Why Science is Different - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

No top authority; rather a dynamic tension:
- there's not a pope; there's no single head of the organization; there are universities, and levels of prestige. But no top-down authority that can enforce things upon people. So there seems to be more dynamic tension
- What's the dynamic tension between specifically?
  - Maybe this is where the necessity of constraints comes in? This tension may be between the freedom to express any idea, pursue any hypothesis, investigate/observe any phenomena (on the one hand) and the rigid frame of evaluation that include methods/systems of judging the quality of the idea, hypothesis, or set of observations (through peer review, grant funding reviews/competitions, tenure applications, etc). So there are "rules" and ways of judging quality of work; there is the whole peer-review system which, in its ideal form, is a system for which the veracity or quality of work is evaluated, but NOT by some authoritarian ruler who can singly and unilaterally judge the contribution of said work. (IG: Is this consistent with the "dynamic tension" idea?)
  - Is the dynamic tension also between knowing and not-knowing other subdisciplines? So there is this insulated contact between scientists in different subdisciplines: they can, with some time and effort, learn each other's area of expertise and relatively efficiently get up to speed on the main findings or assumptions of one field or another. And yet there is also super specialization and specificity to the degree that it's relatively difficult for any one scientist to know deeply any more than 2 or 3 subdisciplines VERY WELL. So the tension here is between depth of knowledge (specialization) and potential for breadth of knowledge (because you know the "code" of science, it's relatively easy to read up on a few fields and get the general premises). So this is the tension between the hedgehog and fox.
Fragmentation:
- Science progresses so quickly because of its ability to fragment, to produce self-organized niches, because of its tendency towards specialization
- Scientific subspecialities tend to stay under the Dunbar number (IG: can you elaborate? What is being counted? Number of scholars in that subspeciality? Number of labs? Seems like a very small number if we’re counting scholars for this to be considered a sub-speciality in a discipline?)
- Kuhn: these sub-specialities develop their own “esoteric vocabulary”, their jargon (and as written elsewhere in MM and about Kuhn, this esoteric language allows the members of that sub-discipline to speak to eachother very efficiently and so they can progress faster)
- People like Crick and Edelman are allowed to exist, even if they might be somewhat ostracized; they’re not killed and they’re not even silenced entirely; people disagree with them, but they can, in turn, build their own coalitions and form consensus among their own niche supporter Esoteric Vocabulary
It isn’t that anyone off the street can form an interesting dissenting opinion and build an influential sub-discipline/coalition; there are standards, training and accreditation
Kuhn (and BK and IG, the latter of whom has recently been convinced) argues that the jargon/esoteric language is a "feature not a bug" of how science efficiently proceeds within subdisciplines; information is much more efficiently shared if the "back story" doesn't have to be re-articulated each time a discussion ensues and the "psychological safety" or related comfort within a subgroup is useful to decrease defensiveness and to encourage wild and crazy thinking across a broad number of domains
- As an aside, part of the grant IG wrote elaborated on how marginalized lab groups that aim to bridge disciplines and dissolve conventional boundaries can work towards a common language. Building this shared "esoteric vocabulary" was essentially the FIRST goal to get a new "trans"disciplinary lab group off the ground. From the grant: It is critical to encourage active consensus-building discussion around the terminology and concepts that will be fundamental for collective projects going forward. Theoretical and conceptual discussion are important, but so are “maker” phases, where abstract discussions are interspersed with hands-on experimentation to make sure that everyone at the table is actually referring to the same "stuff" in the world that is of empirical interest. These iterative discussions around developing a shared lexicon are often the meetings in which serendipity is maximized and genuine innovation emerges... Within the context of these diverse and "flat" lab hierarchies, leaders need to facilitate a culture of trust and openness, without top-down power dynamics at play, and they need to have a reasonable facility with all disciplinary practices, to be part of the translation process across domains of expertise. Finally, a coherent story of purpose is usually what keeps these transdisciplinary teams focused and the momentum high. There is a particular storytelling method we are developing that helps teams form a sound foundation from which to develop and evaluate their effectiveness, as well as flexibly iterate that collective story when it seems necessary.
- Coming out of my thinking around the importance of shared language within a labgroup that constitutes a range of disciplines/expertise, this last point about storytelling became particularly important to me and I'm wondering if it's not relevant here: Articulation in science may proceed all the faster not only through a shared esoteric vocabulary within subdisciplines, but also a shared narrative about what is being searched for or discovered and/or the importance, gravity, or contribution that this shared goal has. This collective story may be the lode star that's essential to maintain coherence and momentum
we can certainly say that religion and monarchies rely as heavily, if not a lot more so, on a collective narrative ... so perhaps what may be less obvious (and so more interesting), is that science may need narrative as much

