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Comment by failrate | Hacker News Reader

“I told my boss, 'hey, what if I put this sphere in a syringe and increase the pressure?' He said it was not an interesting idea and that this wouldn’t do anything,” Djellouli claims."

If someone tells you that your line of research is uninteresting, just do the research anyway.

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If someone experienced in a field of research tells you something is possible, they're very probably right.

If they tell you it's not possible, it's 50/50.

Adapted from:

Clarke's first law: 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.

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I don't think you need to be elderly - just set in your ways.

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A valuable conversation would be why they think it wouldn't work. That will give you a lot of surface area to mine for clues to make it work.

Seconded. More than once I've been talked out of pursuing a line of research only to see someone else publish decent results on the same thing a couple of years later.

If someone tells you that your line of research is uninteresting, that means results would be surprising – i.e., that's a sign that it is interesting. (Unless they've tried it and empirically found that it's "uninteresting" – which is somewhat interesting in itself, even if it's not sexy enough for today's academia.)

> If someone tells you that your line of research is uninteresting, just do the research anyway.

My graduate advisor said that to me and put me on some other stuff he wanted to work on. It really took the wind out of my sails, and I never really had the passion for the new work that I did for my original idea.

My final year he got a new PhD student and let her work on the idea. She was quite successful in that area. He never said anything to me about it.

TLDR if you have an idea you're passionate about it, ignore the haters and just do it. Even if it doesn't succeed, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you pursued something YOU found interesting.

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