Disscovery

In the old days, scientists were taught to publicly diss everything new that they ever heard or read (in science, that is).

This practice was designed to put pressure on the providers of new data or novel ideas.

Nobody took it too personally because it was part of the fabric of the discipline of science.

As soon as something had passed this collective stress test, it was absorbed into accepted knowledge or wisdom, and the progenitor was rewarded with a gold star in the minds of his or her peers.

This apparent negative response to the new shouldn’t be mistaken for pessimism nor conservatism.

Just the opposite in fact. It was simply the most efficient means to fast-track science in the context of the loose communications channels that they had to work with.

But then, if you took a scientist out of its native environment into, say, business, such methodology was in fact mistaken for pessimism or conservatism, and generally considered anti-social.

Business preferred then, and still does to this day, passive-aggressive playhouse behaviors. Actors to the man, trained in the arts of purposeful hypocrisy.

Today science has, to a large degree, shifted from discovery to invention. Engineering, if you will, without the discipline of an engineer.

The old practice of instant and mandatory critique of the new has largely been lost.

In fact, younger scientists that I meet behave more like business types, but with much less purpose and no driving metric (profit) to catch out the frauds and punish the weak.

But then I guess it just doesn’t matter that much. Most of what they are inventing, we don’t need.