There are fields where studying edge cases leads to confusion and actually hinders progress. From gwern’s excellent essay on Bakewell and the origins of genetics:
But surviving theoretical scientific discussions of heredity are baffling. People lurch between ‘only fathers matter’ & ‘only mothers matter’, endlessly elaborating on wildly speculative (and wildly wrong) mechanistic explanations of how exactly sperm & eggs & embryos connected and formed, and in an example of “hard cases make bad law”, the focus on ‘monsters’ and other extreme cases among humans or animals badly misguided their premature attempts to elucidate universal principles comparable to that of astronomy or physics
The lesson is that when attempting to study statistical effects that aggregate across populations (like with genetics), studying the edge cases will lead one away from truth rather than towards it. Bakewell, Mendel and Darwin didn’t develop their theories of heredity and genetics by studying plants and animals deformed by mutation. They studied populations of “normal” plants and animals, and kept very careful records of the statistical rate at which characteristics were transmitted from parent generations to child generations.
I agree that edge cases are not very good for synthesis. They are essential for analysis, however. Noticing patterns in a well functioning system is useful for building phenomenological models of the system, but not necessarily for figuring out its constituents. And yeah, sometimes it is possible to figure out a lot from a nominally functioning system.
There are fields where studying edge cases leads to confusion and actually hinders progress. From gwern’s excellent essay on Bakewell and the origins of genetics:
The lesson is that when attempting to study statistical effects that aggregate across populations (like with genetics), studying the edge cases will lead one away from truth rather than towards it. Bakewell, Mendel and Darwin didn’t develop their theories of heredity and genetics by studying plants and animals deformed by mutation. They studied populations of “normal” plants and animals, and kept very careful records of the statistical rate at which characteristics were transmitted from parent generations to child generations.
I agree that edge cases are not very good for synthesis. They are essential for analysis, however. Noticing patterns in a well functioning system is useful for building phenomenological models of the system, but not necessarily for figuring out its constituents. And yeah, sometimes it is possible to figure out a lot from a nominally functioning system.