Hmm. Seems like you’re conflating application métis and fan theories a bit? Most programmers don’t understand semiconductor manufacturing but build their theories atop abstractions that they trust up to a point. Programming lore does not appear to be a quasiscience in your sense.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
There is a spectrum going from programming lore on one end (based on strong, nearly leakproof abstractions) through fMRIology to social psych and say startupology. The abstractions they depend on get progressively leakier, and conclusions shakier.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
Fandom seems almost like an epiphenomenon of shaky foundations but not in itself an indictment of the foundations. You look for more social reassurance when your truths have a half life of 5 years rather than 50. But that’s degree, not kind.
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Replying to @vgr
This sounds like an interesting thread of questions, but I’m not sure I understand what it is. Is the point that there’s a continuum from reliable science to pseudoscience? Yes definitely. “Quasi” refers vaguely to the middle ground there.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
There are fields that haven’t quite managed to get into a normal-science groove yet, because the methods are still shaky or there’s still ontological problems. Kuhn called them “pre-paradigm”.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
Pre-paradigm science is great (only place I personally want to be; normal science, however valuable, bores me). Quasisciences are ones that are pre-paradigm but are treated as normal due to public desire for answers. That’s pathological.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
Do you mean the scientists themselves treat it as normal? If so, on what basis is a field being designated as *actually* pre-paradigm?
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Replying to @NeuroStats @vgr
Well these are interesting and difficult questions! The relevant meta-science is itself mostly pre-paradigm, so any answers have to be tentative… >
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Anecdotally, scientists in any field have varying degrees of understanding of, and skepticism about, the field’s methods and logical foundations. And fields differ with respect to that distribution.
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A field whose leaders recognize and acknowledge that its foundations are shaky, and/or its methods are questionable, and are working to improve them, is not pathological—quite the opposite. (Although its results are unreliable in the interim.)
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If outsiders took the field as reliable when the leaders are loudly saying “no, not yet” that would be pathological (although not the field’s fault). Do you have examples in mind?
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