From: Daniel J. Boone (djboone@romea.com)
Date: Thu Jul 08 1999 - 13:11:49 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Thursday, July 08, 1999 10:37 AM
Subject: RE: seti@home WILL NOT WORK
<snip>
>There is a quote by perhaps Kuhn or Clarke (?) that in effect
>says that scientists never change their minds and that the
>only way new ideas are ever accepted is for the old generation
>to die off. [Does anyone know the actual source of this quote?
>Altavista seems almost useless...]
>
>Robert
Apparently it was Kuhn, but available citations are paraphrases.
"[According to Kuhn] The old
scientists who became established within the dominant paradigm
have to die off first: they will virtually never accept the new
paradigm. Only the younger generation of scientists, who don't
have the emotional attachment to the old paradigm will be willing
to change their minds. As physicist Max Planck once said,
'Science progresses funeral by funeral.'"
Marilyn Ferguson, New Age, August 1982 (quoted at
http://www.fha.asn.au/main.html ).
The insight is attributed to Thomas S. Kuhn, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTIONS Second Edition, Enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970) at http://www.igc.apc.org/awea/wew/othersources/rachel467.html and is
paraphrased at that web site thusly:
"Not only is science a popularity contest of ideas, but some scientists hold
onto ideas long after the available data have shown them to be untenable. In
fact, says Kuhn, the way scientific ideas change completely is not by all
scientists changing their minds; it's that older scientists who retain
discredited ideas die, and then the only people left are those holding the
newer ideas."
I love Altavista. The ability to combine pure boolean queries with ranking
keywords is very powerful, but tricky to use. In this case, all it took was
a search on "change" NEAR "minds" with the ranking keyword "Kuhn". Both
useful hits were in the first page of results.
FWIW, and to stay on topic, I don't think SETI (nor seti@home in particular)
are completely useless. Yes, the odds of a positive result are seem
vanishingly small; and yes, the assumptions made in conducting the search
are homocentric (how else can humans act?) which limits the value of a
negative outcome. But there is no way to claim that, after subjecting the
data to detailed analysis, we will not know more than we knew before. Deny
the value of that and you deny the value of science, which I am not prepared
to do.
-- Daniel J. Boone
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Thursday, July 08, 1999 10:37 AM
Subject: RE: seti@home WILL NOT WORK
<snip>
>There is a quote by perhaps Kuhn or Clarke (?) that in effect
>says that scientists never change their minds and that the
>only way new ideas are ever accepted is for the old generation
>to die off. [Does anyone know the actual source of this quote?
>Altavista seems almost useless...]
>
>Robert
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