Sublime

But as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals a

they experiment, they explore, they adjust, they readjust, but not just in terms of having some wondrous mathematical model of the situation and updating a parameter. They form a hypothesis, maybe they have multiple hypotheses or ideas about the situation they are in, and they put more belief in the ones that work over time and throw out hypotheses

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.

There is an additional element of importance: these systems usually generate implicit internal models of their environments, models progressively revised and improved as the system accumulates experience. The systems learn.

Malthus made a provocative and important point, but fortunately for us, his conclusions were far too pessimistic. When living standards began to rise globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as more people moved to cities, families chose to have fewer children and to invest more in the education, nutrition, and health care of each ch

The more a Susceptible individual is informed – about numbers, places, patient concentrations in hospitals – the more their behavior will adjust to the context. Of course, this is not always the case – there will always be someone who reacts unpredictably – but most of us are equipped with reasoning skills. Scientific simulations take into account

Our social circles have a strong influence on our own beliefs and behaviors. In the 1950s, conformity experiments by social psychologist Solomon Asch showed that some people will disregard objective facts if everyone else opposes them. More recently, social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have found that people tend to mirror their

Swanson a vu une opportunité. Il a compris qu’il pouvait faire des découvertes en reliant des informations publiées dans des articles scientifiques de domaines de sous-spécialités qui ne se citaient jamais et entre lesquels n’existait aucun projet de recherches communes. Par exemple, en faisant systématiquement des recherches croisées entre les bas