How is science built? Is it through small incremental changes or through “revolutionary”, disruptive and singular events?


As emphasized by Nassim Taleb, it is not the expected and mundane events (the white swans) the ones that shape the world but the improbable and unexpected (the black swans). The point that Mark Buchanan makes in his recent Physics World article is that "the publish-or-perish ethic too often favors a narrow and conservative approach to scientific innovation". Are we then pushing the most innovative ideas/people to the margin and transforming valuable people into some kind of golem? poor beings limited in their free will by being stimulated to follow the main stream?

Here it is a brief excerpt taken from Buchanan's article:

Unfortunately, today’s academic and corporate cultures seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with practices that stifle risk-taking mavericks who have a broad view of science. At universities and funding agencies, for example, tenure and grant committees take decisions based on narrow criteria (focusing on publication lists, citations and impact factors) or on specific plans for near-term results, all of which inherently favour those working in established fields with well-accepted paradigms.

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The conference room is almost full as the people try to get the last seats while the session is restarting after the coffee break. The speaker is trying to convey his motivation. After a few words he presents a bar graph showing the number of publications on his topic as a function of time showing a huge (seemingly exponential) increase in the last few years. "There is a lot of clever people working on this field" he assesses confidently with an Iamoneofthem attitude.



This kind of phenomenon, called "social proof" is not new. Stanley Milgram and other social psychologists identified it already in 1968 in a series of social experiments. The key is the assumption that if lots of people do something it should be because there is something interesting in it. Therefore, the crowd becomes more influential when it is bigger. As James Surowiecki points out: "every additional person is a proof that something important is happening", "The strategy of following the others if things are uncertain is reasonable but if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart".

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