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Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know", telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field, provide s
by joe_the_user 7y ago
Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know", telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field, provide structure and guidance while a person spends time attempting to address a given question, etc, etc, etc.
All these things are powerful and shape most modern intellectual endeavors. And by that token, someone who apply discipline and rigor in approaching questions outside an institution can have an incredible effect - back to Chomsky essentially creating the field that he's dominated (theoretical linguistics, one thing I didn't know 'till this article).
- vkou 7y agoThe key question that people are trying to answer in the field of fluid dynamics is how to find the solution to the Navier-Stokes set of equations. There you go. You have the question. You have a search engine. Go solve it. Oh... Hmm. 'Knowing which question to solve' only helps for easy problems. A search engine can help you solve easy problems. It won't do a damn thing for hard problems. You need someone to curate what is known in the field, point you in the right direction, steer you away from dead ends, help you break the problem down into bits that you might make headway in. Academic institutions do just that. They don't always do it optimally, they can get stuck in local maximums, they are occasionally blind-sided by some genius that attacked the problem from an unorthodox angle. But they do a hell of a lot more then a search engine ever would.
- contingencies 7y agoThe whole notion that there is a field and it has a key question and there's a goal to solve it is already a triple set of local maximums.