"Somehow some science gets done anyway!" — well the degree is much higher IRL. In the sims, each scientist can only talk to 4 others! "Informal networks" — I've heard this called the "invisible college" and I _love_ that term.
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Replying to @KevinSimler @Meaningness
Btw, David, I think you'd really like this essay (which I excerpted for you a couple weeks ago): https://thestoryofscience.blogspot.com/?m=0 I would also love to hear your thoughts on it! It talks about invisible colleges and systemic problems with science and many other things.
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Replying to @KevinSimler
Thank, I enjoyed this! Its description of the pathologies of institutional science are mostly correct I think. They’ve been clear to the clueful for decades, have gotten progressively worse, and are now so bad that even the MSM are writing about the problems.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
The question is what to do about it. Charlton is nostalgic for “the systematic mode” or “high modernism” or “the golden age of rationalism,” which ended in the late 60s. What he’d really like to do is to restore that, which gives him a cranky reactionary tone, but >
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
> he recognizes that this is impossible, and suggests a return to amateur science instead. His valorized examples are the Manhattan Project and Apollo, which … are the antithesis of amateur science. (As he also notes.) They are, rather, peak achievements of high modernism.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
Since we’re no longer capable of Apollo, we’ll have to go back in history to the Lunar Society of aristocratic amateurs. I fit that profile, after a fashion, so I find it emotionally attractive, but it’s unrealistic for numerous reasons and can’t be taken seriously.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
Which he then admits and gives up with “well science was nice while it lasted but’s over, so I’m taking refuge in my Catholic faith” which I don’t find altogether satisfactory.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
I would rather look forward than back—although I do read a lot of history of science to inform my attempts to imagine better futures.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
“Meta-rationality” means examining how we’re using rationality (including science) in context, not taking its claims about itself at face value, figuring how it relates to concrete reality, where and when and how and why it works or doesn’t, and figuring out how to do it better.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
One of Kuhn’s main points is that when rationality breaks down, you have to get meta-rational (and, when science is functioning correctly, scientists observably do exactly that).
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Now we have not just a localized breakdown, but a pervasive science-wide one (and, indeed, a society/culture/psychology wide one, but that’s another story). We have to step back and examine science overall as a phenomenon and ask when and how and why it work or doesn’t.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
Charlton does that, and gets mostly right answers. Science management has treated it as industrial assembly-line production of knowledge-units as ordered by the state. The Politburo’s Five Year Plan has mandated 23% more medical research papers by 2020! Glorious, comrade!
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler
We do have *some* knowledge of what worked in postmodernity. Skunkworks can work. Xerox PARC was an extraordinarily postmodern institution, and well, hello THE WHOLE TECH INDUSTRY. Why has no one replicated that? Lack of courage? Was PARC just a unique, unrepeatable accident?
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