The book is called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Very interesting read.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has the most relevant writing on this.

Such an incredible book.

A lit class isn't going to make any comment on a phrase like that, or management speak in general. Management speak is just a jargon.

Manufacturing Consent/Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky(Possibly even more relevant today than it's ever been)

The Selfish Gene/The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins

The Republic by Plato

The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-...

Also Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

And I think he wouldn't have touched that phrase with a barge pole.

>Management speak is just a jargon.

No. Jargon comes out of necessity and field-specific needs.

Management speak comes out of the desire to unecessarily dress-up bullshit.

Darwin Among the Machines

Technomanifestos

Possiplex

What Technology Wants

A couple of not computer related, but quite interesting books-

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

As far as details on how Kuhn challenges Popper, I'd recommend you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to find out--specifically chapter 8 where he addresses falsification and chapter 12 where he mentions Popper by name. Popper is also mentioned in the postscript.

"By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core."

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Long story short, Max Planck was on the money when he said that "“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

As an introduction, Alan F. Chalmers' What Is This Thing Called Science? is good. It covers Popper in chapters 5 to 7 (Introduction & Naive Falsificationism, Sophisticated Falsificationism, Limitations). Then it moves on (as it were) to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Imre Lakatos' Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (great short read, btw, applying those ideas to maths: Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations), and Feyerabend's Against Method. Chalmers then covers Bayesianism, new experimentalism, the nature of scientific laws, and scientific realism.

They've all pointed out problems with Popper's demarcation criterion. Not sure there's really a good catchy replacement, though. It seems to amount to "it's complicated".

One of the problems with Popper's account is the following: an observation is never about only one hypothesis, but about it and a whole set of auxiliary hypotheses. So, if your observation does not line up with the prediction, do you throw out the theory, or some auxiliary hypothesis? (Eg, Uranus didn't move as predicted, so Newton's physics was wrong. But wait, it was not a problem with Newton's physics, but there was another planet, Neptune.) Quine's notion of a "web of belief" captures that quite nicely - you don't just take one hypothesis, test it, and drop it if falsified, but you adjust the whole edifice such that it becomes coherent again. See [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem–Quine_thesis

+1 for Man’s Search For Meaning.

Lord of the Flies. Amazing that this is assigned reading in middle school (or high school).

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Really drove home the importance of paying attention to language and framing.

Moby Dick. I’m amazed at myself for reading this on my own in high school. There’s something about that era of sea travel that speaks to my soul.

6 Pillars Of Self-Esteem. This was a HN recommendation. I’ve been doing the sentence completion exercises for about 6 months, and it’s been astounding to palpably feel my self-awareness increase.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Discusses the underlying group dynamics that influence the progress of science.

A Fire Upon The Deep. Just an amazing work of sci-fi exploring the internal logic of radically different forms of intelligence.

The Sane Society. It’s liberating to reflect on some of the crazy things that capitalism pressures us to do.

The Power Of Now. I think I might have some more issues if I re-read it, but it undoubtedly had a huge impact on me and made me introspect deeply and finally “get” meditation.

The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea."

> he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas.

The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion.

In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.

"Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

My go to recommendations:

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-... - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, (1996)

http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master... - The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas (1999)

Things I've liked in the last 6 months:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busin... - How to Measure Anything, Douglas Hubbard (2007)

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineerin... - Mythical Man Month: Essays in Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks Jr. (1975, but get the 1995 version)

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/00... - Good To Great, Jim Collins (2001)

Next on my reading list (and I'm really excited about it):

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Interface-No-brilliant-technology... - The Best Interface is No Interface, Golden Krishna (2015)

I found that to be a really good foundation for scientists, and highly recommend these three to anyone in academia or science.

This is very abstract, but more concretely, what I mean is that it helps to read about the philosophy/history of science. The canonical recommendation here is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1], but I also strongly recommend watching James Burke's Connections tv series [2] and then watching or reading his The Day the Universe Changed [3] to understand how our entire conception of "reality" or "truth" is so strongly determined by the technology of the time.

