Many pioneering scientists were initially rejected by the scientific community. At first, the ideas of Galileo Galilei, Gregor Mendel and Geoffrey Hinton were ridiculed. There are many more examples of such “martyrs of science”, people who were cancelled and then vindicated.

Science isn’t as dramatic nowadays. There aren’t as many Galilei-like figures, at least not in relative terms. If 1/1000 of crazy-seeming scientists turned out to be geniuses in the 20th century, today the proportion might be more like 1/1 000 000. Why is that?

To begin with, it seems as if good ideas are getting harder to find. There are some ideas whose discovery appears almost inevitable because of the amount of readily accessible data. In contrast, much science today requires costly equipment and large-scale collaboration. Scott Alexander put it well in his essay about science slowing down:

For example, element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorous in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss.

Early scientists picked the low-hanging fruit.

What’s more, the average scientist today is more competent than the average scientist 100 years ago, since job selection has become more meritocratic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, science was largely run by aristocrats with too much spare time. These days, becoming a leading researcher in a STEM field requires brains. So if I’m disagreeing with a great number of brilliant people, it’s more likely that I’m the one being wrong.

Finally, the industrial organisation of science might create a selection pressure against wild ideas. While most wild ideas are bad, brilliant ideas often seem wild too. Across almost all scientific disciplines, researchers publish more papers now than a hundred years ago. Someone optimising purely for research output probably can’t afford to explore as many wild ideas. If you’re expected to publish 4-5 papers per year, you’ll spend a significant amount of time on overhead work, leaving you with less time for open-ended exploration. In terms of Kuhn’s framework for scientific revolutions¹, you’ll mostly be doing normal science.

Science isn’t what it used to be. The fraction of martyrs of science today is minuscule. This doesn’t mean today’s scientists are any less intelligent². Rather, it means that today’s scientific methodology works relatively well, and that brilliant ideas are the norm rather than the exception. If we’re right about the mad scientist just being mad, that’s a good thing.

This post was inspired by a conversation with Miles Kodama.