The SoS Library
The SoS Library
A collection of essays on creativity and diversity of thought in science
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” (Richard Feynman)
The following collection of essays all speak in some way to Seeds of Science’s mission of promoting greater creativity and diversity of thought in science (and more generally). We hope this “library” provides a valuable resource for scientists young and old in need of inspiration, insight, or just an enjoyable read.
We also hope to update and expand this collection over time—feel free to comment below or email us (info@theseedsofscience.org) if you know of any essays (your own or someone else’s) that would be a good fit for the library.
Enjoy!
Table of Contents
“The Control Group is Out of Control” by Scott Alexander (2014)
“How to Build a Motivated Research Group” by Uri Alon (2009)
“How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem” by Uri Alon (2013)
“How Do People Get New Ideas?” by Isaac Asimov (1959)
“Science & Speculation” by Adrian Currie (2023)
“In Defense of Basic Science” by Kian Faizi (2022)
“The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” by Abraham Flexner (1939)
“Science in the Age of Selfies” by Donald Geman and Stuart Geman (2016)
“What You Can’t Say” by Paul Graham (2004)
“The Top Idea in your Mind” by Paul Graham (2010)
“The Risk of Discovery” by Paul Graham (2017)
“Beyond Smart” by Paul Graham (2021)
“You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming (1986)
“The rise and fall of peer review” by Adam Mastroianni (2022)
“An invitation to a secret society” by Adam Mastroianni (2023)
“Science is a strong-link problem” by Adam Mastroianni (2023)
“Who's got the guts to go to the moon?” by Adam Mastroianni (2024)
“Systems of (non-)diversity” by Douglas Medin, Bethany Ojalehto, Ananda Marin, and Megan Bang (2017)
“A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science” by Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu (2022)
“The importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin Schwartz (2008)
“Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2021)
“The Scientific Virtues” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2022)
“Reality is Very Weird and You Need to be Prepared for That” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2022)
“Unconceived alternatives and conservatism in science: the impact of
professionalization, peer-review, and Big Science” by Kyle Stanford (2015)
“Night Science” by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher (2019)
Seeds of Science Section
“Announcing the SoS Research Collective” by Roger’s Bacon (2024)
“Research Papers used to have style. What happened?” by Roger’s Bacon (2022)
“The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius” by Roger’s Bacon (SoS co-founder) (2021)
“Randomness in Science” by Roger’s Bacon, Sergey Samonsau, and Dario Krpan (all SoS co-founders) (2021)
“The Seeds of Science Manifesto” by Roger’s Bacon, Sergey Samonsau, and Dario Krpan (all SoS co-founders) (2021)
“Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants: A Quest for Disconnected Academic Psychology” by Dario Krpan (2020)
“Beyond a Dream: The Practical Foundations of Disconnected Psychology” by Dario Krpan (SoS co-founder) (2024)
“Amateur hour: Improving knowledge diversity in psychological and behavioral science by harnessing contributions from amateurs” by Erik Mohlhenrich and Dario Krpan (SoS co-founder) (2021)
1. “The Control Group is Out of Control” by Scott Alexander (2014)
Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of Staring is my favorite parapsychology paper ever and sends me into fits of nervous laughter every time I read it.
The backstory: there is a classic parapsychological experiment where a subject is placed in a room alone, hooked up to a video link. At random times, an experimenter stares at them menacingly through the video link. The hypothesis is that this causes their galvanic skin response (a physiological measure of subconscious anxiety) to increase, even though there is no non-psychic way the subject could know whether the experimenter was staring or not.
Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman, in accordance with nominative determinism is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such different results.
The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.
The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.
2. “How to Build a Motivated Research Group” by Uri Alon (2009)
Most students begin graduate school or a postdoc full of passion for science. They are given the resources to devote themselves to solving fascinating puzzles. Why is it, then, that in some groups students thrive, can’t wait to come to the lab in the morning, can’t stop thinking about their projects, and feel a sense of personal and intellectual growth, whereas in the lab next door, students after two years are depressed, unmotivated, and, by the end, are loath to even look at their own papers?