Finally, there are lots of "truths" in fields where this is no scientific basis to fall-back on -- politics, art, etc. For these, you have to seek out and find the best elucidators of each field (usually, but not always, books).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29

[3]

The classics have their place as art and as sources of prestige, but if you're looking to learn things there are usually better places to look.

Not that I disagree with everything Mr. Sanger said, but the truth is a complicated beast.

[1] Some people studying the history of science read the originals, but thats different.

BTW, if you do research solely by what you find interesting, more power to you. But to propose that most or all researchers do so, while not caring what their colleagues and peers think, doesn't square with well-documented reality (e.g. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

You're right to call this out. It's the most difficult and elusive thing to achieve. However, it has been happening pretty continuously since the dawn of civilization. Thomas Kuhn sat down to study it in the 50's or 60's and published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." That book is one of the best treatments of this subject area to date. It is the book that popularized the term "paradigm shift."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

http://www.philosophybites.com/

Check out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free and edited by active research philosophers on pretty much every major topic and figure.

http://plato.stanford.edu/

Naming and Necessity by Kripke is about reference and the causal theory of reference, but it assume a decent amount (in case that is what you were asking for specifically).

The Very Short Introductions series have some really good booklets if you want quick ways to jump into a topic.

A few other books:

B Russell The Problems of Philosophy. OUP (dated, but a classic general introduction)

Simon Blackburn Think. Oxford (nice general introduction)

Tim Crane The Mechanical Mind. Penguin (Nice introduction to phil of mind)

A J Ayer Language, Truth, and Logic. Penguin (dated, but a classic)

D Hume Enquiries

T Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Univ of Chicago Press

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw

- Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

- Tools of Titan by Tim Ferriss

- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

- Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims

- Build Better Products by Laura Klein

- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Picketty

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

- Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin

- Grit by Angela Duckworth

- Love Sense by Sue Johnson

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

- Sprint by Jake Knapp

- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock

- The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

- Design Sprint by Richard Banfield

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

- Advanced Swift by Chris Eidoff

- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Some of these books are older and had been on my list for awhile. Some were released this year. Most of these books are very good. I usually stop reading bad books by the end of the first chapter.

And it doesn't really qualify as a paradox in my opinion. Perhaps briefly counterintuitive. But the real question of "X is free and does the 'same thing' as Y, which is not free: so why are more people using Y?" Is perfectly easy to explain via UI/UX, discoverability, ease of install/uninstall, or network effects (all my friends/coworkers use Y, so I will too).

This seems like an uninteresting question named after a very interesting writer.

Wrong book. Try looking at a history of science. You definitely see the same sort of behavior. A good place to start is Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If anything, science is worse because the cycles are longer. As Max Planck wrote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R...

In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.

That is, when you look seriously at what scientists do as opposed to what they say they do when they attempt to justify their work, you will find they are not falsifiers but model-builders. If you like to learn more about how Popper has fared in the philosophy of science, you might find Thomas Kuhn [0] and Paul Feyerabend [1],[2] interesting counterpoints, I would throw in the work of Larry Laudan too as it is a good overview of "realist" attempts to move beyond falsification while trying to avoid Feyerabend's embrace of "relativism." [3],[4]

Obviously alot of more recent and good literature on the subject!

[0]: Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962
[1]: 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
[2]: 1978. Science in a Free Society
[3]: 1977. Progress and its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth
[4]: 1996. Beyond Positivism and Relativism

> I share the skepticism towards any progress towards 'general AI' - I don't think that we're remotely close or even on the right path in any way.

This isn't how science works though. Quoting the wikipedia page for Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...):

"Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of conceptual continuity where there is cumulative progress, which Kuhn referred to as periods of "normal science", were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science."

I think this is the accepted model in the philosophy of science since the 1970s. That's why I find this argument about AI so strange, especially when it comes from respected science writers.

The idea that accumulated progress along the current path is insufficient for a breakthrough like AGI is almost obviously true. Your second point is important here. Most researchers aren't concerned with AGI because incremental ML and AI research is interesting and useful in its own right.

We can't predict when the next paradigm shift in AI will occur. So it's a bit absurd to be optimistic or skeptical. When that shift happens we don't know if it will catapult us straight to AGI or be another stepping stone on a potentially infinite series of breakthroughs that never reaches AGI. To think of it any other way is contrary to what we know about how science works. I find it odd how much ink is being spent on this question by journalists.

