>Most of the professional science we produce right now is bad. Seriously, pick a paper at random and see how well it holds up.
This is utter BS. Occasionally, a high-profile fraudster is found out, but the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny (not that there couldn't be more scrutiny!). Scientists are humans though, and a certain percentage are scumbags. Given how scum rises to the top in private enterprise, I'm actually surprised we don't see more fraud from top administrators at ivy league colleges.
Academia has always had to strike a balance between embracing new ideas and resisting quacks. It's not news that revolutionary ideas sometimes have a tough time gaining acceptance. Science provides a framework that makes accepting ideas that work almost inevitable, but sometimes it takes time.
Can millions of backyard scientists really move things forward? Only if they're actually scientists in the sense that they keep careful notes and can reproduce their findings. If you find something weird and can't reproduce it, why should anyone take your word for it? Science has to be replicable. You can't have some secret process that only works in your backyard. You need to be able to write down how you produced your result in a way that someone else can read it and then replicate it in their own backyard. Only then can it become useful.
Unfortunately, for some areas of science, there are certain requirements that are impossible to meet in your backyard. You can't experiment with creating anti-hydrogen in your backyard because you need a massive particle accelerator for that kind of work.
What is most direly needed is better lines of communication between academia and the public. Currently, most university laboratories' communication with the public is carefully managed by PR departments. You don't just talk to anyone you like about your latest work. The PR people must be involved, lest you say something embarrassing or fail to sufficiently puff up the university's image. This needs to end. Scientists are sometimes awkward communicators. Certain words sometimes mean very different things to them. We need to get the public used to letting the occasional gaff slide and we need to get scientists out of the PR hustle sideshow.
We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing, and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery. It lets the public know what's being done with their tax dollars and gives amateur scientists a chance to get up to speed on cutting edge research. It also bombards scientists with ideas. Even bad ones can be valuable prods in novel directions.
We don't need people saying that academia has failed and it's time for unpaid enthusiasts to pick up the mantle of progress, because that's not true and not how we move forward. We need to bridge the communications gap and unite the creativity of amateurs with the resources of professionals.
> the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny
I guess you didn't get the memo about the replication crisis?
But even leaving that aside, no, your statement here is not correct.
Even in "hard" sciences, many papers don't end up holding up under scrutiny. That's by design. The purpose of publishing a paper is not to document a result that is already known for sure to be right. It is to push the boundaries of current knowledge. Many such pushes don't pan out. We non-scientists don't see that because we never hear about those papers. We only hear about the ones that do pan out--or the ones that somebody hyped and marketed even though they hadn't panned out yet, and then got caught.
To take an example from a century ago: if you just look at Einstein's published papers on General Relativity, it looks pretty straightforward. He made a few tries all tending in the same direction and finally ended up with the right field equation, the one that we now know, a century later, to have extensive experimental confirmation. What you don't see is all the papers published by all the other physicists that were working on a relativistic theory of gravity--all of which were wrong and were dropped. But they were still published papers, because the standard of publication wasn't "this has to be right", but "this is worth considering to see if maybe it's right".
> We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing
We already have that. Scientists write books, do videos, have blogs. Unfortunately, scientists don't do a good job at communicating with the public, because they don't take care to distinguish what is actually established--by experimental confirmation and replication--from their own pet hypotheses that haven't yet been confirmed. (String theory in physics is a prime example: string theory makes no testable predictions at all, yet string theorists routinely talk about it as if it were proven fact.)
> and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery.
No, we don't need that, because nobody from the "peanut gallery" (meaning people who are interested in science but don't have a good understanding of our best current theories) has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing. Tales to the contrary are myths. For example, Einstein is often given as an example of a "peanut gallery" person who came up with a great theory; in fact he was nothing of the kind. He got a doctorate in physics right around the time he published his classic 1905 papers. He had a thorough understanding of the best current theories of the time in physics, and that was recognized by the top physicists of the time. He had close connections with top experimental physicists who kept him up to speed on the latest discoveries, and he worked with them to develop theoretical models for them (for example his work on Brownian motion and on specific heats). He was no "peanut gallery" person; he was a working scientist.