[…]
Social connectedness is a major motivating factor for many scientists. Though there is a romantic notion that scientists are solitary people, there are many people that think best in discussions and gain great satisfaction from helping others. And sometimes it’s even simpler than that: a lot of lab work is dull, and having people to joke with and chat to can turn a mundane day into a fantastic one. A colleague of mine said that she became a scientist because she likes scientists and enjoys their way of looking at the world. Our connection to a community and a culture provides us context and empathy during our struggles, celebrations and acknowledgment during our successes.
3. “How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem” by Uri Alon (2013)
A common mistake made in choosing problems is taking the first problem that comes to mind. Since a typical project takes years even it if seems doable in months, rapid choice leads to much frustration and bitterness in our profession. It takes time to find a good problem, and every week spent in choosing one can save months or years later on. In my lab, we have a rule for new students and postdocs: Do not commit to a problem before 3 months have elapsed. In these 3 months the new student or postdoc reads, discusses, and plans. The state of mind is focused on being rather than doing. The temptation to start working arises, but a rule is a rule. After 3 months (or more), a celebration marks the beginning of the research phase—with a well-planned project.
Taking time is not always easy. One must be supported to resist the following urge: ‘‘Oh, we must produce—let’s not waste time, and start working.’’ The author is under no illusion that everyone is free to choose their own problems, or has the time needed for an extended search. Taking time can be especially difficult when funding is insufficient and grant deadlines approach. In such difficult situations, nurturing is not enough, and you need to find support and do all you can to get into a better situation. Even so, for many of us, dealing with the difficulties of running a lab, taking time to choose problems can make a huge difference.
4. “How Do People Get New Ideas?” by Isaac Asimov (1959)
But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.
If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.
For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.
5. “Science & Speculation” by Adrian Currie (2023)
Despite wide recognition that speculation is critical for successful science, philosophers have attended little to it. When they have, speculation has been characterized in narrowly epistemic terms: a hypothesis is speculative due to its (lack of) evidential support. These ‘evidence-frst’ accounts provide little guidance for what makes speculation productive or egregious, nor how to foster the former while avoiding the latter. I examine how scientists discuss speculation and identify various functions speculations play. On this basis, I develop a ‘function-frst’ account of speculation. This analysis grounds a richer discussion of when speculation is egregious and when it is productive, based in both fne-grained analysis of the speculation’s purpose, and what I call the ‘epistemic situation’ scientists face.
6. “In Defense of Basic Science” by Kian Faizi (2022)
This debate is as old as science itself—and yet I can’t help but feel suspicious of those who deride basic research as foolishly romantic. I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about Michael Faraday who, when challenged by an audience member to justify the value of some discovery, retorted: “Madam, what is the use of a newborn child?” Clearly, it would be ridiculous to judge a person’s future potential based solely on their defenselessness as an infant. Similarly, when science aggressively optimizes for immediate utility above all else, it risks missing a wealth of mysteries we have yet to understand or even conceive. How much is a fact really worth? What’s the going rate for a flash of insight, a new model in biophysics, or an entire branch of mathematics? Why did Newton invent calculus, Darwin follow finches, and Einstein ponder gravity? The most impactful advances in human history were born of curiosity alone. And while their initial value is difficult to formulate in dollars and cents, their ensuing practical ramifications have revolutionized our lives. “People cannot foresee the future well enough to predict what’s going to develop from basic research,” says George Smoot, a 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics. “If we only did applied research, we would still be making better spears.”
7. “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” by Abraham Flexner (1939)
Is it not curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women—old and young—detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.
[…]
We make ourselves no promises, but we cherish the hope that the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge will prove to have consequences in the future as in the past. Speculative research, the kind that is fundamental to the advancement of human understanding of the world of nature and of humanity, is not a product that can be made to order.