The account of how science does work is still being debated. Perhaps Kuhn disavowed his account later, but that doesn't matter with respect to the most important parts of the book.

AFAIK there aren't many (or any) renegade theoretical physicists/mathematicians working on teams at the LHC or ITER or similar sized projects, as an extreme example. Just getting plugged into the ecosystem and getting time to run an experiment is close to a full time job, let alone actually designing a meaningful experiment. Hell, even acquiring lab equipment for small scale experiments is a huge time sink, especially for the nicer stuff that's so expensive it requires labs pooling together and fighting over the allotments.

I'm not so sure that PIs not doing any real work is the real problem though based on my reading of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and personal experience. Science is about breaking new ground and I'm not convinced that seniority instills ability like it does with mathematics and engineering, where pattern matching builds on itself and its utility increases exponentially. Seniority in science does improve one's ability to navigate the scientific bureaucracy, but the problem is that the PIs accumulate power and the entire system calcifies around them. It was already such a noticeable phenomenon that Plank coined his principle in 1950 ("Science progresses one funeral at a time") when there were far more individual PIs who did their own work. Now we've taken it to the extreme where each subfield has a small group of larger labs creating an incestuous circle of peer reviewers, PIs, and postdocs who end up dominating the subfield just out of sheer numbers and prestige.

"... Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." [2]

If you haven't checked out Polanyi yet, look up The Tacit Dimension — a very short book that talks about "tacit knowledge" (also discussed in uky.edu page, with attribution).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn#Polanyi%E2%80%93Ku...

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Evolution)

MindStorms by Seymore Papert (Education)

Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn (Scientific Method/ Philosophy)

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Formal Systems)

The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Entrepreneurship)

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F Druckert (Entrepreneurship but most likely because I had a quite crazy experience while reading it)

They are all books written by what I consider careful thinkers i.e. people who are able to avoid confusing what they want the world to be with what they actually observe.

They don't have to be right and can be highly subjective as long as their premise is clear and they are aware of it.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn is an excellent read on this topic - dense but considered one of the most important works in the philosophy of science. It popularized Planck's Principle paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time." As you note, the true machinery is a very complicated mix of human factors and actual science.

Always how it has been, since beginning of the thing we call "science."

Science is not a purely additive process. New facts and theories are not simply added to the pile of existing ones. New knowledge and understanding often requires abandoning or drastically reconceiving old theories and observations. Kuhn explores this in great detail, and I found it fascinating and insightful.

For example, prior to the invention of the telescope, the celestial sphere was viewed as fundamentally different from the earthly sphere. But a simple look at the moon in Galileo's telescope reveals it to be a body that is very similar to the Earth. It has mountains which cast shadows as the light moves across them, and so on.

The "moon" must now be be viewed as a rather different concept, and this new conception is invoked every time one looks at it. This new "paradigm" affects other observations, such as those of Jupiter and Saturn. They are not pure, static points of light like stars, and some color and a circular shape can be see with the new telescope. Must they be bodies like that of the Moon or Earth as well?

In the book, as Kuhn presents his analysis, it seems we are also taking a deep look at epistemology, and the subtleties and differences between how something is perceived and how it is conceived. Grounded in the historical narrative of scientific advancement, I found this investigation of those difficult and elusive topics to be more enlightening than usual.

I believe that some criticize Kuhn for how sharp and discontinuous he describes his paradigm shifts to be. For me, this was not a main point. I enjoyed his detailed analysis of how paradigms change in general, and why this is a more accurate description of how science progresses, compared to additive models.

Not even them. It only makes sense to talk about proof in formal domains such as math and logic.

