Comment by godelski
2 days ago
> I feel like this sentence is in every article for a reason.
Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts. You don't shift the paradigm by following the paradigm.
I think we do a lot of disservice by dismissing the role of the dark horses. They are necessary. Like you suggest, there are many that fail, probably most do. But considering the impact, even just a small percentage succeeding warrants significant encouragement. Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. In research, most things fail. But the only real failure is the ones you don't learn from (currently it is very hard to publish negative results. Resulting it not even being attempted. The system encourages "safe" research, which by its nature, can only be incremental. Fine, we want this, but it's ironic considering how many works get rejected due to "lack of novelty")
> Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts.
This is wrong. It's not inherent in the meaning of the word "breakthrough" that a breakthrough can occur only when someone has gone against the grain, and there are countless breakthroughs that have not gone against the grain. See: the four-minute mile; the Manhattan Project; the sequencing of the human genome; the decipherment of Linear B; research into protein folding. These breakthroughs have largely been the result of being first to find the solution to the problem or cross the theshold. That's it. That doesn't mean the people who managed to do that were working against the grain.
> Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure.
I don't know which "we" you're referring to, but just about everybody would agree with the statement that it's good to think creatively, experiment, and pursue either new lines of inquiry or old lines in new ways, so, again, your claim seems clearly wrong.
If you're discussing just scientific research, though, sure, there are plenty of incentives that encourage labs and PIs to make the safe choice rather than the bold or innovative choice.
Sounds like an argument over semantics and the meaning of the word "breakthrough".
Running the 4 minute mile, climbing everest - those are achievements rather than breakthroughs.
I'd also class the atomic bomb as an achievement - it was the expected/desired result of a massive investment program - though no doubt there were many breakthroughs required in order to achieve that result.
Yup, it's semantics, because the comment I answered stresses "by definition." My point is partly that that isn't the definition.
Even if we decide that breakthroughs require some kind of discontinuity, break, or, as the comment said, "paradigm shift," such discontinuity isn't necessarily "against the grain," as this would imply some kind of resistance to or rejection of "the grain."
2 replies →
Yea but this is HN where everyone is a disruptor and doesn’t play by the rules
> Often with reasons about fear of failure.
If that were it, I would agree.
But I don't agree. I think people who discourage going against the grain are more fearful of the loss of economic input. It's unproductive to do something you know will fail; it's very expensive to encourage that failure.
Paradigm shifts require an accumulation of mundane experiments that present contradictions in a model. The renegade hacker isn't enough.
> Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain.
They are what Gladwell calls, in "David and Goliath", being unreasonable in the face of so-called "prevailing wisdom".