Do science hero stories stand in the way of progress?

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, raises the question:

If you believe that genius alone will do, then you are likely to believe it doesn’t matter how smart people arrange their interaction. If you, on the other hand, take into account that even big-brained scientists must somehow make decisions about what information to have a look at, you understand that it matters a lot how scientists organize their work-life.

I think that currently many scientists, especially in the foundations of physics, fail to pay attention to how they exchange and gather information, processes that can easily be skewed by social biases. What’s a scientist, after all? A scientist is someone who collects information, chews on it, and outputs new information. But, as they say, garbage in, garbage out. Sabine Hossenfelder, “How Heroes Hurt Science” at BackRe(Action)

She thinks that the problem is not a shortage of smart people but a shortage of smart people who grasp that they are simply “wheels in the machinery.”

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See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Has The Large Hadron Collider “Broken Physics”?

and

Sabine Hossenfelder: Can Gravitational Wave Interferometers Tell Us If We Live In A Hologram Universe?

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