8. “Science in the Age of Selfies” by Donald Geman and Stuart Geman (2016)
Another change from 1965, related to these same technologies, is in the way we communicate, or, more to the point, how much we communicate. Easy travel, many more meetings, relentless emails, and, in general, a low threshold for interaction have created a veritable epidemic of communication. Evolution relies on genetic drift and the creation of a diverse gene pool. Are ideas so different? Is there a risk of cognitive inbreeding? Communication is necessary, but, if there is too much communication, it starts to look like everyone is working in pretty much the same direction. A current example is the mass migration to “deep learning” in machine intelligence.
In fact, maybe it has become too easy to collaborate. Great ideas rarely come from teams. There is, of course, a role for “big science” (the Apollo program, the Human Genome Project, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider), but teamwork cannot supplant individual ideas. The great physicist Richard Feynman remarked that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” In a 2014 letter to The Guardian newspaper (11), 30 scientists, concerned about today’s scientific culture, noted that it was the work of mavericks like Feynman that defined 20th century science. Science of the past 50 years seems to be more defined by big projects than by big ideas.
[…]
The response of the scientific community to the changing performance metrics has been entirely rational: We spend much of our time taking “professional selfies.” In fact, many of us spend more time announcing ideas than formulating them. Being busy needs to be visible, and deep thinking is not. Academia has largely become a small-idea factory. Rewarded for publishing more frequently, we search for “minimum publishable units.” Not surprisingly, many papers turn out to be early “progress reports,” quickly superseded. At the same time, there is hugely increased pressure to secure outside funding, converting most of our best scientists into government contractors. As Roberta Ness [author of The Creativity Crisis (8)] points out, the incentives for exploring truly novel ideas have practically disappeared. All this favors incremental advances, and young scientists contend that being original is just too risky.
9. “What You Can’t Say” by Paul Graham (2004)
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
10. “The Top Idea in your Mind” by Paul Graham (2010)
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
11. “The Risk of Discovery” by Paul Graham (2017)
The brief essay is reprinted here in its entirety:
Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.
Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.
But maybe there is a simpler explanation. Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we think. Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. But that's because we know how things turned out. In Newton's day the three problems seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been working on it. And alchemy and theology were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would describe as "huge, if true."
Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.
12. “Beyond Smart” by Paul Graham (2021)
Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Viewed from that direction, the question seems a rather depressing one. But there's another way to look at it that's not just more optimistic, but more interesting as well. Clearly intelligence is not the only ingredient in having new ideas. What are the other ingredients? Are they things we could cultivate?
13. “You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming (1986)
There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.
[…]
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
14. “The rise and fall of peer review” by Adam Mastroianni (2022)
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
15. “An invitation to a secret society” by Adam Mastroianni (2023)
Right now, professional science is like a world where every organism is trying to be a mammal. Mammals are great: milk-producing glands, body hair, ears that have three bones in them, what’s not to like? But if you’ve only got mammals, you’re in big trouble. Monocultures are fragile and prone to collapse because every single organism has identical weaknesses. What you need is an ecosystem—hawks, sea urchins, fungi, various types of fern, and so on.
Creating diverse ecosystems is hard for humans because they like to do whatever everyone else is doing, even when they know it’s wrong. So when you’re trying to be a mammal and you see someone else trying to be a lizard, you might think they’re just doing a bad job being a mammal. “You should try having little hairs all over your body,” you might tell them. But a lizard isn’t a bad mammal. It’s a lizard. Its job is to eat flies and bask on rocks.
What I’m saying is: be the lizard. The mammals—that is, mainstream scientists, the ones who get PhDs and professor jobs—have their niche covered. What we need is more people doing botany in their backyards. We need basement chemists. We need amateur geologists and meteorologists.
