Question
How much does ego and the desire to be recognized as an individual impede scientific progress?
Answer
It does not impede scientific progress. It accelerates it.
You need to distinguish between 2 kinds of recognition-hunger though. The first is "acceptance and status" hunger. The kind that puts you on a publish/perish treadmill and you deliberately try to work on "hot topics" and win prizes by doing work the awards committee is known to like.
The other kind is the egoistic kind, where your research has a characteristic style/brand, is driven by its own agenda and completely ignores the problems the field's priests think are "important."
Formal recognition seeking vs. vindication seeking for following your own path.
The first kind, the desire to be recognized as an accepted, valued and decorated member of a community impedes progress because it motivates you to validate groupthink and increase its inertia. It is NOT the desire to be recognized as an individual, but as a valued community member. Such communitarian people are more likely to have titles like "President" or "Program Committee Chair" than have theorems named after them. They adopt a pious air and elevate some notion of "service" above the core activity of discovery. They try to lead the field via committee reports and consensus, rather than undeniably powerful demonstrations of truth. Things that even your worst enemies, who hate you, are forced to accept as important, original and correct.
The second kind is an adversarial, aggressive kind of recognition-seeking, one that says "I am going to do exactly what I think is important, and the day I am vindicated, I'll laugh at you guys, rub it in your faces, and destroy the crappy intellectual edifice you guys have been propping up and giving each other prizes over." This is a desire to BE right, and be ACKNOWLEDGED as being right, based on truth, not social proof and "he's a jolly good fellow"-itis.
Individualism and an "ignore everybody" egoistic (NOT egotistic) thinking drive people to do the second kind of more revolutionary work. Wanting work to be accepted and win prizes drives people to do evolutionary work. These are the classic Kuhnian distinctions.
Newton and Gauss were egoistic, sociopath jerks by this reckoning. Each of them created 1,000,000x more progress than the collectivist types. Gauss was very unusual and passive-aggressive in his recognition seeking. He didn't publish a lot of his stuff, and torpedoed a lot of careers by (correctly) claiming he'd already done it. Thanks to him, really good people like Bolyai abandoned mathematics. He damaged the community quite a bit. Yet, his contributions are so immense, it is a no-brainer that the costs were worth the benefits.
I know dozens of well-liked, community-values type researchers who religiously study the "best paper" award winners, serve on program committees, and write one dull paper after the other. They'll be forgotten the day they die.
Some do the exact same things, but do so subversively and ironically, pursuing a more revolutionary agenda under cover. I admire these guys.
And some of course, become the crazy, openly individualistic and egoistic kinds who go off and try to create fields containing just one person, themselves.
You need to distinguish between 2 kinds of recognition-hunger though. The first is "acceptance and status" hunger. The kind that puts you on a publish/perish treadmill and you deliberately try to work on "hot topics" and win prizes by doing work the awards committee is known to like.
The other kind is the egoistic kind, where your research has a characteristic style/brand, is driven by its own agenda and completely ignores the problems the field's priests think are "important."
Formal recognition seeking vs. vindication seeking for following your own path.
The first kind, the desire to be recognized as an accepted, valued and decorated member of a community impedes progress because it motivates you to validate groupthink and increase its inertia. It is NOT the desire to be recognized as an individual, but as a valued community member. Such communitarian people are more likely to have titles like "President" or "Program Committee Chair" than have theorems named after them. They adopt a pious air and elevate some notion of "service" above the core activity of discovery. They try to lead the field via committee reports and consensus, rather than undeniably powerful demonstrations of truth. Things that even your worst enemies, who hate you, are forced to accept as important, original and correct.
The second kind is an adversarial, aggressive kind of recognition-seeking, one that says "I am going to do exactly what I think is important, and the day I am vindicated, I'll laugh at you guys, rub it in your faces, and destroy the crappy intellectual edifice you guys have been propping up and giving each other prizes over." This is a desire to BE right, and be ACKNOWLEDGED as being right, based on truth, not social proof and "he's a jolly good fellow"-itis.
Individualism and an "ignore everybody" egoistic (NOT egotistic) thinking drive people to do the second kind of more revolutionary work. Wanting work to be accepted and win prizes drives people to do evolutionary work. These are the classic Kuhnian distinctions.
Newton and Gauss were egoistic, sociopath jerks by this reckoning. Each of them created 1,000,000x more progress than the collectivist types. Gauss was very unusual and passive-aggressive in his recognition seeking. He didn't publish a lot of his stuff, and torpedoed a lot of careers by (correctly) claiming he'd already done it. Thanks to him, really good people like Bolyai abandoned mathematics. He damaged the community quite a bit. Yet, his contributions are so immense, it is a no-brainer that the costs were worth the benefits.
I know dozens of well-liked, community-values type researchers who religiously study the "best paper" award winners, serve on program committees, and write one dull paper after the other. They'll be forgotten the day they die.
Some do the exact same things, but do so subversively and ironically, pursuing a more revolutionary agenda under cover. I admire these guys.
And some of course, become the crazy, openly individualistic and egoistic kinds who go off and try to create fields containing just one person, themselves.