When good scientists go bad?

[Tessa K]

Nobel prize winners are lucky. They had a hunch and it turned out to be true.

Good scientists aren't lucky. There's no such thing as a hunch. It's a combination of experience and talent that lets them identify potentially fruitful lines of research and then put in many many hours of work. There's a certain amount of confirmation bias in calling them 'lucky'; there will be many ideas/theories etc that turned out to be fruitless in their careers.

It also helps to be a white male in a well-funded lab. Which isn't luck either.

I'm a bit confused by this.

Call it a "hunch" or a "potentially fruitful line of research", science can nevertheless only be judged after you've put in the many many hours of work. Maybe "luck" isn't quite the right word, but I don't think it's the case that the Nobel Prizes simply go to the "best" or "most hard-working" scientists - what label would you give to the remaining variation?

There is of course a certain amount of chance involved with the skill, hard work and experience but I'm always reluctant to use the word luck as it has woo connotations that ignores the human effort.

[Sciolus]

Top-flight success in any highly competitive field requires three things: talent, hard work and luck. A shortfall in one area can partly be made up for by an excess in the others, but if a competitor has more, you're nobody. There are plenty of talented, hard-working bands who never get their big break because they don't get spotted by the right person at the right time. There are plenty of potential Nobel prize winners who don't get started because they are born in a sink estate in Grimsby or a back-of-beyond village in Burkina Faso or are female in Afghanistan.

In what way is being white or male not a matter of luck?

(Maybe you prefer "chance" or "fickle whim of fate" but it's different words for the same thing.)

[Tessa K]

Top-flight success in any highly competitive field requires three things: talent, hard work and luck. A shortfall in one area can partly be made up for by an excess in the others, but if a competitor has more, you're nobody. There are plenty of talented, hard-working bands who never get their big break because they don't get spotted by the right person at the right time. There are plenty of potential Nobel prize winners who don't get started because they are born in a sink estate in Grimsby or a back-of-beyond village in Burkina Faso or are female in Afghanistan.

In what way is being white or male not a matter of luck?

(Maybe you prefer "chance" or "fickle whim of fate" but it's different words for the same thing.)

See my post above for the connotations of 'luck'.

[Bird on a Fire]

Top-flight success in any highly competitive field requires three things: talent, hard work and luck. A shortfall in one area can partly be made up for by an excess in the others, but if a competitor has more, you're nobody. There are plenty of talented, hard-working bands who never get their big break because they don't get spotted by the right person at the right time. There are plenty of potential Nobel prize winners who don't get started because they are born in a sink estate in Grimsby or a back-of-beyond village in Burkina Faso or are female in Afghanistan.

In what way is being white or male not a matter of luck?

(Maybe you prefer "chance" or "fickle whim of fate" but it's different words for the same thing.)

See my post above for the connotations of 'luck'.

By "woo connotations" do you mean things like good luck charms?

I propose "stochastic variation" as a suitably scientific, value-free term.

[dyqik]

In what way is being white or male not a matter of luck?

The probability of me not being white, male and English (born) are, and always have been, zero. Because if I wasn't, I'd be someone else.

ETA: A priori probability/luck doesn't necessarily make a whole lot sense when you are talking about selection biases like this.

[Tessa K]

Top-flight success in any highly competitive field requires three things: talent, hard work and luck. A shortfall in one area can partly be made up for by an excess in the others, but if a competitor has more, you're nobody. There are plenty of talented, hard-working bands who never get their big break because they don't get spotted by the right person at the right time. There are plenty of potential Nobel prize winners who don't get started because they are born in a sink estate in Grimsby or a back-of-beyond village in Burkina Faso or are female in Afghanistan.

In what way is being white or male not a matter of luck?

(Maybe you prefer "chance" or "fickle whim of fate" but it's different words for the same thing.)

See my post above for the connotations of 'luck'.

By "woo connotations" do you mean things like good luck charms?

I propose "stochastic variation" as a suitably scientific, value-free term.

That and the fact that luck is considered an external, often supernatural force

[Bird on a Fire]

Fair point.