16. “Science is a strong-link problem” by Adam Mastroianni (2023)
In the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all. The history of science is littered with the skulls of dead theories. No more phlogiston nor phlegm, no more luminiferous ether, no more geocentrism, no more measuring someone’s character by the bumps on their head, no more barnacles magically turning into geese, no more invisible rays shooting out of people’s eyes, no more plum pudding, and, perhaps saddest of all, no more little dudes curled up inside sperm cells.
Our current scientific beliefs are not a random mix of the dumbest and smartest ideas from all of human history, and that’s because the smarter ideas stuck around while the dumber ones kind of went nowhere, on average—the hallmark of a strong-link problem. That doesn’t mean better ideas win immediately. Worse ideas can soak up resources and waste our time, and frauds can mislead us temporarily. It can take longer than a human lifetime to figure out which ideas are better, and sometimes progress only happens when old scientists die. But when a theory does a better job of explaining the world, it tends to stick around.
“Who's got the guts to go to the moon?” by Adam Mastroianni (2024)
Everybody’s trying to do a moonshot these days. A moonshot for covid, a moonshot for climate change, a moonshot for brain maps, a moonshot for semiconductors, a moonshot for, uh, teenagers building robots.
People apparently agree that there are big problems in science and we need to shake things up: bring on the breakthroughs! Bold, transformative ideas! Let’s revolutionize science!
But here’s the thing: despite all these supposed moonshots, nobody has gone to the moon. As far as I can tell, nobody is even aiming at the moon. All this noise about moonshots is, at best, a farce. At worst, it’s a con.
18. “Systems of (non-)diversity” by Douglas Medin, Bethany Ojalehto, Ananda Marin, and Megan Bang (2017)
We take social, educational, and behavioural sciences as having the fundamental goal of identifying and understanding the range of human potential in forms of interaction with physical, biological, and social environments. Yet, almost paradoxically, current normative practices in these sciences appear to be directly antithetical to this aim. We consider three interrelated dimensions of diversity (or lack thereof) and suggest that they conspire to create something of a crisis for the science of human behaviour. The three dimensions are (1) who gets studied (sample non-diversity), (2) the theory and methods used (methodological non-diversity), and (3) who directs and controls the research (researcher non-diversity). These facets of diversity operate within a larger system that regulates the publication process, research grants and standards for promotion and tenure, and this system can serve not only to reflect but also to amplify diversity or non-diversity.
The central thesis of this Perspective is that these various dimensions of diversity, including that of both the researchers and the researched, are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. That is to say, the same forces that lead to a lack of diversity in research methods and narrow sampling of research participants also tend to undermine researcher diversity. Conversely, encouraging and supporting researcher diversity works to encourage sample and methodological variability. In short, these factors work together to produce either strong diversity or extreme narrowness as two ‘attractor states’
19. “A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science” by Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu (2022)
How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.
20. “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin Schwartz (2008)
We don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.
21. “Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2021)
Do we really think this mild stimulant [coffee] could be responsible for the Scientific Revolution? Well to be entirely clear, we aren’t the first ones to make this argument. Here’s a Huffington Post article reviewing several books and essays on the same idea, including one by Malcolm Gladwell. And in Weinberg and Bealer’s The World of Caffeine, the authors tell us that the members of the Royal Society, “had something in common with Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who experimented with LSD, in that they were dabbling in the use of a new and powerful drug unlike anything their countrymen had ever seen. Surviving recorded accounts confirm that the heavily reboiled sediment-ridden coffee of the day was not enjoyed for its taste, but was consumed exclusively for its pharmacological benefits.”
22. “The Scientific Virtues” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2022)
Science education usually starts with teaching students different tools and techniques, methods for conducting research.
This is wrong. Science education should begin with the scientific virtues.
Teaching someone painting techniques without teaching them composition will lead to lifeless paintings. Giving business advice to someone who lacks civic duty will lead to parasitic companies. Teaching generals strategy without teaching them honor gets you warlords. So teaching someone the methods of science without teaching them the virtues will lead to dull, pointless projects. Virtue is the key to happy, creative, important, meaningful research.
