Daniel Whiteson

There's recognition.

It's everybody's dream.

It's the best thing you can do in your career is to discover something new that overturns everything we ever thought.

It's what everybody wants.

But there is a structural pressure also that encourages people to follow up on existing ideas, so for sure.

But there's no sense in which scientists are getting together to say, let's shut down that idea.

It's dangerous or something.

Scientists are not so organized.

There's no coherent group of us in a back room smoking cigars and deciding what we're going to publish.

Science follows the data.

every example people bring up of like historical gatekeeping, you know, Galileo or, you know, play tectonics or whatever.

That's a story of data persuading the community of a new idea.

That's actually a story of science doing it right.

You know, Galileo, for example, who was doing the gatekeeping there?

It wasn't the scientists.

It was political, right?

Science responds to data.

And I think anybody who says like, look, I have a crazy new idea.

Why won't science pay attention to me?

Like, well, you need data to back this stuff up.