The real relationship between your age and

https://t.me/TED_IWS
(Laughter)
11:20
So let's look at the probability that you publish your highest-
impact paper. And what you see is, indeed, the genius 
research is right. Most scientists tend to publish their highest-
impact paper in the first 10, 15 years in their career, and it 
tanks after that. It tanks so fast that I'm about -- I'm exactly 30 
years into my career, and the chance that I will publish a paper 
that would have a higher impact than anything that I did 
before is less than one percent. I am in that stage of my career, 
according to this data. But there's a problem with that. We're 
not doing controls properly. So the control would be, what 
would a scientist look like who makes random contribution to 
science? Or what is the productivity of the scientist? When do 
they write papers? So we measured the productivity, and 
amazingly, the productivity, your likelihood of writing a paper in 
year one, 10 or 20 in your career, is indistinguishable from the 
likelihood of having the impact in that part of your career.
12:24
And to make a long story short, after lots of statistical tests, 
there's only one explanation for that, that really, the way we 
scientists work is that every single paper we write, every 
project we do, has exactly the same chance of being our 
personal best. That is, discovery is like a lottery ticket. And the 
more lottery tickets we buy, the higher our chances. And it 
happens to be so that most scientists buy most of their lottery 
tickets in the first 10, 15 years of their career, and after that, 
their productivity decreases. They're not buying any more 
lottery tickets. So it looks as if they would not be creative. In 
reality, they stopped trying. So when we actually put the data 
together, the conclusion is very simple: success can come at 
any time. It could be your very first or very last paper of your 
career. It's totally random in the space of the projects. It is the 
productivity that changes.
13:25
https://t.me/TED_IWS
Page of 
8
10

---