Science proves nothing. It is impossible to prove that any given scientific theory will not be falsified in the future. In fact, physics was one of the main inspirations for the idea of "paradigm shift" by Thomas Kuhn in his famous work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

Talking about proof in science is damaging, and it conveys the wrong idea about what science actually is.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that science is apolitical. As someone who's worked in science, I can assure you that it is not. Many non-scientists listen to popularizers like Neil deGrasse-Tyson and come to believe in a very idealized model of how science operates when the de facto "nature of science" is more akin to what Thomas Kuhn describes in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". I really wish that NDT were a bit more forthcoming about his own experiences in science, seeing as how he barely made it through the grad school gauntlet himself. Ditto for Carl Sagan, who made a powerful enemy in Harold Urey (I can't find a link right now, but iirc Urey basically gave Carl a bomb of a recommendation letter that cost him a tenured position Harvard and compelled him to "settle" for Cornell).

In my personal experience (as well as the experience of many, many others if you dig deep enough into this), some scientists can be very egotistical to a point where they take a challenge to their theories as a personal affront, and will employ insanely Machiavellian tactics to suppress dissenting opinions (i.e., senior researchers are the ones who hold the purse when the NIH makes funding decisions).

Let's say I believe something that most people do not. If I want them to give me a chance, perhaps I should start with demonstrating why my theories are valid. If you read 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', Kuhn describes the process by which a scientific paradigm changes. And that starts with observations that do not fit with currently established models (as opposed to upstart scientists showing up and labeling everybody else a racist idiot).

Ie for every point you raised, where is the data that demonstrates that commonly held beliefs (that she disagrees with) are wrong?

apu's recommended reading and viewings (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", and Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed") are excellent starting points in your personal explorations into this.

Another worthwhile reading comes from Issac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" (http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html ). I think he may have been an inspiration to the notion of science as an enterprise at being "less wrong", per this redacted snippet: John Campbell [Asimov's editor], who specialized in irritating me [...] told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts...

Instead, we should try to predict how the fundamental paradigms will change, and then deduce visible, commonplace details from that.

I did just started reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn, which is all about paradigms (of a specific sort). It's good stuff.

They are not rooted in science in the sense of sophistry where they are anti-authoritarian and anti-conformist. Its impossible to express something new without being in conflict with established authority.

Its actually a fairly normal situation for all paradigm shifts. Kuhn wrote a book about it named "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" about a half century ago; it seems a pretty accurate model for how real paradigm change happens in societies (as opposed to idealized theory).

I'm not saying you're wrong and certainly not in any sort of value judgment but am saying that historically there seems to be no possible way for a paradigm shift to roll out without those relatively standard feelings and attitudes toward change you express.

The legacy model seems to result in sad middle aged lonely cat ladies for no obvious reason; clearly that model doesn't work well enough; the paradigm shift proposes a workable model with successful predictions, perhaps workable solutions.

No, it isn't. Check out a book called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see how humans really work; even the best and most intellectual of us age and die clinging to old ideas we just can't unlearn. Any future that relies on most people continually learning new and ever changing skills is a future only possible in fantasy.

> I don't think that AI and human intelligence will ever completely converge.

They don't have to, what I said applies even without strong AI. This notion that AI is only disruptive when it reaches human level is not well thought out.

> I think that the world is a "fractal".

I think that statement carries no real meaning; I could snazz it up and say I think the world is a quantum fractal, but it's still just technobabble with no meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Judea Pearl - Causality

John Earman - World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time

James Woodward - Making Things Happen

Jeff Bub - Interpreting the Quantum World

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection

Jesse Prinz - The Conscious Brain

Kim Sterelny - Thought in a Hostile World

And some historically important works:

Carnap - The Logical Structure of the World (in a loose sense, the first attempt at an AI program)

Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the philosophy of science practicing scientists now inherit and unquestionably assume)

Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a ubiquitous work on scientific practice)

Readers of HN might also dig up Scott Aaronson's paper on how complexity theory might be applied to certain philosophical questions.

The author claims we're currently in an age which doesn't accept an objective reality outside our own desires, and ties this to fights in physics (and earlier in philosophy) whose echoes are still being felt.

While some effort to standardize is important, it also waste a lot of time setting up a specific set of experimental conditions that may not have much resemblance to the conditions that obtain in the real world. In my opinion, we learn much more by taking someone's existing result, thinking through the consequences and then designing well-powered experiments that probe the assumptions, mechanisms and applicability of the result. With critical eyes and diverse systems, we won't fool ourselves.

