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.
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.