Article by James Evans, Casey Petroff, and Gary King: “…Information theory, pioneered by mathematician Claude Shannon, offers a different perspective: only surprises carry new information. If people in an American town have conservative political preferences, and someone demonstrates that they are more likely to vote Republican, little is learned. A paper that confirms what readers already believe tells them little they did not already know and perhaps nothing that changes their worldview. Yet, the incentives of modern science reward this type of uninformative communication. Peer reviewers are drawn from one’s own field and publication norms favor deference to established paradigms. Scientists cite sources in their immediate field roughly 500% more than those in distant fields. This is performance art designed for reviewers rather than a search for the most informative surprise designed to advance knowledge. Thus, most papers are written to be unsurprising, and consequently, have minimal impact. These consequences are linked. The ultimate value that a paper adds to collective knowledge depends not only on what it shows, but on whose worldview it updates, and by how much.
To understand why surprise is the currency of impact requires understanding what science is. Science is not merely a method. It is an emergent, socially organized system that has produced more knowledge over the last 400 years than at any time in human history, by any means. The architecture deserves credit, and within it, the papers that contribute the most are those that update knowledge the most. This structure is governed by rules of cooperation (sharing methods, data, and goals) and decorum (validating empirical claims solely with empirical evidence, and justifying the importance of these claims based solely on whether other scientists will go along). But its primary driver is competition. Progress requires persuading the scientific community to accept new empirical claims. What is less appreciated is that the farther a scientist can move the predominant position of a community, the more people will acknowledge the finding, and the more importance will be attributed to the work. The predominant view is often supported by considerable evidence, which is why moving it demands extraordinary evidence and why the system offers its largest rewards for successes and largest penalties for failures, the farther a claim sits from that view. A researcher who convinces the scientific community, with robust evidence, that objects can travel faster than the speed of light would become famous, and the researcher who presses such claims without convincing evidence would be ignored or sanctioned…(More)”