The scientific virtues are:
Stupidity
Arrogance
Laziness
Carefreeness
Beauty
Rebellion
Humor
These virtues are often the opposite of the popular image of what a scientist should look like. People think scientists should be intelligent. But while it’s helpful to be clever, it’s more important to be stupid. People think scientists are authority figures. Really, scientists have to defy authority — the best scientists are one step (or sometimes zero steps) away from being anarchists. People think scientists are arrogant, and this is true, but we worry that scientists are not arrogant enough.
Anyone who practices these virtues is a scientist, even if they work night shifts at the 7-11 and learned everything they know about statistics from twitter. Anyone who betrays these virtues is no scientist at all, even if they’ve got tenure at Princeton and have a list of publications long enough to run from Cambridge to New Haven.
“Reality is Very Weird and You Need to be Prepared for That” by SlimeMoldTimeMold (2022)
Reality is very weird, and you need to be prepared for that. Like the hypothetical Holst, most of us would be tempted to discard this argument entirely out of hand. But this weird argument is correct, because reality is itself very weird. Looking at this “contradictory” evidence and responding with these weird bespoke splitting arguments turns out to be the right move, at least in this case.
Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated.
24. “Unconceived alternatives and conservatism in science: the impact of professionalization, peer-review, and Big Science” by Kyle Stanford (2015)
Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way.
25. “Night Science” by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher (2019)
François Jacob, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod, had a picture that may capture the full scientific process much better than the current paradigm of “hypothesis-driven” research. In his autobiography, Jacob distinguishes two modes of scientific work, which he referred to as day science and night science [3]. Day science is the one you read about in the news, it is the one we learn about in school, the one captured by the phrase “hypothesis driven”. It’s epitomized by the women and men in white lab coats holding pipettes or looking intently at a computer screen. A day scientist is a hunter who has a clear picture of what she is pursuing.
But the bright day is just one half of the cycle. What is on the night side? Reflect for a second on the hypothesis that you are testing. Did you pull it from the ether? How? There is no single answer to this question. In many cases, we may not even have a coherent answer, which may be why we prefer not to include it in most accounts of the scientific process. As Jacob says: “Night science wanders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, question itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out” [3]. In day science, we may test a hypothesis using established protocols, and we may move to neighboring ideas in small, logical steps. But ideas that are unconnected or only loosely connected are out of reach when all we rely on are established protocols and logic. This is why we often have to pop out into the world of night science, where we float between ideas that may be only loosely connected, often moving in associative leaps rather than in logical steps (Fig. 1). Intermittently, we may pop back into the world of day science to examine the apparent merit of a night science idea in the light of day, and maybe to even submit it to the rigorous hypothesis testing at the heart of day science—before popping back out into the dream world above to continue our exploration. Night science is of course not restricted to a particular time of day, just as we can test hypotheses after 10 pm. But these two aspects are distinct frames of mind—so different that they seem like day and night.
Further reading: the 11-part series of editorials on Night Science published by the authors in Genome Biology and Nature Biotechnology.
Seeds of Science Section
26. “Announcing the SoS Research Collective” by Roger’s Bacon (2024)
Excessively intense academic competition, the specter of the replication crisis (how can you go out on a limb when every branch seems shaky?), and fears over the spread of scientific misinformation have all combined in recent years to create a chilling effect on speculation in science. Remedying this “speculation deficit” is one of the goals of Seeds of Science and the SoS research Collective.
[…]
This is the fundamental premise and promise of independent research: freed from the incentives and constraints of academia (e.g. publish or perish) or industry, amateur independent researchers can pursue more idiosyncratic and unorthodox lines of research, thereby creating a healthier and more diverse research ecosystem.
