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Why Breakthrough Ideas Rarely Succeed Quickly
The scientific community rarely welcomes breakthrough ideas. In fact such discoverers are often quickly rejected by the community. The reason for this unwillingness to accept new ideas is mostly due to maintaining the status quo. Established scientists spend their lifetime focused on mastering a few core ideas/principles. These ideas are their livelihood so any challenge to these ideas directly impacts their livelihood and future. Their job security depends on their ability to show society the value of their work. If new ideas are discovered then society will no longer perceive any value in their now obsolete ideas and work.
Just as a policeman is motivated by only two things, fear and ego, scientists are motivated by recognition and humiliation. Immured within their narrow field they are only able to make incremental advances to the science they are generally ignorant of. Consequently many scientists find it a lot easier to reject those with new discoveries rather than face the humility of admitting the error in their obsolete ideas .
Like an ostrich with its head stuck in the ground, they fail to see the train coming. As a result breakthrough ideas can be discovered by just having the ostrich lift its head from the sand. It is precisely this simplicity of discovery that sets up a culture of persecution and rejection.
Furthermore, often times new discoveries are based on very simple incremental improvements to existing ideas. For this reason established scientists find it very easy to ridicule them. They claim how can something so simple replace decades of their research and experience? Society agrees with them since they are conditioned into believing all science is beyond their understanding. Since it is society that ultimately funds scientist work, then without the support of society, the new ideas will never take ground and flourish.
So what does this all mean? It means breakthrough ideas are all around us and just require an open mind to accept and implement. One can become very rich if one is able to grab onto a good idea sooner then if one waits for the scientific community and eventually society to eventually accept it. I am curious to learn your list of new ideas out there that have yet to gain any foothold due to the above-mentioned reasons?
Consider the excerpt from an article in The New Yorker by eminent surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande. In this excerpt, Dr. Gawande describes how Dr. Pronovost developed simple medical checklists that have proven to save countless lives . Gawande writes, " If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost's checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it. " As you will read below, his checklists have fallen on deaf ears due to their lack of perceived complexity!
We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity.the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that's what rankles many people.The still limited response to Pronovost's work may be easy to explain, but it is hard to justify. If someone found a new drug that could wipe out infections with anything remotely like the effectiveness of Pronovost's lists, there would be television ads with Robert Jarvik extolling its virtues, detail men offering free lunches to get doctors to make it part of their practice, government programs to research it, and competitors jumping in to make a newer, better version. That's what happened when manufacturers marketed central-line catheters coated with silver or other antimicrobials; they cost a third more, and reduced infections only slightly.and hospitals have spent tens of millions of dollars on them. But, with the checklist, what we have is Peter Pronovost trying to see if maybe, in the next year or two, hospitals in Rhode Island and New Jersey will give his idea a try.
Pronovost remains, in a way, an odd bird in medical research. He does not have the multimillion-dollar grants that his colleagues in bench science have. He has no swarm of doctoral students and lab animals. He's focussed on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine. As a result, few other researchers are venturing to extend his achievements. Yet his work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.
And the scientific community rejects some ideas because the ideas are crap, although the originators may prefer to call them "breakthroughs". However, scientist of all people should have learned by now that between the choice of negativism toward new ideas because of possible "crap" and positive views toward new ideas because of the possibility of Creative Genius and Nonconformity, the possible benefits are more with the latter.
Any endeavor subject to government regulation exists at the pleasure of those with their hands out. If you sat on a *huge* pool of domestic oil that could be recovered with almost zero cost in this time of $50/bbl oil it would be called "Santa Barbara Channel" and you would be legislatively banned from recovering the resource. Ditto literal *cubic miles* of high grade coal in the American West sitting under "protected" Federal lands (fragile and endangered scrub desert).
If you have the green you can have the FDA pass a drug with efficacy so marginal it might as well be placebo. The big drug companies spend huge amounts of money trying to suppress studies, that show some of their most profitable drugs as being marginally more therapeutic than sugar. If you can't get a license to print money, one that allows you to rig the market is a close second.
Who cares what the scientific community thinks? It is a community of mutual ass kissers, as everyone knows. Peer review is synonymous with ass kissing.
If you got something worthwhile, people will come. But you'd better be prepared to show proof. If you have an idea for a machine that flies around with no visible means of propulsion, nobody will care, you can bet on it. Talk is cheap. Demonstrate your machine and the world will beat a path to your door, regardless of what the scientific community has to say.
The scientific community is stupid, and most of humanity is even more stupid - especially the concrete-oriented (Materialist) part of humanity. Welcome to Materialism 101.