Quality control among the dissenters: - It isn’t that anyone off the street can form an interesting dissenting opinion and build an influential sub-discipline/coalition; there are standards, training and accreditation systems so that opinions can be taken seriously -Science articulates rapidly:

Science does not progress, it articulates; it’s this process of articulation that is so rapid within science; it does so through its increasing specialization and self-organizing knitting of subdisciplines; theories start out vague and then get increasingly articulated and connected to other subdisciplines
- IG: I agree with this specific point. But I'm struggling with the larger direction that this thinking is going. Specifically: This discussion of how fast “articulation” is in science is in comparison to religion and monarchies, right? I’m having trouble with figuring out the implication of this comparison and how compelling it is; it's not about how accurate it is, but whether the comparison is reasonable to make at all. Specifically, when you say it is “uniquely fast”, I wonder if fast is only a goal for science and so the scientific system is set up to at least attempt this efficiency; it's in part a core goal, to "advance" knowledge, etc. Whereas religion and monarchies (and other types of power structures) are explicitly built to remain stable, to maintain homeostasis, to NOT change and “progress” and certainly to not be further articulated with innovations and so on.
Freedom to leave:THIS NEVER GOT FILLED IN BY IG

I’m not quite sure I understand this part BELOW. I completely get the idea about “policy”. It’s similar to the idea of a scientific “stance” or “attitude”and what we talked about the other day – indeed, the idea is that it is not the actual “scientific method” that is the holy grail of science, but more this policy towards the pursuit of facts or understanding of nature, through exploration and a critical, iteratively doubting position. What I am confused about is whether or not (in this section) you were arguing that religions also have their own policy by which they approach understanding nature… and that although they are different policies, they nevertheless share the fact that they rely on one to engage with nature. And so I am not clear what you were saying about the purpose of the book vs its structure (and how these are misunderstood) and how that similar to the purpose of a scientific article vs its structure (in that they all have the same one: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion).__

-BK TRANSCRIPT: __What I do think is right here is the role of ritual in both religion and science: Both have structures to their texts that they adhere to predictably and that have specific purposes in terms of communicating parts of the “story” of the nature of truth (e.g., the Bible vs the scientific article each has its own formulation or presentation of “truth” as it sees it and that ritualistic laying of “facts” adds to its predictability and feeling of veracity). __think it's the scientific method that matters, it's more like the scientific policy. So, in the same way that, you know like, okay, the beliefs of Mormonism, are different from those of Catholicism, but that's not actually that important for how it functions in society, what matters is the policy that the fact that you, you know, say that these, you know, each, each young person goes on these like two year missions or whatever, that increases the virality and you could even say, you know like, like a policy would be like saying its scientific method is like saying the reason the essay works is because, or the reason a book works is because it has an introduction and then it builds the argument and then it has a conclusion or something like that, it's like, no, the reason the book works is because it's a cheap way to transmit knowledge like, and you know there's like this gatekeeping function of like publishers who decide what's good and not it's like at that meta level it's basically like, you know, and so, so, for, for Mormonism, it's like, you have to go proselytize and that is a policy feature in science, you have to publish let's say and there's all kinds of problems with that, I'm not saying that this is like, oh this magical thing that will drive us ever towards like a better world or something like, I don't think that, You know I have no illusions are well you can you can elaborate that part of it, but I'm just saying that

