(1) There is too much knowledge available at one’s fingertips. This may have a subtle inhibitory effect on creativity, in essence making it harder for us to ever come at a problem with “fresh eyes”.
Another way of coming at this intuition appears when newcomers in preparadigmatic field
I find more and more that people (especially me) sin more by not searching for knowledge than by overdoing it. Or more explicitly, your point about preprocessed knowledge doesn’t really apply to data: having a lot of data is incredibly useful to see a problem with “fresh eyes”. The issue of course is that so much data comes with a perspective attached, which makes creative perspective harder (but not impossible).
(2) It is too easy to know if your ideas are considered fringe and unusual, or have already been studied and “proved”. This makes people less likely to do the kind of thinking that can overturn conventional wisdom or show something to be true which was highly unlikely to be so, resulting in a sort of global chilling effect on intellectual risk-taking.
First reaction: that sounds like a good thing more than a bad thing. And actually, I would argue for the exact opposite effect: fringe and unusual topics are way more popular thanks to internet and the ability to converse with other people caring about them, even if you’re only a handful spread over the world. One just has to look at the explosion of conspiracy theories.
(3) The internet has also had the effect of homogenizing cultures across the world. German, Russia, American, and Chinese cultures are much more similar now than they were 50 years ago (and were much more similar 50 years ago than they were 100 years ago); accordingly, German, Russia, American, and Chinese science (in terms of their organization, goals, norms, values, etc.) are much more similar as well. The internet has also likely played a similar role in reducing the political diversity of modern academia (see “Political diversity will improve social psychological science”, 2015).
This points sounds true, and that’s definitely not something I usually consider. But given the title of your referenced paper, would that also be a problem for pure sciences or maths? I don’t see how the political diversity could matter there, while being really interested by good counterarguments.
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.
Re: the cost of internet
Another way of coming at this intuition appears when newcomers in preparadigmatic field
I find more and more that people (especially me) sin more by not searching for knowledge than by overdoing it. Or more explicitly, your point about preprocessed knowledge doesn’t really apply to data: having a lot of data is incredibly useful to see a problem with “fresh eyes”. The issue of course is that so much data comes with a perspective attached, which makes creative perspective harder (but not impossible).
First reaction: that sounds like a good thing more than a bad thing. And actually, I would argue for the exact opposite effect: fringe and unusual topics are way more popular thanks to internet and the ability to converse with other people caring about them, even if you’re only a handful spread over the world. One just has to look at the explosion of conspiracy theories.
This points sounds true, and that’s definitely not something I usually consider. But given the title of your referenced paper, would that also be a problem for pure sciences or maths? I don’t see how the political diversity could matter there, while being really interested by good counterarguments.
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.