I attended a number of seminars this week, and a number of them self-consciously joked about being scooped. This is not really frequency illusion – I’m pretty sure it’s a cultural norm/meme. I’ve never really understood it though. Wouldn’t it just be validation/consilience that you’re on the right track? And that means you can get your curiosities solved without doing the work! You can turn your attention to the other things you’re interested in.
Take it from someone who’s been scooped, of sorts:
Around 2019, I went to a talk by Marinka Zitnik and learned about the Stanford SNAP page, where I learned about the TreeOfLife dataset. Later I read Erik Hoel’s emergence paper around the same time, and realized I could apply his measure to the TreeOfLife dataset. Evidence: https://github.com/dll110/treeoflife I never finished it though because it was just a side-hobby (my actual research work had nothing to do with either of these topics directly) and I got distracted by other things.
Then last year I came across “Evolution and emergence: higher order information structure in protein interactomes across the tree of life” when looking through Michael Levin’s publications: Pretty much EI-Net + TreeOfLife data. Published by the original EI peeps and Michael Levin – I’d bet they have sound thinking.
Which means I have proof that I have great ideas. A full two years before they published. My intuitions are validated without me having to write up a full paper. And I wouldn’t have gotten such validation if I had actually written it.
Of course, it would’ve been an actually cool paper to have under my belt, but that’s more of a resume thing than a personal thing.
In “Letters to a Young Scientist”, E.O. Wilson wrote ‘look for a field that is sparsely inhabited; look for a chance to break away, to find a subject you can make your own…shy away from subjects that are receiving a great deal of attention, if it has a glamorous aura, if its practitioners are prizewinners who receive large grants…take a subject instead that interests you and looks promising, where established experts are not yet competing with each other’. (45)
The takeaway is, if your poop is getting scooped, find pastures elsewhere. Your poop is better served fertilizing a new field.