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Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just tha
by possibilistic 12y ago
Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just that the surface area of the problem space has grown too vast for the human mind to generally see the bigger picture?
Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model. I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.
- fidotron 12y agoI certainly do think the publishing culture has become broken. There is no doubt in my mind that if Einstein appeared in this environment he'd have been labelled a crackpot and it would have taken fifty years or more before anyone even began to take him seriously. The fact we now have a global network of entities competing for funding from relatively narrow sources means that those that deviate rapidly get weeded out. There is at least the perception that prior to about 1990 different institutions could be quite divergent with their views on particular ideas, violently disagree, but both still pursue research in their unique directions. The world seems far more homogeneous today.