an opinion on everything. Sometimes there is money or malice involved -often just hubris.
This was my brother's theory on why Steve Jobs didn't use traditional cancer treatments. The way he explained it to me was "Put yourself in his place: your whole life every time everyone said you were wrong about something and it was gonna destroy you you did it anyway and made a billion dollars. This time they were right and he was wrong but you can't blame him for playing the odds one last time."
Nobelists are so prone to it that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates. But it's certainly a strong marker that somebody had indeed tremendous scientific skills, and then failed utterly to apply that ability later.
> It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates.
See also: Engineer's disease.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
I'm kinda not a fan of the list there, since it tries to tar a few early-20th century folks with connections with ESP and parapsychology, but my understanding is those ideas weren't as kooky back then as they are now.
There's a podcast named "??? Tapes" (can't remember the ??? part) on the matter that seems to be blowing a lot of people's minds, some of whom were formerly very skeptical.
Elon is only an authority in the topic of raising money and mostly not trashing the work of the better men whose work he buys when he correctly infers he doesn't know enough.
You see this wherein he has mostly avoids ruining spacex because he knows he isn't a rocket scientist but absolutely wrecks Twitter because he thinks he understands it.
See also his delusions about mars, desire to use a minisub in a cave rescue so tight divers had to remove tanks, stopping services needed for 2FA, and suggestion for relay satelites between earth and mars to communucate faster.
He's absolutely intellectually average with a way above average personality, ego, and wallet.
> You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another.
You don't think one of the world's foremost statisticians should have felt that he was qualified to participate in a purely statistical argument?
No because it was medical as well. Anyone who thought it was purely statistical was by that thought alone unqualified
What's the medical part of the argument?
1 reply →
This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.
We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.
So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.
Rosalind Franklin didn't figure out how to crystalize the DNA, they were doing fiber diffraction. Similarly, the films were collected by her student Raymond Gosling. She shared her work at a department seminar and published it internally (Crick didn't "steal" it). And she was also published in the same exact journal of Nature.
The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparallel double helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.
Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.