One more note: if this topic interests you, please read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If you are unfamiliar with the book, I guarantee it will completely change how you think about science as a human endeavour and make you much more comfortable with the existence of long periods of time where science just gets some things wrong.

"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is critical for understanding how long change really takes, and spotting areas where revolutionary change is overdue.

"Pritikin's Testament" (also published as "Jesus was an Ad Man") which is The Bible on human communication from one of the original Mad Men. The original name was just to attract controversy, it's not a Parable of Jesus the Advertiser or anything dumb like that. The author worships the three martini lunch.

"Angel Tech" by Antero Alli for it's devastating analysis of what makes people tick, and how to rework your own clockwork. Owes more to improv theatre than shamanism, regardless of its name.

"The Outsider" by Colin Wilson. This book has aged strangely, and it's up to you if he's describing adolescence or asberger's syndrome, but you can't get your head around social difference through the ages in an easier way.

$0.02 etc.

Kuhn says that this works well for a while, until there builds up a collection of anomalies that result in the second type of science: revolutionary science. For a short while, people start to question fundamental assumptions about their world and this results in a "paradigm shift". In this mode of science, philosophy has always been relevant. The philosopher Ernst Mach was relevant to Einstein, for example.

In our present age, we are at the stage of normal science started by Einstein and the quantum physicists. But anomalies have started building up. And when we enter into the new phase of revolutionary science, as happens every few hundred years, we'll see philosophy be relevant once more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

For a real mindbender, read Kuhn (history of science), Carlota Perez (economics), and Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biology) in rapid succession. There're very similar ideas there around paradigm shifts, selection bias, and responses to environmental change there, appearing in many disparate domains.

That said, despite its limitations and current failures, we do not have a better intellectual process than science to study such questions.

Postmodernism was the philosophy that peeled of kind of the last layer which is the language itself and showed that the very tool we were using to express objective truths itself was in fact highly subjective and ridden with assumptions.

I can assure you the point is not to miss the point. Philosophy is for the most part not useful for everyday discussions as it tends to deal with things that often sound absurd (is it ok to kill babies if they cry) but it's important to understand that philosophy is informing other areas such as scientific methodology and to inform how to think about scientific discoveries. Falsification is a product of philosophical pondering. So is Kuhns Paradigm Shift.

With regards to books.

I would say that "Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations" is a pretty good place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Postmodern-Theory-Interrogations-Stev...

Although he isn't considered a postmodernist per se as such I would also say that Kuhns "The structure of scientific revolution" gets you an interesting view into postmodernism without gunning for it. And it's about science which in itself is always interesting.

You should probably also read some Derrida or maybe start by watching the documentary about him he is pretty hard to read unless you are motivated. But you could start with "Speech and Phenomena" or of course Focult (but try and ignore the many political nuances)

And keep in mind postmodernism doesn't lead you to a conclusion it just shows you the limit of language. It's from that limit we must build structures while knowing they can always be broken down again.

Personally, it's helped me analyze the world differently and see past assumptions which allowed me to come up with better solutions for my clients. But it can also just be something that opens up your eyes for a different way to think about the world.

You are ignorant on the history of science. Read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It will set you straight.

> Scientific fields craft and then test falsifiable scientific theories, explanations. Cognitive psychology can only describe, a failing freely acknowledged by its practitioners.

You cherry pick your quotes. Cognitive psychology is just like any other science. It constructs models, uses those models to make predictions, and then performs empirical experiments to test the accuracy of the models.

If you don't understand that science is about models, then you don't understand science.

I love the Max Planck quote, though. I hadn't heard it before.

I.e., science as never been the direct route from hypothesis to proven theory that they teach us in high school.

Chickenpox is not a horrible disease that ought to be vaccinated against. Pro-vaxxers don't realize that they're missing the big picture too: we can't vaccinate against everything, and it's just as important to address all the conditions that result in children developing an especially bad case of chicken pox.

Medicine is a fickle field. The tragedy is that modern medical practitioners think they now know what they're doing. Otto Warburg was probably always right about cancer [0], but conventional doctors are still working with the 'kill all the cancer cells' theories of cancer treatment.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/magazine/warburg-effect-a...

