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koganbotAnother 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:
(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. I mean, there are passages in Structure that directly and obviously contradict what Silver wrote. Of course, Silver isn't claiming to explicate Kuhn, is just citing him in a general paragraph of Silver's own un-thought-through quasi-philosophical views. But it's as if he didn't notice a blatant challenge. What I see is a culture of laxness, though maybe it's a culture of overload, too. It isn't that most people are incapable of reading someone and thinking about what they've read, and thinking about what other people have said about what they read. It's that in reading Kuhn, people — smart people, who otherwise would be thoughtful — are unaware of stumbling, unaware that they need to pause and collect themselves and reread and rethink. I mean, life throws enough stuff at us, where we have to stop and think hard, and for some reason (maybe it's the apparent easiness of his ideas), when Kuhn is at issue, almost no one wants to go, "Oh, maybe I don't get this, maybe here, too, I have to put forth some effort of my own."
Btw, despite that it's teeming with flaws, the Nate Silver passage is the sort of thing that encourages Nate to think hard about what he's good at thinking about: the uncertainties in polls, the need not to be so taken with new data that you don't see all the data, and so forth.
**"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.
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.A couple of hints:
*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).
(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. I mean, there are passages in Structure that directly and obviously contradict what Silver wrote. Of course, Silver isn't claiming to explicate Kuhn, is just citing him in a general paragraph of Silver's own un-thought-through quasi-philosophical views. But it's as if he didn't notice a blatant challenge. What I see is a culture of laxness, though maybe it's a culture of overload, too. It isn't that most people are incapable of reading someone and thinking about what they've read, and thinking about what other people have said about what they read. It's that in reading Kuhn, people — smart people, who otherwise would be thoughtful — are unaware of stumbling, unaware that they need to pause and collect themselves and reread and rethink. I mean, life throws enough stuff at us, where we have to stop and think hard, and for some reason (maybe it's the apparent easiness of his ideas), when Kuhn is at issue, almost no one wants to go, "Oh, maybe I don't get this, maybe here, too, I have to put forth some effort of my own."
Btw, despite that it's teeming with flaws, the Nate Silver passage is the sort of thing that encourages Nate to think hard about what he's good at thinking about: the uncertainties in polls, the need not to be so taken with new data that you don't see all the data, and so forth.
**"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.
