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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

> the (largely governed by luck) outcome of their studies

I've never heard that. Is there some evidence that it's largely luck? Does the theory imply that Einstein and Newton were extremely lucky?

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You re almost creating a straw man. There have probably been scientists as intelligent or more intelligent than einstein, but worked on fields that proved fruitless, or didn't manage to finish their work within a lifetime. There is a large element of luck in any research, which has to align with capability. The matter at hand is how to keep those promising people in a science career and not the just the ones that publish a lot. Publishing negative but honest results is a step. Though i hope it doesn't end up becoming gamed as well.

Einstien did his Nobel prize winning work (the photoelectric effect) very early in life, and then went on to continually make big successes. If he had started out spinning his wheels he would have had plenty of time to switch.

that doesnt mean he was immune to unsuccessful investigations, in which he spent a large part of his later life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_unsuccessful_inve...

Not the best examples. They both came up with analytical models and tested them. They were also amazing outliers. In that that achieved so much.

For your everyday empirical research there is a lot of luck. You have to disprove a lot of possibilities to get to the true data. And as we only reward the positive findings your lucky if you’re test that one truth. If you’re sifting through drugs to find there possible other uses you’re going to have a lot of null results. But those are good they’re still extra knowledge.

Even if it doesn't, there's a whole world outside of theoretical physics.

So Darwin was very lucky? The questions remain for any field: Is there evidence, and is the implication that the leading scientists are consider very lucky?

Yes, he was the lucky person chosen to be the field geologist on the Beagle

Darwin was lucky that Wallace came to the same theory independently but contacted Darwin for feedback. This forced Darwin to publish his own results. If Wallace hadn't contacted Darwin before publishing, Darwin would probably be an unknown today.

Nah, I think you’re missing the point that you can google “bullshit psych studies” and get pages of results. This isn’t an indictment of science, this is an indictment of journals and academia today.

Had this registration been in effect 300 years ago, Newton/Darwin would still be fine.

They have the advantage of being in fairly trivially replicatable fields, so we can say with confidence they found something true.

As to luck, who can say?

I'm not 100% sure about Newton but Einstein didn't do any empirical research, which is the topic of this discussion.

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