Eliezer, I guess the answer you want is that “science” as we know it has at least one bias: a bias to cling to pragmatic pre-existing explanations, even when they embody confused thinking and unnecessary complications. This bias appears to produce major inefficiencies in the process.
Viewing science as a search algorithm, it follows multiple alternate paths but it only prunes branches when the sheer bulk of experimental evidence clearly favours another branch, not when an alternate path provides a lower cost explanation for the same evidence. For efficiency, science should instead prune (or at least allocate resources) based on a fair comparison of current competing explanations.
The science world, as much as the rest of the “worlds” comprised by people who share something which everybody cherishes, has to have the status quo bias.
(the enigmatic add-on: One cannot escape the feeling that there is such thing as time)
Eliezer, I guess the answer you want is that “science” as we know it has at least one bias: a bias to cling to pragmatic pre-existing explanations, even when they embody confused thinking and unnecessary complications. This bias appears to produce major inefficiencies in the process.
Viewing science as a search algorithm, it follows multiple alternate paths but it only prunes branches when the sheer bulk of experimental evidence clearly favours another branch, not when an alternate path provides a lower cost explanation for the same evidence. For efficiency, science should instead prune (or at least allocate resources) based on a fair comparison of current competing explanations.
Science has a nostalgic bias.
The science world, as much as the rest of the “worlds” comprised by people who share something which everybody cherishes, has to have the status quo bias. (the enigmatic add-on: One cannot escape the feeling that there is such thing as time)