> No, we don't need that, because nobody from the "peanut gallery" (meaning people who are interested in science but don't have a good understanding of our best current theories) has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing.
That's clearly not true (as you'd expect from such a broad absolute) and it's apparent in the countless scientists who were inspired to pursue research because of ideas taken from art or science fiction.
Even really fringe ideas about things like ghosts, telepathy, or remote viewing, have been considered ideas worth pursuing by scientists and all kinds of paranormal concepts have been widely studied as a result.
You might also count as peanut gallery types scientists whose interests were mainly in one area, but who came up with some amazing ideas in others. For example, Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist who had studied physics and astronomy but first got the idea for plate tectonics just by noticing how well continents seemed to fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. When he eventually put the idea forward geologists rejected it.
> the countless scientists who were inspired to pursue research because of ideas taken from art or science fiction
Examples, please?
> Even really fringe ideas about things like ghosts, telepathy, or remote viewing, have been considered ideas worth pursuing by scientists and all kinds of paranormal concepts have been widely studied as a result.
And none of them have resulted in any actual science.
> When he eventually put the idea forward geologists rejected it.
Yes, because there was neither evidence that continents could move nor a known mechanism at the time for how continents could move. That's normal science. Things changed once enough evidence accumulated and once a feasible mechanism was proposed.
> And none of them have resulted in any actual science.
Not true. Many researchers around the globe have been involved in paranormal research. Remote viewing for example was studied at Stanford Research Institute as part of a government project (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project) and while the conclusions reached as a result of the research performed for that project and other similar efforts didn't confirm the existence or usefulness of psychic abilities, that doesn't mean that "actual science" wasn't done. Science is about getting us closer to the truth, and even a null result is a valuable contribution to that effort.
> Yes, because there was neither evidence that continents could move nor a known mechanism at the time for how continents could move. That's normal science.
It's also an example of someone from the peanut gallery having an idea worth looking into.
I don't think the expectation is that "Listening to screwball ideas from the public" means some rando will come up with extensive evidence or proofs that confirm a novel idea. I think it means that anyone with the curiosity and passion to think about a subject in depth can look at something and come up with a good idea even if they're not an expert in that area.
We can reject and ignore the ideas of non-experts and shame curious minds into silence, or we can embrace them and maybe even explore them or be inspired by them because if we do, we could discover something sooner than we might have otherwise.
Only one of these is any kind of potential scientific discovery: Szilard's hypothesis about the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. However, the article vastly overstates the case: Szilard did not "solve" the problem of a nuclear chain reaction. He just guessed that a chain reaction involving neutrons might be possible if a suitable element could be found. It's also not clear how much of an inspiration Wells' novel actually was; in the novel, the "atomic power" is based on radioactivity, which was discovered a decade and a half before Wells published, and which does not produce any chain reactions. Szilard's guess was certainly inspired, no question about that, but he might well have had it without ever knowing about Well's novel; learning about the discovery of the neutron would have been enough.
The other items are just new technologies based on already known scientific principles; none of them involved any new scientific discoveries.
> even a null result is a valuable contribution to that effort.
If it's a new null result, sure. But anyone who understood what was already known about fundamental forces at the time would have known that there would be a null result without having to do the research.
> It's also an example of someone from the peanut gallery having an idea worth looking into.
Huh? Wegener was a credentialed scientist; he wasn't "from the peanut gallery".
> Only one of these is any kind of potential scientific discovery
You've moved the goalposts here quite a bit from "nobody from the [peanut gallery] has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing" to "their ideas have never resulted in a new scientific discovery"
Stories of technologies that didn't exist and weren't at the time scientifically possible have inspired people to try to make fantasy reality and science has certainly progressed as a result.
> If it's a new null result, sure. But anyone who understood what was already known about fundamental forces at the time would have known that there would be a null result without having to do the research.
That isn't how science works. Why assume that physic abilities which seem to defy everything we know would be dependent on fundamental forces? I'm certain that physicists like Robert G. Jahn and other researchers were well aware of fundamental forces but still thought it was an idea worth pursuing, and of course many of the null results they got were new since the researchers were often doing pioneering research into topics that hadn't seen serious scientific study.