I guess what I'm calling luck is really better thought of as residual variation leading to better-than-average outcomes, rather than anything spooky.

But I think stuff like serendipity and happenstance and odd coincidences can be important - Feynman makes much of them in his (somewhat embellished) books, for instance. Or have I been reading too much Kuhn and Feyerabend?

[Tessa K]

I agree. I just have an instinctive aversion to 'luck". Of course, the skill is in recognising opportunities that others might not pursue

[Bird on a Fire]

For sure. Thanks for the replies. I've heard those pithy quotes like "you make your own luck" and "the harder you work, the luckier you get" etc., and I think there's definitely some truth in it. Although (and I say this having just won a "best student prize" at a small conference, lol) I also reckon stochasticity is probably responsible for a greater proportion of variance in prizes and competitions than in other parts of scientific endeavour like collecting and publishing data.

In future I shall wow my friends by upbraiding their references to "luck", and talk about residual stochastic variation instead.

[Sciolus]

I agree. I just have an instinctive aversion to 'luck". Of course, the skill is in recognising opportunities that others might not pursue

What about people who, not as a result of any choices they've made, don't get those opportunities in the first place?

[Tessa K]

I agree. I just have an instinctive aversion to 'luck". Of course, the skill is in recognising opportunities that others might not pursue

What about people who, not as a result of any choices they've made, don't get those opportunities in the first place?

That's not luck, that's the way society works against them.

[Sciolus]

Of course, but from the point of view of the individual, when society works against some people and for others, which side of the fence you land on is luck.

[dyqik]

Of course, but from the point of view of the individual, when society works against some people and for others, which side of the fence you land on is luck.

No, it isn't. It's not luck that I, a white man, was born a white man. It's just a historical fact about the thing that I call me. The child of my white parents would always be white. That their first child was male is a matter of probability, but if I'd been born female, I'd be a different person, with different experiences and even a different name.

From the view of an individual, the fact that that individual has that individual's identity is not a matter of odds or probability. It's the only way things can be.

[noggins]

Nobel prize winners are lucky. They had a hunch and it turned out to be true.

Good scientists aren't lucky. There's no such thing as a hunch. It's a combination of experience and talent that lets them identify potentially fruitful lines of research and then put in many many hours of work. There's a certain amount of confirmation bias in calling them 'lucky'; there will be many ideas/theories etc that turned out to be fruitless in their careers.

It also helps to be a white male in a well-funded lab. Which isn't luck either.

But surely at the cutting edge of a topic there are a handful of hunches - A,B,C,D,E, At the moment they are all equally plausible.

One scientist decides to investigate Hunch 'A' first . Another takes a punt on 'B'.. etc.

Turns out 'D' is the breakthrough and the scientist that picked that one looks Great. But are they really any better than the others and is their opinion on the next subject any more valid ?


ahah - "Fortune" is a better term than "Luck"

[Tessa K]

Nobel prize winners are lucky. They had a hunch and it turned out to be true.

Good scientists aren't lucky. There's no such thing as a hunch. It's a combination of experience and talent that lets them identify potentially fruitful lines of research and then put in many many hours of work. There's a certain amount of confirmation bias in calling them 'lucky'; there will be many ideas/theories etc that turned out to be fruitless in their careers.

It also helps to be a white male in a well-funded lab. Which isn't luck either.

But surely at the cutting edge of a topic there are a handful of hunches - A,B,C,D,E, At the moment they are all equally plausible.

One scientist decides to investigate Hunch 'A' first . Another takes a punt on 'B'.. etc.

Turns out 'D' is the breakthrough and the scientist that picked that one looks Great. But are they really any better than the others and is their opinion on the next subject any more valid ?


ahah - "Fortune" is a better term than "Luck"

Fortune is no different from luck. Fortuna was a goddess, after all.

[noggins]

Fortune is an external force, luck is intrinsic.

[dyqik]

The term you are looking for is "historical accident".

[Tessa K]

The term you are looking for is "historical accident".

Except that nothing happens in isolation. History is a process, not a series of isolated incidents

[dyqik]

The term you are looking for is "historical accident".

