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/ ….)
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Replying to @patrickc
The key problem here is transmission fidelity. Tacit knowledge and inarticulate heuristics no longer pass from masters to apprentices. Mass-production education has fatally undermined traditional apprenticeship, with dire effects. http://bit.ly/1X1QmZy / http://bit.ly/2CcpYcN
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
The less comfortable an artist becomes about acknowledging and embracing these "unjustifiable" but essential aspects of artistic practice, the more they tend to recede, leaving behind only formal abstractions which, though more readily "teachable," are relatively sterile.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
Scientific investigation is practiced now almost exclusively by academics whose teaching systematically misleads by concealing their heuristics and inspirations. Students gain mastery of existing knowledge, but remain untutored in the arts of successful groping about in the dark.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
Among the shrewdest observers of this demoralizing and perverse phenomenon was the great Alexander Grothendieck: "Of course, no creative mathematician can afford not to “speculate,” namely, to do more or less daring guesswork as an indispensable source of inspiration. (1/2)
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
"The trouble is that, in obedience to a stern tradition, almost nothing of this appears in writing, and preciously little even in oral communication." (2/2)
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @patrickc
The very best students eventually supply for themselves the crucial investigative heuristics and inspirations denied them by the present system of scientific education. But this perverse need to reinvent the wheel discourages many, and delays those it does not discourage.
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All of which, of course, brings us back to transmission fidelity, and to the profoundly suggestive (and even ominous) work of Laland and Lewis. As a class, scientists are grossly undervaluing pedagogy, and failing to share what they privately value most. The damage done is vast.
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