All this an no mention of the benefits of many minds working together on a common pile of information and hypotheses? There is a human intellectual bias to notice some secondary effect and completely miss the dominant effect.
Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data. They were more exposed to the data in their own back yards, and may or may not have benefited from not being so close to the sphere of influence of Harvard’s authority. But even this is a weak hypothesis, is there some reason to think that if Harvard had set up a remote campus in South Africa that it would not have been a Harvard geologist who revived continental drift?
As a counterexample to this all, consider the BIg Bang. Before the Big Bang, the common belief among astronomers was a steady state universe that went on and on. Was the big bang theory thrown over by astronomers remote? No, it was thrown over by astronomers and physicists at Princeton and Bell Labs,, neither of which could be imagined as anything but central and authoritative in the fields in which they participated.
We have PLENTY of people that don’t get sucked into the usual crap. In fact many of them, like the Indonesians as described in the OP, don’t get sucked into the good stuff either! In my opinion, we need to encourage more people to work hard to LEARN the ‘usual crap’ more fully before thinking they have much of use to add by being independent.
Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data.
He wasn’t proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn’t that much in academic circles, I’ve seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.
His basic argument is not that intellectual cooperation isn’t useful, his argument is that intellectual cooperation is not a good way to investigate whatever craziness happens to get fixated in the community of intellectuals in question. It seems a stronger version of the argument that science advances by scientists holding on to old theories dying off and being replaced by younger ones, he posits entire fields can most easily be fixed by being replaced by a fresh fork of them from Alpha Centauri.
To give a technobable example, if someone here proposes duotronic dylithium computers might not violate the will of the Great Zod, and might be worth investigating, he would be widely seen as violating the Geneva convention and denounced for unethical research and being a quack, everyone after all knows multitronic plasma computers are the most promising branch. But once we see the data stream from Alpha Centauri’s working version and note cats are not living with dogs there yet, this becomes harder to claim.
the 4 year time lag isn’t that much in academic circles, I’ve seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.
How does that happen? It’s not like people are reading foreign journals at a 10 year lag. Maybe they’re reading them in real time and after 10 years of seeing the paper cited repeatedly, they take it seriously. More likely, they’re just not reading the foreign journals, but one day they went to a foreign conference and met the author or a protege—not going to happen with interstellar distances.
All this an no mention of the benefits of many minds working together on a common pile of information and hypotheses? There is a human intellectual bias to notice some secondary effect and completely miss the dominant effect.
Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data. They were more exposed to the data in their own back yards, and may or may not have benefited from not being so close to the sphere of influence of Harvard’s authority. But even this is a weak hypothesis, is there some reason to think that if Harvard had set up a remote campus in South Africa that it would not have been a Harvard geologist who revived continental drift?
As a counterexample to this all, consider the BIg Bang. Before the Big Bang, the common belief among astronomers was a steady state universe that went on and on. Was the big bang theory thrown over by astronomers remote? No, it was thrown over by astronomers and physicists at Princeton and Bell Labs,, neither of which could be imagined as anything but central and authoritative in the fields in which they participated.
We have PLENTY of people that don’t get sucked into the usual crap. In fact many of them, like the Indonesians as described in the OP, don’t get sucked into the good stuff either! In my opinion, we need to encourage more people to work hard to LEARN the ‘usual crap’ more fully before thinking they have much of use to add by being independent.
I don’t think most humans do this; it seems particular to LessWrong and related subcultures.
He wasn’t proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn’t that much in academic circles, I’ve seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.
His basic argument is not that intellectual cooperation isn’t useful, his argument is that intellectual cooperation is not a good way to investigate whatever craziness happens to get fixated in the community of intellectuals in question. It seems a stronger version of the argument that science advances by scientists holding on to old theories dying off and being replaced by younger ones, he posits entire fields can most easily be fixed by being replaced by a fresh fork of them from Alpha Centauri.
To give a technobable example, if someone here proposes duotronic dylithium computers might not violate the will of the Great Zod, and might be worth investigating, he would be widely seen as violating the Geneva convention and denounced for unethical research and being a quack, everyone after all knows multitronic plasma computers are the most promising branch. But once we see the data stream from Alpha Centauri’s working version and note cats are not living with dogs there yet, this becomes harder to claim.
How does that happen? It’s not like people are reading foreign journals at a 10 year lag. Maybe they’re reading them in real time and after 10 years of seeing the paper cited repeatedly, they take it seriously. More likely, they’re just not reading the foreign journals, but one day they went to a foreign conference and met the author or a protege—not going to happen with interstellar distances.