If the US government already had a mountain of prior scientific evidence showing that psychic abilities were non-existent or ineffective they wouldn't have poured such massive amounts of money into that research. What they did have was evidence that other countries (and the USSR in particular) were already doing this kind of research, but much of that was kept secret.
> Huh? Wegener was a credentialed scientist; he wasn't "from the peanut gallery".
I acknowledged that it might be stretching your definition as a scientist exploring a topic outside of his area of expertise.
> You've moved the goalposts here quite a bit from "nobody from the [peanut gallery] has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing" to "their ideas have never resulted in a new scientific discovery"
I haven't moved the goalposts at all. "Worth pursuing" means "results in a new scientific discovery". That's what you are claiming: that listening to the peanut gallery will give us some new scientific discoveries. I'm simply pointing out that it never has up to now.
> Why assume that physic abilities which seem to defy everything we know would be dependent on fundamental forces?
Because everything is dependent on fundamental forces. That's why they're called fundamental. Again, read the Carroll article referenced elsewhere in this discussion.
> If the US government already had a mountain of prior scientific evidence showing that psychic abilities were non-existent or ineffective they wouldn't have poured such massive amounts of money into that research.
Bad example. The US government, like all governments, does lots of things that are stupid and guaranteed to fail.
> a scientist exploring a topic outside of his area of expertise.
It wasn't outside his area of expertise. Many scientists in the course of their work gain expertise outside the narrow area in which they are credentialed.
It is also not impossible for a person with no scientific credentials to become an expert in a scientific field. But if they do that, they are no longer a member of the "peanut gallery". They are a working scientist. A historical example is Michael Faraday, who never had any scientific credentials at all, but made himself an expert in electricity and magnetism by intense study and experimentation.
> We can reject and ignore the ideas of non-experts and shame curious minds into silence, or we can embrace them and maybe even explore them or be inspired by them because if we do, we could discover something sooner than we might have otherwise.
I don't share your optimism here, and I don't think we're going to reach agreement on this point.
Yeah, even some of the uninteresting results we got have been classified. I wouldn't be surprised if some research is still ongoing in secret. I remember reading about this: https://time.com/4721715/phenomena-annie-jacobsen but that seems like it's more about intuition and gut feelings than magic.
This is utter BS. Occasionally, a high-profile fraudster is found out, but the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny (not that there couldn't be more scrutiny!). Scientists are humans though, and a certain percentage are scumbags. Given how scum rises to the top in private enterprise, I'm actually surprised we don't see more fraud from top administrators at ivy league colleges.
Academia has always had to strike a balance between embracing new ideas and resisting quacks. It's not news that revolutionary ideas sometimes have a tough time gaining acceptance. Science provides a framework that makes accepting ideas that work almost inevitable, but sometimes it takes time.
Can millions of backyard scientists really move things forward? Only if they're actually scientists in the sense that they keep careful notes and can reproduce their findings. If you find something weird and can't reproduce it, why should anyone take your word for it? Science has to be replicable. You can't have some secret process that only works in your backyard. You need to be able to write down how you produced your result in a way that someone else can read it and then replicate it in their own backyard. Only then can it become useful.
Unfortunately, for some areas of science, there are certain requirements that are impossible to meet in your backyard. You can't experiment with creating anti-hydrogen in your backyard because you need a massive particle accelerator for that kind of work.
What is most direly needed is better lines of communication between academia and the public. Currently, most university laboratories' communication with the public is carefully managed by PR departments. You don't just talk to anyone you like about your latest work. The PR people must be involved, lest you say something embarrassing or fail to sufficiently puff up the university's image. This needs to end. Scientists are sometimes awkward communicators. Certain words sometimes mean very different things to them. We need to get the public used to letting the occasional gaff slide and we need to get scientists out of the PR hustle sideshow.
We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing, and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery. It lets the public know what's being done with their tax dollars and gives amateur scientists a chance to get up to speed on cutting edge research. It also bombards scientists with ideas. Even bad ones can be valuable prods in novel directions.
We don't need people saying that academia has failed and it's time for unpaid enthusiasts to pick up the mantle of progress, because that's not true and not how we move forward. We need to bridge the communications gap and unite the creativity of amateurs with the resources of professionals.