Competing Paradigms: On “The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn”
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
The desperation which fully-subscribed adherents of a paradigm cling to said paradigm in spite of shortcomings of its explanatory power is the most powerful signal for detecting big shifts within a domain.
Kuhn only applies it to scientific paradigms, but the exact same patterns emerge within microcosms
A recent paper has been making the rounds suggesting that disruptive research is becoming less common. This seems critically important for interpreting Kuhn.
Perhaps, for instance, Kuhn was writing or formulating his ideas in an unusually disruptive era. Or maybe our current era is less disruptive, and so discourse about ideas has to be approached differently, maybe more skeptically.
Because statistically, you probably are. We all are.
Studies have shown that people are pretty good at identifying when studies won't replicate, and I think that insight (foresight?) among some extends to identifying overhyped research. I think part of the issue with "disruptive" ideas in science is that I think there's enough people who don't recognize potential problems with it before it can catch on a lot before water is put on the fire, so to speak.
There's some analogies to things like Theranos or crypto probably. They get a lot of monetary investments, and a lot of enthusiasm, but then there's also lots of pushback. You could get into arguments about whether or not they are truly disruptive -- maybe they haven't been -- but I think defining that also is murkier in science also.
Maybe truly truly disruptive ideas are hard to dismiss as mere hype, but I think in the grey area between, a lot of things look relatively disruptive but are overhyped.
It probably varies a lot by field too.
The author's project is to fill in the gaps in Kuhn's later writing. His later work has been explored much less than his early work such as Structure [1]. I appreciated the author's sincerity with extending Kuhn's theory rather than trying to give a more gimmicked interpretation e.g. the Wittgensteinian Kuhn.
[0] http://cup.columbia.edu/book/kuhns-legacy/9780231146685 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
* https://www.inventionofscience.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Rarely does a Cantor, Russell, Whitehead, Godel, or Einstein literally "think outside the box" or step out of the Platonic "cave" for a moment and see the paradigm (thought prison). Those who do are considered "mad".
Other than Rudy Rucker's "4th Dimension" (remix of Edwin Abbott Abbott's "Flatland") and Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", what modern (accessible) philosophies can anyone think of that encourage young people to think like real scientists and try to escape paradigms rather than add bricks to the wall?
I think it would be misguided to go all-in on that goal and forget why these paradigms matter, though. Everyone else in science who helps build those walls makes meaningful contributions too, to the extent that a paradigm is actually useful (wildly different conversation).
If we just scrap every paradigm immediately and move on, that’s sort of the same as going back to tribes and superstition. No one will be able to get very far on their own, not even with a tribe of acolytes. Does that make sense?
The biggest tragedy about science is that it usually has a huge delay on its utility. “Brand-new scientific answers” to practical problems of the day are often not much better than answers you get from other methods, both because the paradigms take time to get discovered and mature, and because people are corrupt. This is not the same as saying ballistics isn’t useful, it’s just that it’s remained useful long after it was brand-new science, and most of the other stuff has been forgotten.
Certainly. Rampant iconoclasm and revisionism alone bring chaos.
> No one will be able to get very far on their own, not even with a tribe of acolytes. Does that make sense?
Absolutely, old paradigms still matter, showing where we've been, how we got here. To totally smash and forget them is to undermine our own foundations. I don't think any successful new paradigm can avoid subsuming the old ones.
> a huge delay on its utility.
Here's where I imagined the conversation going.
However much I dislike Peter Thiel's "control machinations" there's one thing I strongly agree with him on, and it's in that famous discussion with David Graeber; "Where Did the Future Go?" Somewhere, perhaps around the turn of the century, we got really stuck;
More. Faster. Bigger. Repeat.
We stopped paying attention to the immense social utility possibilities that were (and still are) latent in computer science. I think we've been riding on Moore's law the way we rode fossil fuels. LLM's are the latest round. But I don't think scale is the answer to very much.
Maybe it's a bit grand to call it a "paradigm", but I'm claiming the kind of radical thinking that could shake us out of it is a bit thin on the ground these days.