Except that nothing happens in isolation. History is a process, not a series of isolated incidents

That's not what I mean by historical accident in this sense. I mean a single historical fact that was the outcome of a (at least partially) chance event, and which the rest of historical flow and process happened around.

In the proverbial "for the want of a nail", I mean the absence of the nail. Not the historical process that led to the large consequences of that. A battle being lost because a message didn't arrive, because the rider fell, because the horse lost a shoe as a result of the nail being missing is more a result of systematic fragility against chance events, rather than the random event itself. And so the battle outcome shouldn't be seen as an accident as such, because although this particular chain of events was triggered by an accident, there are thousands of other contingent chains of events that also had to happen for that particular historical accident to be relevant.

In terms of the five scientists, who got interested in which problem, who happened to run into a colleague and have a key conversation, and who got funding to pursue their idea can easily be viewed as a chance event subject to luck. In detail though, it's a combination of a huge number of contingent events and chains of events with probabilistic elements (who's bus was late so that they started talking to a colleague at the bus stop, etc. etc.). Some of which are affected by skill, some by social systems, etc. etc.

[Tessa K]

The term you are looking for is "historical accident".

Except that nothing happens in isolation. History is a process, not a series of isolated incidents

That's not what I mean by historical accident in this sense. I mean a single historical fact that was the outcome of a (at least partially) chance event, and which the rest of historical flow and process happened around.

In the proverbial "for the want of a nail", I mean the absence of the nail. Not the historical process that led to the large consequences of that. A battle being lost because a message didn't arrive, because the rider fell, because the horse lost a shoe as a result of the nail being missing is more a result of systematic fragility against chance events, rather than the random event itself. And so the battle outcome shouldn't be seen as an accident as such, because although this particular chain of events was triggered by an accident, there are thousands of other contingent chains of events that also had to happen for that particular historical accident to be relevant.

In terms of the five scientists, who got interested in which problem, who happened to run into a colleague and have a key conversation, and who got funding to pursue their idea can easily be viewed as a chance event subject to luck. In detail though, it's a combination of a huge number of contingent events and chains of events with probabilistic elements (who's bus was late so that they started talking to a colleague at the bus stop, etc. etc.). Some of which are affected by skill, some by social systems, etc. etc.

Yes, pretty much

[shpalman]

Luc Montagnier is another Nobel recipient we've discussed a few times. He's now into anti-vaccinationism and homeopathy.

IMHO getting a Nobel may well mean that the winner has embraced ideas which were far ahead of the rest of their colleagues. That's a good thing but someone like Montagnier may also be be attracted to other ideas that are rightly not accepted by their peers (but be unable to tell the difference).

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been awarded the 2023 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their contributions to RNA biology that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines that have changed the course of the Covid pandemic.

On Twitter

So whenever some antivax moron comes out with but luC moNTagniEr Is alSO agaiNst VACciNeS aND HE's GoT a noBEL prIZE you can point to the people behind the covid vaccine having Nobel prizes too.

[Opti]

There must be some mistake. Shouldn't this prize have gone to Robert Malone?

[Imrael]

Not a scientist going wrong (as far as I know) but related to the luck/fortune discussion. I did undergraduate biochem from 1975-1978, and a key question at the time was how ADP was turned into ATP. I can't remember the main theories I was taught, but there was a dismissive/humorous mention of "oh - and I suppose theres Peter Mitchel's chemiosmosis idea". This would have been in my first year, and in the year I finish Peter Mitchell was awarded a nobel prize for chemiosmosis.

His career is interesting - he stalled in mainstream academia and funded a private institute where he and his partner carried on the work. I heard at the time that he was a stubborn and difficult person, although cant confirm. But certainly there were unlikely events in that chain - the ill health that made him leave Edinbugh, the ability/funding to carry on privately, quite possibly his partnership with Jennifer Moyle.

(I've always thought the Glynn Institute might have been the model for the private lab in P D James' "An unsuitable job for a woman")

[jimbob]

There must be some mistake. Shouldn't this prize have gone to Robert Malone?

One of my twitter mutuals made him a compensation medal.

https://twitter.com/qandamazon/status/1 ... 56851?s=20

[Opti]