Conversation

Misses the biggest factor though imo — new paradigms. Article hints at that in passing — more pivoty seminal publications get more citations — but doesn’t unpack it. You can’t just “start a new field” because a topic is important. You have to start it *with* something.
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I’d argue that the burst of activity triggered by Covid was at least partly due to a “paradigm effect” rather than importance/social good. Many recognized that a huge natural experiment was underway and would paradigmatically reframe everything we thought we knew in many fields.
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I’m not actually a big fan of Kuhnian paradigm shift model, but I think it applies here to first order (I’m more in the Feyerabend methodological anarchy camp). Basically good researchers don’t work on what’s “important” but on what they have a promising attack for.
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It’s not actually possible to drive planned roadmaps at any useful level of detail below say “go to the moon” and allocating Apollo level budgets. Below that, you gotta pour fuel on emerging paradigm sparks, not force “research time travel” down people’s throats with money/funds.
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This is one reason I’m a skeptic of Progress Studies type thinking. Appeals to economists and billionaires but rests on an illusion of methodological legibility and governability that the history of science casts serious doubt on.
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A “tell” that you’re trying to force a new field is uninspired, extrapolative naming as in “5th generation computing” which couldn’t avert the AI winter despite billions in funding by Japan in the 80s vs. “deep learning” as a natural paradigm that attracted funding.
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You can’t “make fetch happen” One of the warning signs of Web3 is that it is called Web3. I do think there’s a new paradigm there but the bane suggests a weakness that’s being patched over by funding forces.
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But I’m not overindexing in this name heuristic. Web 2.0 despite being named by Tim O’Reilly by extrapolation was a new paradigm. Semantic Web despite sounding like a paradigm, wasn’t really. It was wishful thinking.
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Also values/manifestos are not paradigms. Sustainability is not a paradigm Progress is not a paradigm Equality/justice are not paradigms Maintenance over building is not a paradigm Paradigms don’t prioritize problems, they suggest ways of looking at phenomena
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The basic tension in a formulation like “progress studies” is that it applies a lens from “low paradigm” fields (social sciences) to “high paradigm” processes (technological evolution). It’s like trying to study chemistry by composing music about it.
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