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Here: “The Nobel Disease: When Intelligence Fails To Protect Against Irrationality.” They fret that Nobel Prize-winning scientists ditch critical thinking and embrace unorthodox views.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t agree. In reality, he says, unorthodoxy helped the unorthodox scientists win the Prize.
The “Nobel Disease” isn’t a paradox. Scientists who reject consensus, who think for themselves, are often the ones best prepared to make major scientific discoveries. The top rank of scientists is full of mavericks—Galileo, Newton, Semmelweis, Einstein, and Watson and Crick, to name just a few—who made outstanding contributions not despite their unorthodoxy but because of it…
This is not to say that every “out of the box” idea is right—most are wrong—but a scientific culture that welcomes unorthodox ideas and encourages theories that fall outside of the “consensus” is indispensable for genuinely good science and for major scientific advances.
Michael Egnor, “Thinking outside the box is not a disease” at Mind Matters News
If you enjoy reading about creativity in science, you might also like these informative pieces by Robert J. Marks:
Should AI hold patents? the flash-of-genius answer. Robert J. Marks: To understand why AI cannot independently invent, let’s look at how famous inventors have actually done it. Like Excel, AI assists programmers in their design work. AI can search through trillions of possibilities, using data from a million sources, to find a successful design. But the structure of the search and the source of the data is the choice of the programmer. A look at how famous inventors developed products that changed the world sheds some light on the process.
and
The creativity needed for successful command is beyond the capability of AI. AI sifts enormous amounts of accumulated data. But successful military strategy often depends on creating a new approach to a problem, one that lies outside the historical data available to the opposing forces. Muhammad Ali and Hannibal were famous for using such strategies.