> I've been working with professionals a lot, and I know they are just repeating what they are told. Every profession is like that. Experts even more so, since otherwise they lose credibility and are not experts anymore.

There's a human tendency to trust "received wisdom". I think Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is about the phenomenon...

Professionals who build things that are expected to just work (bridge engineers) are a little different than professionals who try real hard to help their patients (certain medical specialties).

  That doesn't invalidate the scientific method

  First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem solving activity that has accrued to science through its predecessors.

It wasn't so long ago that Einstein declared that God doesn't play dice with the universe. Kuhn doesn't deny the existence of scientific facts or the utility of the scientific method -- he only hopes to illustrate that the notion of scientific truth is contingent on certain assumptions and that these assumptions often get in the way of future progress.

It's also important to remember that Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" back in 1962. At that time, he was largely responding to the logical positivists. While I think a lot of the contemporary rationalist movement is caught up in old logical positivist modes of thought, your own willingness to invalidate models based on evidence wasn't fully developed before Kuhn and Popper brought such thinking into the mainstream.

The few times I've encountered people talking about Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was in the context of religious people taking the point of the book to be that "science" thinks one thing for a long time, until it suddenly doesn't, and then suddenly "science" thinks another, different thing when some rebel comes along with new ideas (e.g. Copernicus and heliocentrism), and then they use this gloss as a justification to ignore any science that contradicts whatever weird beliefs they're currently defending.

Not to suggest this is what's happening in this case, but "religion" was the first thing that popped into my mind when contemplating how one might attempt to make a lot of money from ideas in that book.

But I might just have had bad luck in my encounters with people talking about Kuhn and his book.

Most of my work is with graphs so, for example, if you want to use a graph database to build a social graph with a Bayesian network, you wouldn't use most of Django's components such as auth and admin because they're tied to the ORM -- most of Django would just get in your way. It has nothing to with a Django-based site "outgrowing" auth.

Try to break out of your relational mindset and understand the thread before you decide to go off. And regarding my "paltry 3.79 karma average," you do realize the median for the leaderboard (http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders) is 3.975, right? Again, know what you're talking about.

In other words, you never see a true paradigm shift take place in a single generation. Two or three is the more realistic norm.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...

"Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[7] Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay"

In Kuhn's view, "normal science" is mostly iterative and incremental. It is so because most people in the discipline agree on most of the big issues, and people are mostly refining those understandings. The periods where people don't agree on the big issues in a discipline is around the time of scientific revolutions: the solutions to such big issues are so different from previous approaches that accepting them requires a complete re-think of what the discipline is.

A lot of areas of CS are in the "normal science" part of that cycle, and I think compilers and languages are in there. (The biggest argument against that is concurrency and parallelism.) In the 60s and 70s, programming languages were new, and they changed computer science forever. We were exploring what these things could be.

I also recommend Cristina Videira Lopes's blog post, "The Evolution of CS Papers": http://tagide.com/blog/2014/02/the-evolution-of-cs-papers/

The particular field that I know best where Kuhn's critique applies is that of psychology. For many decades, Skinnerian behavioral psychology was the orthodoxy for the scientific approach to psychology. Back in the day, if a scientist wanted to pursue a more cognitive approach, he would be squeezed out of the field. The rationale for this from the behaviorists was that cognitivism was anti-scientific because it posited complex internal mental states that could not be directly observed, which was considered to be counter to Empiricism, and hence anti-scientific. Behavioral psychology was based on the premise that mental states are very simple, and therefore that nearly everything important can be easily measured by directly observing behavior.

In their enthusiasm to be "scientific" and promote objective measurement, the behaviorists missed something very important: That their model was completely wrong. Wanting something to be easy to measure doesn't make it so. And the cognitivist claim that people have complex internal states is not anti-scientific, despite the protests of the behaviorists.

The "paradigm shift" did eventually come, when no other than Noam Chomsky published a devastating criticism of behaviorism that opened the door for the cognitive approach to be taken seriously. But this didn't happen without a fight that had lasted decades, where many careers were needlessly ruined, and the entire field was held back by decades.

The fact that Kuhn was so right on is seen by the fact that Kuhn's book was actually written before the Behavoirsim -> Cognitive Psychology shakeup was complete. The most prominent example in Kuhn's book, I believe, is for the rise of quantum mechanics.

