Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find and Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is a Coward and I Will Fight Them

To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.

Science is not like foraging, mining, or drilling, where we keep doing the same thing and it keeps getting harder. It’s more like discovering an elevator left for us by aliens. At first we have no idea how it works; we get in and push a button, and now we’re climbing dozens of floors in a matter of seconds. We excitedly calculate that, at this rate... See more

We can all agree that discovering fire was pretty rad. The first humans to do it probably spent a lot of time learning which kind of kindling was best, how to nurse a spark into a flame, and what sorts of fires were best for cooking vs. heating. They must have painstakingly passed this knowledge from generation to generation, and youngsters had to ... See more

To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers b... See more