Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It
nav.al
nav.al
OK, naval – what are you actually talking about?
Imo the message is at least delivered early. It's the subtitle. My read: you have to be uncool to be good.
> Science’s biggest breakthroughs came from unpopular people
Especially in cases where they say "I am lone and contrarian therefore I am a genius". There are many who seem to want to make themselves unpopular as if this somehow singles them out for achievement, but it just makes them a*holes the vast majority of the time.
We just don't hear about them, while we do hear about those rare circumstances where somebody really did manage to achieve something despite being a jerk about it.
I was thinking about examples where corners are cut such as data being shaped to fit conclusions.
Maybe replication crises don't hinder scientific progress as much as I think they do, but things do get lost in the noise, considering what has been rediscovered.
Experiments are arguments, designed to cause other scientists to agree about something. Do this enough that most scientists agree, and you've got the truth--or as reasonable an approximation thereof as your level of skepticism will permit.
If you prevent science from being social, you take away whatever might make it true.
It seems like "centralized science" might have something to do with authority, which not an idea that I think gets along with science very well. I'm more into Feyerabend than Popper in that way.
Some degree of gatekeeping is probably good. What we're doing now is probably not. Striking the right balance seems important, but I don't know if drawing a firm line between the two is a good idea, I think you'd end up with otherwise rational people arguing themselves into more and more extreme positions if you managed to frame it as an us-vs-them thing (which is what drawing that line would do).
> An individual doesn’t want to go to zero—doesn’t want to die—so they will not take risks of ruin and they will not take risks of bankruptcy; whereas a group should be willing to take a risk of bankruptcy because that’s spread out among so many different people.