i-blis

> Venturing outside your field is also part of what drives discovery itself, not a post-Nobel symptom

This is precisely what I meant to say (and seemingly failed) and why I upvote you!

The article lists an order some 10 of Nobel prize-winners later seen as "unsound" mostly in a field other than their main area of expertise. Making them 1 in 100. I won't be surprised that 1 in 100 senior scientist expresses unorthodox or even unsound ideas when foraging far away from their field, particularly on the kind of topics listed.

I agree that the share of unorthodox thinkers should all in all be higher among those winners. This is indeed what made them advanced in their field. But the main bias remains: looking at those whose voice reaches even when they venture out of their field rather than the full pull of (good) scientists.

I am convinced that a similar proportion of non-prize winner scientists across all fields of natural sciences share "scientifically unsound ideas" or "scientifically unsupported or discredited beliefs", or however else we want to call them. I am not even confident that age may be a decisive factor.

As an (almost retired) anthropologist with background in genetics, I do certainly nurture yet unverified and pretty unorthodox convictions, if only as a matter of hypothesis. Looking around me among colleagues who have a wealth of experience, cultivating strange ideas seems to be very common and indeed part of the discovery process.

How can one find new insight without erring ?

Still one of the best, by far.

Surely a factor. As is the deregulation.

I've been living in Germany for a very long time and the real decline started some ten years ago. At the beginning mostly because of poor maintenance. My first years with the DB 100 card (allowing to travel on all trains) were a pleasure then it deteriote to the point where you start yourself: where is this heading. As I said, the ban of SBB on German trains was a turning point for me.

But You're right about the networks being different (mostly because France suppressed many local lines in the last 20 years.

When I was young (70s-80s), we were all amazed by Deutsche Bahn's punctuality and quality of service (second only to the Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses). Now, French and Italian trains are a lot more reliable, which is rather strange.

The Swiss Federal Railways asked German trains to wait at the border and has even ban many German trains to enter Switzerland over excessive delays to prevent their train schedule from being affected.

The site is hilarious by the way. I hope it will have an effect on DB, even though I doubt it.

This is NOT a genuine gambling site but a take on DB to remind them of the issue and take it seriously.

> knowledge is transferable

I concur: Perl taught me to mentally parse and build (complex) regexes, a highly transferable skill. The Lisp course I was taught in the late 80s, certainly helped me grok Clojure and find it a pretty natural fit. I think this is a very common trope.

A similar kind of observation made a profound impression on me some 30 years ago. A team of primatologists filmed Macaques in northern Japan. A female had two consecutive baby loss, the second one at least being stillborn. She successively acknowledges the death, takes care of the newborn as if it was alive, hit it furiously on rocks in despair and then again care for it, carry as if alive, get angry at it and so on. Her behaviour displays of acting as if knowing it's not, in this case in a pathological way. (She ends up being rejected by the group.)

Despite the Bonobo case being even more striking an example of being able to do as if, both shows that the behaviour is not unique to humans.

I was already horrified by what I heard in the Netflix documentary (some five years back, I guess). One frightening aspect was that some victims, despite having terribly suffered themselves, introduced him 10, 20 of their friends and acquaintances. One young lady among the victims even confessed with deep remorse to have sent, among others, her own under-aged sister.

You might be right about a Leetcode effect and the difficulty to find new interesting positions. But OP wasn't stressing that at all but the desire to architect and manage. I might have put to much emphasis of the managing and too less on the urge to architect and see things from above. I agree.

I am scientist and worked from time to time as a research engineer merely to pay the bills, so I may see things differently. I always like doing lab / field work and first-hand data analysis. Many engineers I know would likely never stop tinkering and building stuff. It may be easier for a scientist than for an engineer to still get trilled, I don't know.