I actually would disagree with your last point. Certainly cultural/political diversity will matter more for psych/social sciences but I think it will have an effect on what kinds of topics people care about in the first place when it comes to harder sciences and math. I can imagine a culture which has a more philosophical bent to it leading to more people doing theoretical work and a culture which has a greater emphasis on engineering and practicality doing more applied work. I could also imagine a more authoritarian culture leading to people doing physics in a certain style—perhaps more of a search for unifying “theory of everything” type ideas vs. a more democratic and diverse culture leading to a more pluralistic view of the universe. Not saying these would be huge effects necessarily but on the margins it could make a difference.
So your point is something like “political inclinations and culture in general are systemic biases in the search algorithms of researchers, even in pure science”?
That’s an interesting take; I just don’t know how to go about checking it. Certainly, we see many example of both theoretical and applied work in many sciences, showing that in this regard the diversity is enough.
About the unifying theory of physics, I’m not that sure about the link with authoritarian culture. But once again, in actual science, there are so many viewpoints and theories and approaches that it would take days to list them for only the smallest subfield of physics. So I’m not convinced that we are lacking diversity in this regard.
certainly the authoritarian link is highly speculative, but I think in general we underestimate how politics/culture/psychology influence what we care about and how we think in science. A more extreme version of the question is: how similar would we expect alien science to be to ours? Obviously it would be different if they were much more advanced, but assuming equal levels of progress, how would their very different minds (who knows how different) and culture lead them to think about science differently? In an extreme version, maybe they don’t even see and use something like echolocation—how would this influence their scientific investigation?
“Certainly, we see many example of both theoretical and applied work in many sciences, showing that in this regard the diversity is enough.
About the unifying theory of physics, I’m not that sure about the link with authoritarian culture. But once again, in actual science, there are so many viewpoints and theories and approaches that it would take days to list them for only the smallest subfield of physics. So I’m not convinced that we are lacking diversity in this regard.”
I don’t see how you can make this conclusion, we don’t know what the counterfactual is. Obviously there is a lot of diversity of theories/approaches but that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have different theories/approaches if science was born in a different cultural background.
Again, I think these are all open questions, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that it might make a difference on the margins. Really we are asking—how contingent is scientific progress? The answer might be “not very much” but over the long-run of history it may add up.
I actually would disagree with your last point. Certainly cultural/political diversity will matter more for psych/social sciences but I think it will have an effect on what kinds of topics people care about in the first place when it comes to harder sciences and math. I can imagine a culture which has a more philosophical bent to it leading to more people doing theoretical work and a culture which has a greater emphasis on engineering and practicality doing more applied work. I could also imagine a more authoritarian culture leading to people doing physics in a certain style—perhaps more of a search for unifying “theory of everything” type ideas vs. a more democratic and diverse culture leading to a more pluralistic view of the universe. Not saying these would be huge effects necessarily but on the margins it could make a difference.
So your point is something like “political inclinations and culture in general are systemic biases in the search algorithms of researchers, even in pure science”?
That’s an interesting take; I just don’t know how to go about checking it. Certainly, we see many example of both theoretical and applied work in many sciences, showing that in this regard the diversity is enough.
About the unifying theory of physics, I’m not that sure about the link with authoritarian culture. But once again, in actual science, there are so many viewpoints and theories and approaches that it would take days to list them for only the smallest subfield of physics. So I’m not convinced that we are lacking diversity in this regard.
certainly the authoritarian link is highly speculative, but I think in general we underestimate how politics/culture/psychology influence what we care about and how we think in science. A more extreme version of the question is: how similar would we expect alien science to be to ours? Obviously it would be different if they were much more advanced, but assuming equal levels of progress, how would their very different minds (who knows how different) and culture lead them to think about science differently? In an extreme version, maybe they don’t even see and use something like echolocation—how would this influence their scientific investigation?
“Certainly, we see many example of both theoretical and applied work in many sciences, showing that in this regard the diversity is enough.
About the unifying theory of physics, I’m not that sure about the link with authoritarian culture. But once again, in actual science, there are so many viewpoints and theories and approaches that it would take days to list them for only the smallest subfield of physics. So I’m not convinced that we are lacking diversity in this regard.”
I don’t see how you can make this conclusion, we don’t know what the counterfactual is. Obviously there is a lot of diversity of theories/approaches but that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have different theories/approaches if science was born in a different cultural background.
Again, I think these are all open questions, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that it might make a difference on the margins. Really we are asking—how contingent is scientific progress? The answer might be “not very much” but over the long-run of history it may add up.