Sounds wonderful, but going it alone outside The System comes with its own difficulties and limitations. This is where the SoS Research Collective comes in—we want to create an ecosystem that supports lizards and help them be as lizardy as possible.
27. “Research Papers used to have style. What happened?” by Roger’s Bacon (2022)
The “life of science” demands a balance between the instrumental and the aesthetic in the same way that evolution requires a balance between selection and mutation. Selection improves the average fitness of a population, but drains it of diversity and limits its potential for future adaptation. Mutation increases diversity, but lowers the average fitness of the population.
Like mutation, aesthetics are diversifying and generative, but generally harmful to clarity and concision. And like selection, restrictions on style and format may improve the average quality of our writing, but at the cost of creative potential.
28. “The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius” by Roger’s Bacon (SoS co-founder) (2021)
The Myth of the Lone Genius is a bullshit cliche and we would do well to stop parroting it to young people like it is some deep insight into the nature of innovation. It typically goes something like this—the view that breakthroughs come from Eureka moments made by geniuses toiling away in solitude is inaccurate; in reality, most revolutionary ideas, inventions, innovation etc. come from lots of hard work, luck, and collaboration with others.
29. “Randomness in Science” by Roger’s Bacon, Sergey Samonsau, and Dario Krpan (SoS co-founders) (2021)
Why does chance seem to play such a role in many significant scientific discoveries? In the previous sections, we suggested that randomness can be used to overcome biases and flaws in judgement, however the exact nature of these biases were not fully spelled out. While randomness can be used to compensate for the personal biases (e.g. a bias towards one’s own topic of study or a racial bias) of any individual decision maker (a grant reviewer, journal editor, head of department), the reason that “happy accidents” are involved in so many scientific discoveries is that randomness serves as a corrective for a more global conservative bias inherent in the structures of organized science.
In addition, metascientific research demonstrates that the most novel and impactful research often results from “unusual individual scientist backgrounds, atypical collaborations, or unexpected expeditions where scientists and inventors reach across disciplines and address problems framed by a distant audience” (Shi and Evans, 2020; also see Uzzi et al. 2013, and Lin et al., 2021). Overall, this paints the picture of a scientific community in need of more novelty and greater risk taking. One way to achieve this goal is to modify the incentives and norms of modern science, however systemic change of this kind is often difficult and only attainable in the long term. Alternatively, we may seek to increase randomness in all its forms as this will increase the generation of the unusual and atypical, thereby reducing redundancy and shifting the scientific community towards riskier research strategies.
30. “The Seeds of Science Manifesto” by Roger’s Bacon, Sergey Samonsau, and Dario Krpan (SoS co-founders) (2021)
Ultimately, Seeds of Science has one criterion—does the article contain original ideas that have the potential to advance science in any way? We believe it is important to remain as open-minded as possible about what constitutes a valuable scientific contribution—it could be a speculation, an idea for an experiment or approach, a novel observation, a thought-provoking question and analysis, the noting of an under-appreciated problem, or an unusual research study. Beyond that, there are virtually no requirements on content or style. Articles (or “Seeds of Science” as we call them) can be from any scientific discipline (including metascience, science ethics, and science education) and can be written in non-traditional formats for scientific articles (e.g. narratives, dialogues, etc.).
31. “Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants: A Quest for Disconnected Academic Psychology” by Dario Krpan (2020)
In current academic psychology, scholars typically develop their research and ideas by drawing on the work of other contemporary and preceding psychological scientists and by following certain conventions of the field. I refer to this variant of psychology as connected because the emphasis is on connecting various research findings and ideas generated by different scholars (e.g., by showing how they are related to each other via referencing). In this article, I argue that, although connected psychology advances psychological knowledge, it restricts the total amount of knowledge that could eventually be produced and therefore limits the potential of the discipline to improve the understanding of psychological phenomena. As a solution, I propose that, alongside the currently existing connected psychology, disconnected psychology should be established. In disconnected psychology, researchers develop their ideas by following the main principles of psychological method, but they are disconnected from a “field” consisting of other psychologists and therefore do not follow the discipline’s norms and conventions. By drawing on one of the core constructs from information theory—information entropy—I argue that combining the two streams of psychology would result in the most significant advancement of psychological knowledge.
