4 ms·

The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty year

The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. We can say a proposal looks stupid (and it might actually be) but huge swathes of current scientific consensus would look ridiculous at any point directly prior to its establishment, which might be considered the whole basis behind the Max Planck quote: "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's not really that many people are ever bowled over by something, so much as the next generation just grows up with a general idea in the atmosphere, so it's a little less alien. At it's heart, isn't the basic conflict between the two views of science as expressed by Drumlin and Arroway in Contact?

gumby 8y ago
> The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow, modern fleshed-out work. Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and did take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment. So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an intellectual tradition. The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat) it's worthless. So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be absurd, you throw out something very important. My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors were unwitting human subjects...

gumby 8y ago

> The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow, modern fleshed-out work. Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and did take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment. So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an intellectual tradition. The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat) it's worthless. So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be absurd, you throw out something very important. My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors were unwitting human subjects...