I enjoyed speaking with @EconTalker about the piece @michael_nielsen and I wrote last year about progress in science: http://www.econtalk.org/patrick-collison-on-innovation-and-scientific-progress/ …. (Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ ….)
Scientific investigation is an art. Its state of health should be compared with that of other arts. Narrative fiction, (classical) musical performance, and drama all still produce acclaimed and successful masters. In these arts, the traditions of apprenticeship remain strong.
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Painting, sculpture, and musical composition, on the other hand, have become increasingly academic pursuits. Their practitioners have become lecturers, scholars, and critics. They spend less time mentoring individual apprentices, and more time teaching masses of undergraduates.
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When artists become academics, the obligation to reduce their practice to a litany of rigorously justified abstract principles suitable for exposition to a broad audience tends to vitiate that practice by suppressing its crucial inarticulate and irrational components.
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