Robin: Science isn’t monolithic, but there is some referent to ‘science’ as a vague high-level description of a set of institutions for developing, disseminating, and implementing new ideas with cultural rules aimed at compensating for some elements of human foolishness. Something was new under the sun in the 17th century. Of course, many different things claim, perhaps by taking place in universities or calling themselves “X Science” to be the heir of that something and not all of them may truly be heirs to it. Possibly none of them truly are and modernity gets by on inertia having crossed some civilizational developmental barrier we may no longer need the same systems that we initially used to cross it just to continue to progress. Population and wealth may be sufficient.
Eliezer: I think that applying weakly justified numbers can actually be quite helpful in establishing boundaries for possibilities under consideration etc. Its quite frequently done in various sorts of management and planning and it can still help to compensate for conjunction fallacies and the like more effectively than strictly qualitative thinking can. In investing, this is sometimes called paying attention to fundamentals.
I think that the scientific lineages phenomenon requires more than a sentence or two of attention. Half of Nobel Prizes go to the doctoral students of other Nobel Laureates and three quarters go to people from universities that are top 5 in the relevant field. Different countries specialize in very different sciences and sub-fields, sometimes to the point of absurdity. “Discovering” by Robert Root-Bernstein has some very enlightening diagrams of just how rich scientific lineages are. Obviously some mix of favoritism, selection of better students and superior instruction is taking place here, and the relative mix isn’t easy to determine, but the phenomenon may be responsible the large majority of scientific progress while only involving a few thousand people at a time in which case the details are very worthy of attention, as it is often possible to simply hire more than a few thousand people to do projects much smaller than “science in general”.
Robin: Science isn’t monolithic, but there is some referent to ‘science’ as a vague high-level description of a set of institutions for developing, disseminating, and implementing new ideas with cultural rules aimed at compensating for some elements of human foolishness. Something was new under the sun in the 17th century. Of course, many different things claim, perhaps by taking place in universities or calling themselves “X Science” to be the heir of that something and not all of them may truly be heirs to it. Possibly none of them truly are and modernity gets by on inertia having crossed some civilizational developmental barrier we may no longer need the same systems that we initially used to cross it just to continue to progress. Population and wealth may be sufficient.
Eliezer: I think that applying weakly justified numbers can actually be quite helpful in establishing boundaries for possibilities under consideration etc. Its quite frequently done in various sorts of management and planning and it can still help to compensate for conjunction fallacies and the like more effectively than strictly qualitative thinking can. In investing, this is sometimes called paying attention to fundamentals.
I think that the scientific lineages phenomenon requires more than a sentence or two of attention. Half of Nobel Prizes go to the doctoral students of other Nobel Laureates and three quarters go to people from universities that are top 5 in the relevant field. Different countries specialize in very different sciences and sub-fields, sometimes to the point of absurdity. “Discovering” by Robert Root-Bernstein has some very enlightening diagrams of just how rich scientific lineages are. Obviously some mix of favoritism, selection of better students and superior instruction is taking place here, and the relative mix isn’t easy to determine, but the phenomenon may be responsible the large majority of scientific progress while only involving a few thousand people at a time in which case the details are very worthy of attention, as it is often possible to simply hire more than a few thousand people to do projects much smaller than “science in general”.