I always thought it was more like a dinner party where really smart people were usually wrong and engaged in petty groupthink, and the guy who was able to show they were wrong (by reproducible experiment) eventually changed their minds (after quite a bit of trouble, and sometimes by having to wait until they retired or died)

Have you heard of the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolution", probably one of the top ten books on science in the last hundred years? Wasn't the entire point of that book that the way science is sold to kids, ie, a linear process where one good idea comes out and naturally replaces another, was a complete fable? In reality science gets "stuck" in various paradigms and it takes quite a bit of pushing to get them to change.

I've been observing your comments, and I wonder how you make these two things fit together.

Most of what is discussed falls into the latter category, opinion. That includes things very relevant to people's lives, like who enjoys equal protection under the law. Approaching a conversation about a topic of social justice as if it's as simple, clear, and verifiable as Newtonian mechanics is the wrong approach. XKCD lampooned that here:

https://xkcd.com/793/

I'd add that even science isn't as clear as you make it out to be. Newtonian mechanics weren't really true; they were just an approximation adequate to the time. As Box writes, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." It took us a few hundred years to understand their limits. Out that struggle came quantum mechanics and relativity. Of that transition, Max Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

So as much as we'd like to pretend that science proceeds differently, it is also a social process. Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the standard place to start reading about that, but there's now a large body of literature on the anthropology of science.

However, it is not correct to call this a "small improvement." Relativity was a radical change to our understanding of how the universe behaves. In a Newtonian universe, information (including gravitation, electrical attraction, and light) travelled instantaneously. This does not happen in relativity, and nor does it happen in the universe we live in. Einstein did not merely improve upon Newton's work; Einstein proposed a theory which explained the ways in which we do not live in a Newtonian universe. Thomas Kuhn goes into this concept in detail in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Second, I am reminded of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [0] This work described exact the state, with historical examples of the cycles, whereby progress exhibits peaks and valleys, periods of time wherein little monumental progress is made followed by brief frantic periods of discoveries, often stemming from the fertile ground laid by those who worked in plodding toil.

And so I am more inclines to believe we are in such a trough at the moment and not even a particularly deep one. Various avenues of thought & experiment show amble potential to thrust us forward into one of Khun's Scientific Revolutions.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th...

You are also extremely free to with claims about what actual scientists think and believe. Claims that are completely at odds with my actual experiences with actual scientists. But for something better than anecdote, go to http://www.physics.wustl.edu/alford/many_worlds_FAQ.html and look at the first question, You'll find that among physicists who work in areas that would lead them to think about it, the Everett Interpretation is accepted by more than half. (That poll was taken a while ago, based on anecdote I would put support higher now.) Why? Because if you assume that quantum mechanics describes the observer as well as the observed, the Everett interpretation is the only possible mathematical conclusion that you can come to.

Therefore either Everett is true, or quantum mechanics is insufficient to describe the macro events involved in observation.

Next, you're obviously fond of Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. While showing blithe unawareness of how poor a description it is of actual science through the ages. I highly recommend that you read Paul Feyerabend's, Against Reason to open your eyes, and also read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for a better description.

If you understand the last, then you'll understand that Einstein's rejection of QM (which was much more qualified than most people understand) needs no more explanation than Fred Hoyle's rejection of the Big Bang theory. Which is to say none, it was an entirely expected type of event.

“The Science of The Artificial” by Herbert Simon, a multi-disciplinary treatise on the goals of design by practitioners in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych., etc).

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, coined the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history of science that was previously thought to be cumulative and linear.

Kuhn talks about this concept quite a bit in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Relativity was not merely an expansion of the Newtonian explanation of the universe. It was a complete change of our understanding of how the universe worked, even though relativity reduces to the same equations as Newtonian mechanics at low velocities and low masses.

It was surprisingly enjoyable, and surprisingly personally influential. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about what it was in the human brain that caused this pattern of 'normal science' versus 'revolutionary science' to be stable—and it was time well spent, I think.

Or how about the discrepancy around quasars and red shift implying that maybe the doepler effect is not 100% transferable to space? Nope, don’t try that if you want a job or credibility.

