alt Hacker NewsTo me, the greatest contribution of mediocre scientists is that they teach their field to the next generation. To keep science going forward, you need enough people who understand the field to generate a sufficient probability of anyone putting together the pieces of the next major discovery. That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.
Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.
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> Conversely, entire branches of knowledge can be lost if not enough people are working in the area to maintain a common ground of understanding.
Especially if the work is classified.
The manufacture of FOGBANK, a key material for a thermonuclear weapon's interstage, was lost by 2000 because so few people were involved with its manufacture and the ones who knew retired or moved on. It's thought to be an aerogel-like substance.
5 years and millions in expensive reverse engineering was required to figure it out again.
I'm guessing they documented it this time.
Yep. Human civilization is fundamentally predicated on the transmission of ideas through time. Without old ideas to build upon (Newton's "shoulders of giants"), there's no long-term advancement. Transmitting established knowledge is just as important to civilization as generating new knowledge.
> That's the sense in which the numbers game is more important than the genius factor.
Numbers game doesn't work in the idealized way you think it does. if you let too many mediocre or bad people become scientists, some of them engage in fraud or ill- considered modelmaking, which wastes the time of good scientists who are in the place of having to reproduce results that were never going to work.
..or, as Aristotle put it more succinctly: "those who can, do; those who understand, teach".
Mediocre baseball players take their teams to the world series. Mediocre soldiers, not special forces commandos, win wars. Etc. The principle is pretty general.
agreed!
there's a nice short story along those lines, by Scott Alexander
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
An interesting example, in my opinion:
In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks.
Why do we keep making them? Because you need people who, on day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can't spend months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people making tanks for "no reason".