32. “Beyond a Dream: The Practical Foundations of Disconnected Psychology” by Dario Krpan (SoS co-founder) (2024)
Disconnected psychology is a form of psychological science in which researchers ground their work upon the main principles of psychological method but are detached from a “field” consisting of other psychologists that comprises connected psychology. It has previously been proposed that combining the two forms of psychology would result in the most significant advancement of psychological knowledge (Krpan, 2020). However, disconnected psychology may seem to be an “abstract utopia”, given that it has not been previously detailed how to put it into practice. The present article therefore sets the practical foundations of disconnected psychology. In this regard, I first describe a hypothetical disconnected psychologist and discuss relevant methodological and epistemological implications. I then propose how this variant of psychology could be integrated with the current academic system (i.e., with connected psychology). Overall, the present article transforms disconnected psychology from a hazy dream into substance that could eventually maximize psychological knowledge, even if implementing it would require a radical transformation of psychological science.
33. “Amateur hour: Improving knowledge diversity in psychological and behavioral science by harnessing contributions from amateurs” by Erik Mohlhenrich and Dario Krpan (SoS co-founder) (2021)
We propose that amateur psychologists can most effectively improve knowledge diversity in PBS if they focus on “blind spots”—endeavors that are neglected in academia (e.g., because they are not incentivized, or due to some other constraints) but have a large potential to lead to new insights and discoveries (Table 1). For example, the “slow scholarship” movement highlights how scholars face a general intensification in the pace of work and an increasing pressure to publish (Harland, 2016; Hartman & Darab, 2012). Research indicates that the average number of publications at time of hiring for science faculty positions has been steadily rising in recent years) (Pennycook & Thompson, 2018; Reinero, 2019; Van Dijk, Manor, & Carey, 2014); trends like this may influence researchers, especially early career researchers, away from projects that require dedication over a long period of time. This suggests that long-term research projects are generally a neglected area in academia and amateurs could do valuable work by focusing their efforts in that way (Table 1). This may involve spending decades to build rich and multilayered psychological theories, investigating psychological phenomena in greater detail, etc. Although not in PBS, Gregor Mendel is an example of an amateur who made a breakthrough that took a considerable amount of time; his experiments on pea plants took seven years to complete and took nearly 40 years to be understood as a scientific breakthrough (Henig, 2000; Weiling, 1991).
[…]
Taken together, this discussion highlights one general area in “research-space” that may be especially promising: long, aimless, speculative, and interdisciplinary research on uncommon or taboo subjects. Again, although not in PBS, we might hold up Charles Darwin as an exemplar. While Darwin eventually did become a renowned professional scientist, at the time of his departure on the HMS Beagle in 1831 he was very much an amateur, a 22-year-old with no advanced degree or publications to his name who had to pay his own way on the voyage (Bowlby, 1990; Keynes & Darwin, 2001). Darwin’s work on evolution certainly took a long time to develop (the Beagle’s voyage took 5 years and he did not publish On the Origin of Species until 23 years after he returned). It was aimless in the sense that he did not set out from the beginning to develop a theory of evolution. His work was highly interdisciplinary (Darwin drew on numerous fields within the biological sciences in addition to geology and economics), was the culmination of a huge amount of basic observational work, and was not necessarily an experimental contribution (though he did make those as well), but primarily theoretical (and sometimes more speculative) in nature. Darwin’s theories were taboo in the sense that they went against the prevailing theological ideas of the time and caused significant controversy (and still do). We speculate that there may one day be a Charles Darwin of the mind who follows a similar path and hope that this paper provides the smallest nudge in the right direction.