<i>The results suggest that outsiders to a specific scientific field are reluctant to challenge a research star who is viewed as a leader within that field.</i><p>I don't think this is how it works at all. I think people are <i>unable</i> to challenge stars in their field.<p>When everyone is celebrating some star, good luck getting heard if you disagree with them. It is worse if, like so many people, this star will defend their territory by following the maxim "A good offense is the best defense."<p>My observation of behavior in online forums is that a typical pattern of behavior is that everyone seeks to either align themselves with one of the "stars" of the forum or position themselves as being "against" anything that person says. It is very much about pecking order, not truth, and if you have two or three really popular people, then you get camps that revolve around each person. All conversation tends to default into a polarizing back and forth of "I am for STAR!" and "I am against STAR!"<p>Since all conversation is framed as either for or against STAR, no conversation can occur that genuinely diverges from the framing given. Even if you genuinely try to diverge from this framing of for or against the idea set that this star individual represents, people will actively paint you into a corner as being in either the for or against camp. Good luck with saying "Yeah, no. That isn't what I am saying <i>At All.</i>"<p>This only stops when that person exits the picture. Dying is the most final and absolute means to exit the picture.
Reminds me of the old Max Planck quote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Can't believe they didn't cite/discuss the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) written by philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. From the wikipedia article about the book:<p>"Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. "<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...</a>
The quote is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does occasionally come up as a real issue. I have an anecdote on it:<p>A former fellow grad student was expressing their dis-belief that though there was a lot of work done in the brain with electrical signals, there is effectively no work done on measuring the magnetic properties of the brain or neurons. The much older and much more esteemed PI that was also present simply shut the student down, to the point of telling them to 'shut up'. "There are <i>no</i> magnetic fields in the brain", I think was the quote. The student, misunderstanding the situation, pressed onward and challenged the PI on fMRI and the like. The discussion turned into a 1-sided argument where the PI basically told the student that they were an idiot and that things like fMRI were useless (actually a debatable point at the time, re: the dead salmon experiments). I'll say I never quite trusted PIs after that dressing-down, they seem to be more concerned about their mortgages than their legacies.
This reminds me of "Clarke's First Law" [1]:<p><i>When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s_Laws" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#On_Clarke.27s...</a>
As someone who's published in Bayesian inference, that quote has always struck a cord.<p>I've met countless young researchers who embraced Bayesian practices. And all the opposition seems to come from older hands. It's finally turning a corner... Because of retirement!
This idea dates at least to Kuhn: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...</a>
The abstract of this paper says:<p><i>Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist (relative to control fields). In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average.</i><p>I haven't read the paper, and maybe this is just completely wrong, but wouldn't we expect the number of published papers by non-collaborators to rise <i>no matter what?</i><p>I mean, a star scientist is dead now. There are no more papers coming from that person. <i>Of course</i> other people's papers fill the gap. The number of journals didn't change. The number of articles in an issue of each journal didn't change. These journals need to get articles from <i>someone</i>.
Reminds me of a Douglas Crockford presentation (which is obviously referencing this idea) where he talks about computer science progress, and having to wait for people to die or retire before practices change: "Are they gone yet? Can we stop doing X now?"
Even more important than forming synapses is the subsequent pruning of synapses.<p>I imagine the same principle applies to networks of people as does to networks of neurons.
Maybe we should have scientists rotate through unrelated professions on a pre-set schedule?<p>Just putting it out there. Killing scientists to stimulate progress is out for ethical reasons, obviously.
The idea that science advances only when old scientists die is used to promote the idea that science has nothing over politics. It is anti-science propaganda.<p>I will say this though. Young scientists are hungry and there not enough positions for them. Every department has that old rockstar or two who doesn't really push the boundaries of science anymore, but takes up available positions. When they retire or die, new people come in who are still young and full of energy.
So true:<p><a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172ec3fb0b6ce654c191f214360.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cc/56/21/cc562172e...</a>
Given that new ideas in a field often get reviewed by incumbents in said field (due to the requirements of pre-publication peer review) this can certainly delay their uptake or even full examination.<p>This kind of ingrained conservatism can delay progress both of a field and those examining it. It is a catch-22 as you want qualified reviewers to examine a paper so it isn't bunkum but equally those reviewers may slow it down because it is a valid advance in contrary to their position.<p>Perhaps a move to post-publication peer review and greater pre-print deposition would help, but that would take a deep cultural shift.
This is true in many ways.<p>But as always it doesn't have to be that way, it has arrived at this point due to a combination of sometimes perverse incentives and natural human tendencies.<p>I was thinking for a while that having a mandatory retirement age could be a good idea, but retirement is becoming obsolete for economic reasons, and scientists are now employed in so many different ways by so many different institutions that I don't think it is possible.
Alternative: Collaborators are the same age?<p>Next up: a curve showing that friends of WWI vets decrease their tuna consumption when the WWI vet dies, relative to their non-friends.
There's a deeper question here: how does this apply to politics and what are we going to do about it as life spans become longer?<p>It's a really tricky topic...
Alternative explanation: Star scientists are just highly productive scientists. After they die, their not-as-productive collaborators can't keep up with the amount of publication as high as before. Naturally collaborators publication percentage falls while Non-collaborators' rise.
Maybe it is all about funding, the established scientists will receive the greatest chance of getting a grant because they have their previous work to support their ability and direction. Challenging scientists may not be able to contest the established scientists because of this
> The Digest is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate attribution of source.<p>It sounds like they want CC-BY, but as it stands they haven't really licensed the digest in an understandable way.
It happens over a shorter timeframe than funerals are needed to explain. The past decade or decade and a half has been long enough to see outsiders having significant influence in the aging research community, steering it from determined non-intervention to greater willingness to work towards therapies capable of addressing the causes of aging. All of the players are the same at the start and the end, aside from the new faces coming in from outside.
I think if people were immortal this would solve the problem, because you don't have the "this only pays off after I die anyway" mentality.<p>Sadly most people think waiting till the nonbelievers die is the way to go and not much money is spent in immortality research.
I'm trying to access the source paper for this study, and am finding that despite NBER and SSRN, both <i>generally</i> open-access sites, as hosts, the PDF itself is paywalled on SSRN.<p>The backstory here is that SSRN, a site for open dissemination of largely pre-publication papers, was bought by Elsevier in 2013, to the loud dismay of the open-access community.<p>It seems that the predictions of what would transpire are being fully born out.<p><a href="https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying-ssrn/" rel="nofollow">https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying...</a><p>The Sci-Hub workaround is to chase the NBER PDF download link:<p><a href="http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf</a>