It seems “unfocused curiosity-driven knowledge gathering” makes sense if it is driven by some form of instrumental goal, as in invention and engineering, which produce useful stuff rather than general explanations of the world. At least if I imagine it as gathering data from trial and error tinkering, as presumably the invention of the microscope was done.
But for science it is mostly the case that we already have far more data than we can make sense of. So the main problem is to explain known phenomena, and additional data gathering is only necessary to distinguish between competing explanations or to potentially rule out existing ones. There are exceptions though—e.g. astronomy and history and paleontology try to create big catalogues of data in some subject area
That’s so interesting. Such a very different view of science from mine. I feel like it seems like there’s a lot of data sometimes, but then getting down into the weeds on some particular narrow question and suddenly I always give myself lacking the exact data I would need. Or a new method or tool opens up a new type of data...
It seems “unfocused curiosity-driven knowledge gathering” makes sense if it is driven by some form of instrumental goal, as in invention and engineering, which produce useful stuff rather than general explanations of the world. At least if I imagine it as gathering data from trial and error tinkering, as presumably the invention of the microscope was done.
But for science it is mostly the case that we already have far more data than we can make sense of. So the main problem is to explain known phenomena, and additional data gathering is only necessary to distinguish between competing explanations or to potentially rule out existing ones. There are exceptions though—e.g. astronomy and history and paleontology try to create big catalogues of data in some subject area
That’s so interesting. Such a very different view of science from mine. I feel like it seems like there’s a lot of data sometimes, but then getting down into the weeds on some particular narrow question and suddenly I always give myself lacking the exact data I would need. Or a new method or tool opens up a new type of data...