Kuhn 25: Another Flash Quiz (Everybody Misunderstands Kuhn, Nate Silver Edition)

Another one! Nate Silver cites Kuhn in a footnote, Silver probably** being unaware that his own passage (Nate Silver, The Signal And The Noise, p. 260) not only runs opposite to a couple of Kuhn's major ideas, and not only isn't in the same ballpark as Kuhn, it's barely in the same sport. Again, I'm not giving you the answer, this being a quiz:

The notion of scientific consensus is tricky, but the idea is that the opinion of the scientific community converges toward the truth as ideas are debated and new evidence is uncovered. Just as in the stock market, the steps are not always forward or smooth. The scientific community is often too conservative about adapting its paradigms to new evidence,⁶⁴ although there have certainly also been times when it was too quick to jump on the bandwagon. Still, provided that everyone is on the Bayesian train,* even incorrect beliefs and quite wrong priors are revised toward the truth in the end.

*And that they don't hold priors that they believe to be exactly 100 percent true or exactly 0 percent true; these will not and cannot change under Bayes's theorem.

64. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kindle edition).

A couple of hints:

(1) Incommensurability
(2) Darwin

But this passage is a botch in whole hunks of other ways as well, e.g., the word "the" in the phrase "the scientific community."

Look, I've read enough philosophy to know that Kuhn is not hard, though he vagues out too much and he leaves some difficult problems in his wake. That near everybody gets him wrong isn't due to a fundamental ideological barrier or to any drastic unfamiliarity/novelty in his concepts. ( More griping )

**"Probably," since I don't know how much of Structure he read, and I myself had only read about half my nephew's copy of the Silver book, skipping around, before it was time to fly back to Denver.