Rodney Brooks subsumption architecture revolutionized robotics. Back in the 90s you could replicate his work with Attila and Genghis and recreate hexapod robots for under $1000 which was an pittance for a robot.
He was at MIT when he submitted those papers. The churlishness of those reviews is staggering. What if he had given up and gone on to something else?
What would have happened if he had moved on to another field? Subsumption architecture would eventually have been discovered by someone else, standing on the shoulders of giants and eventuality of all discoveries etc.
Or it might have taken another 50-100 years. Fundamentally unknowable.
> What if he had given up and gone on to something else?
Science isn't supposed to be easy and it's the faithful ones that thrive. If anything, i wish reviewers were more critical of stuff before it's published.
Why shouldn't science be easier? We should work at making the doing of science as easy as possible. Getting ideas out there is a boon, suppressing them is of no value. Great ideas should percolate up because they work well, not because someone that has never tested them doesn't like the author. There is no moral superiority in making ideas harder to propagate. Science itself is tough enough as is.
In fields that are more theoretical and far removed from application, the “works well” signal will only be weak and delayed. Then a filtration process is needed to separate coherent ideas from incoherent ones.
Innovative ideas are indistinguishable from crazy ideas until they are sufficiently developed. "Supressing" them in the early stages does serve to cut down the amount of "science spam", which is at record levels already...
Because science isn’t just science, it’s also a career. Humans respond to incentives and scientists are no exception. Great work doesn’t just magically happen; it takes the right environment with the right incentives and cultural norms to induce people to put in the irrational level of effort required for great work.
He was at MIT when he submitted those papers. The churlishness of those reviews is staggering. What if he had given up and gone on to something else?