The student who discovered water on Mars says it was a 'lucky accident' (opens in new tab)

You are right, someone reading articles about scientists, or about startups might come up with "they're all a bunch of hipsters nowadays". IMHO that's pretty bad, because it renders the creative but eccentric or reclusive scientist as someone who doesnt even fit in the scientific circles anymore. Here's how Peter Thiel puts it:

"the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast"

Yea, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Pop culture like tv shows Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley are showing that it's actually cool to be geeky or into tech and startups.

You have to do it when you want to reach "general public" which is far-from-science type of individuals who refer to themselves as "not interested in politics, space and that kind of stuff. I'm interested in people and events that directly affect me today". These personal life descriptions helps them started. Shows quality of journalism actually.

The "I'm scientist but I'm cool also because I play guitar" is a really unfortunate message. Specially when you think in all young scientists that need to have a second job (unrelated) to keep their job as university associated teachers. Those things always remember me the Poochie satire in the Simpsons.

Lottery exists because for some people the thought of being rich is more enticing than the reality of owning an extra buck.

But luck does play a bigger role than most would think as one can work as hard as possible and not be lucky enough to succeed. It's hard to define luck though so it might be highly subjective.

> People like to just believe that brilliance is only possible at random, and nothing they can do will help, unless they get lucky.

On the other hand, scientists (especially observational scientists) know that there's many many many brilliant scientists in the world, and which one of us actually happens to do the right kind of scan on the right data at the right time can be down to pure, "dumb" luck.

Sorry, but over-citation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is a pet peeve of mine.

People seem to think that the Dunning-Kruger effect means "smart people think they're dumb and dumb people think they're smart!" but I don't think that's very accurate.

What they actually found was that lower-skilled people thought their skill level was somewhat higher, and higher-skilled people thought their skill level was a little lower, but not to the point where their relative perceived skill levels inverted. At no point along the skill curve did people incorrectly perceive themselves to be higher or lower in skill level in comparison others who were actually higher or lower in skill. The perceived skill curve was a little less steep than it should have been, that's all.

I think a more appropriate cognitive bias would be the curse of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Thanks for your reply. I've seen an animated image of these salt deposits forming online. It's my understanding these images were taken over a period of several months. Now we know what to look for, would it be possible to watch this happen in real time, or not? Would there be any benefit of a geostationary satellite that just observed the same spot over a long period of time?