BTW, I like the “monopoly on violence” analogy. We can extend it to include verbal violence—you can have an environment where it is okay to yell at people for being idiots, or you can have an environment where it is okay to yell at people for being politically incorrect. Both will shape the intellectual development in certain directions.
Conflicts arise is when you don’t have a monopoly, so sometimes people get yelled at for being idiots, other times for being politically incorrect, and then you have endless “wars” about whether we should or shouldn’t study a politically sensitive topic X with an open mind, both sides complaining about lack of progress (from their perspective).
The more mutually contradictory constraints you have, the more people will choose the strategy “let’s not do anything unusual”, because it is too likely to screw up according to some of the metrics and get yelled at.
BTW, I like the “monopoly on violence” analogy. We can extend it to include verbal violence—you can have an environment where it is okay to yell at people for being idiots, or you can have an environment where it is okay to yell at people for being politically incorrect. Both will shape the intellectual development in certain directions.
Conflicts arise is when you don’t have a monopoly, so sometimes people get yelled at for being idiots, other times for being politically incorrect, and then you have endless “wars” about whether we should or shouldn’t study a politically sensitive topic X with an open mind, both sides complaining about lack of progress (from their perspective).
The more mutually contradictory constraints you have, the more people will choose the strategy “let’s not do anything unusual”, because it is too likely to screw up according to some of the metrics and get yelled at.