The book that proves these dynamics historically is called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This quote from the article sums up why the book resonated with me:

> Kuhn is a realist, in that he believes in some external, material reality beyond our language and cultural constraints, but he is simultaneously a relativist in that he has no access to nor can say anything definitive about that outside world independent of language and the conceptual categories that lead us to think this or that about external reality.

The gist of his thesis, if I recall correctly, is that scientists are indeed progressing towards a deeper understanding of the universe, but the process gets messy sometimes. When we hit an inflection point, and the current paradigm for a field (such as physics) breaks down, multiple theories emerge to restore the internal logic of the field, and the proponents of each camp compete with each other for dominance. It gets messy when some scientists, who have dedicated their lives to the old paradigm, are confronted with the idea that their paradigm is outdated, and therefore their life’s work is kinda outdated. Obviously you can look at it another way and say that we’re all in it together and their work led us to discover the limits of the paradigm, but the reality seems to be that this is a harsh reality to live through, and the old paradigm scientists get reactionary and sometimes actively obstruct the paradigm shift. But the truth eventually comes out when the new paradigm’s theories correctly explain the problems that the old paradigm couldn’t explain, and these new theories get backed by experimental evidence. I think Kuhn goes so far as to say that sometimes the old paradigm can only be laid to rest when its last proponents die.

OK, let's do this.

We have a scientific theory.

From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that, with the property that, if the predictions hold true, we'll have something useful.

The people following the engineering discipline create things.

Those things work.

Does that not, then, validate the scientific theory?

And if that scientific theory is validated, does that not knock Kuhn on his ass?

Because the forces which the artifact the engineers created is subject to don't give a rat's ass what our current culture says. They were the same billions of years ago and will be the same billions of years hence, the existence of our species or intelligent life at all notwithstanding.

OK, some fields of science don't make sense without humans to study. Right. But others will still be just as true if we're wiped out and replaced by sapient Corvidae, or not replaced at all.

The importance of such paradigms is that they seem to determine what scientists investigate, and what they're primed to even see. An example Kuhn gives are X-rays. Their discovery caused some consternation, even though their existence did not need a full theoretical overhaul. The consternation was that they were completely unexpected, but they also must have been present in many prior experiments, yet never directly reported.

To directly address your point, scientists are human, and will probably lean one way or another on understanding quantum mechanics. How they lean will influence what sort of questions they investigate, how they investigate it, and what sort of outcomes they will look for.

In physics, this usually turns out to be people younger than 26, often through seminal PhD theses. But not always. Sometimes people dabble in secondary fields at older ages and come up with significant breakthroughs, like Linus Pauling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling).

I'm not sure what I think about this regarding entrepreneurship. It seems that very successful entrepreneurs are not always coming up with revolutionary thinking, but instead executing well and paying attention to small details that make things work where they haven't before. As such, the age indoctrination barrier may not be as present as it is in physics. But of course there are the risk and drive barriers--people get settled and less willing to take risks and go through the arduous process of starting something new later in life.

In my opinion, what is education, and the whole welfare state, about is creating the best environment for the high archievers, and not limiting them needlessly. The thing is that no one knows which family raises a genius. That is why all children, and thus their parents, should have the slighty the same starting environment, or at least the guaranteed minimum.

One side note is that most educational reforms perceive the education as a thing separated from the society. It is not truth. For instance, it is harder to be a high archiever if your parents lack the social and cultural capital. And the financial capital's role is way less important than before.

The yet another side note is that enormous time, at least in Polish education, is wasted on propaganda and socialization. This time could be spent better.

  =Bertrand Russell=
  * An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
  * A Theory of Knowledge
  * Logic and Knowledge
  =W.V. Quine=
  * Word and Object
  * Mathematical Logic
  =Norbert Weiner=
  * Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
  =Smullyan=
  * Diagonalization and Self Reference

  Thomas Kuhn      - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  Norbert Weiner   - The Human Use of Human-Beings
  Bertrand Russell - A History of Western Philosophy
  Karl Popper      - The Open Society and Its Enemies
  Daniel Dennet    - Consciousness Explained
  E. Abbot Abbot   - Flatland