Sublime

What happens in systems with noisy data and underdeveloped theory—like earthquake prediction and parts of economics and political science—is a two-step process. First, people start to mistake the noise for a signal. Second, this noise pollutes journals, blogs, and news accounts with false alarms, undermining good science and setting back our

The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

My idea of science diverges with that of the people around me walking around calling themselves scientists. Science is mere speculation, mere formulation of conjecture.

In many cases the issue of what precisely the problem is, and what the attributes of a ‘good’ explanation would be, receive as much criticism and conjecture as do trial solutions.

while there is radical discontinuity in the sense that the new theory is not reached by any process of logical reasoning from the old. there is also a continuity in the sense that the old can be rationally understood from the point of view of the new.

To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.

Are you saying that it is a principle of rationality that a theory which asserts the existence of an objective, physical anomaly is, other things being equal, less likely to make true predictions than one that doesn’t? DAVID: Not quite. Theories postulating anomalies without explaining them are less likely than their rivals to make true

Science’s leaps forward are most often not solutions to well-established problems. They come from discovering that the problem was ill posed. This is why it is so hard to make sense of scientific evolution as a well-defined problem.