19:56
Religion seems more dynamic than a hereditary monarchy but less dynamic than science.
· Suppresses dissent violently
· Builds coalitions and enforces them rigidly
· Very hard to support fragmentation/schisms (sometimes, like East/West Protestantism, but not often, not with Catholic Church, for e.g.)
o See Graeber on Max Weber and Foucault
· People are just killed if they’re too far from the party line
IG: This part lost me a bit. I get parts of the logic but how they connect explicitly to how science works and how its differentiated from Religion is fuzzy for me. I can take a shot at it but it seems easier to talk it through (I’ll leave a voice note about what confuses me specifically and what I THINK you mean, but I’m probably wrong):
related to the speciation of cultures that happens in North America when, when you enter an at like an unpopulated, and I don't mean, I don't mean when the Europeans, get to North America and pretend like it's unpopulated and fucking kill everyone. I mean when it literally is unpopulated with humans, even though it has lots of megafauna which all go extinct and things like that. But those humans go into North America, and you can imagine, you can well imagine that there are different types of people born, and some are let. To put it simply, orchids and summer dandelions, or whatever. And maybe, maybe that's not the right way to put it, let's say the summer, summer like men, in the sense of like they explore they they're willing to take big risks. They don't want to do the safe thing. They're progressives, let's say, Okay, so maybe I shouldn't call them men and not call the other ones men but obviously I'm biased, but the ones who stay, they you know this is, this is, um, Weinstein's Brett Weinstein is not his idiot brothers view, which is that, um, he, like, you have these two modes of culture, which transmits down the generations, and consciousness which is like a group level feature, and the consciousness is not in the head of an individual, it happens in these kind of like big coming together of like a lot of people to make a decision. Okay, so the result of that is over a very short period of 10,000 years or whatever, maybe, maybe 20,000 at the max, you, you wind up with not only like completely different languages but completely different ways of being and this must be the original point of culture and ideology and everything else which is how do you get the seals, you know and so going back to that Henrik paper which is like Europeans starving to death because they refuse to learn the local language. That's the true purpose of culture, everything else is just fucking window dressing, it's actually not like because the, the rituals are important, like all they're all like hacks, which are emergent which come from trial and error to get people to remember stuff so if that's you know like, like the ones that remain with us, whether it's like animism or polytheism or that we have some knowledge of or language itself. Those were successful hacks that worked with whatever you know whatever level of blankness the human mind has or does not have. And, or maybe it's just random or whatever but it's like it's successful right like it's not. So, I'm not saying that culture is only about food, because there's a lot of stuff in culture that, but I think it would be a mistake to think that culture is initially about ideas in some kind of like abstract way it has to be about indexical concrete things. So, in my mind.
This line of thinking is brought to you by/related to/builds on: 
Pollanyi: Science vs Catholic Church:
· handles dissent differently
· has a different authority structure
Evolutionarily: big innovation once we start to get tools and language is that, unlike chimpanzees, you don't have this single dominant violent male who is the head of everything; you get coalitions that are formed that can suppress dissent by literal force; you get any group of 3 men who can kill just about anyone now… firing squads and stone-throwing executions work to take responsibility away from the individual who is the “killer”; everyone shares in that responsibility (or more like no one’s responsible); sharing of guilt (or bond through guilt)
· selfhood or selfconsciousness is related to guilt, debt (IG: shame)
· the “tall poppy” syndrome probably functions to prevent people to feel too high and mighty, otherwise you’re killed;
· but then it also prevents overly rigid top-down hierarchies from stopping some people from doing more innovative things; this part ends with the suggestion that it’s always in a tenuous balance but… (IG: I don’t get this… what’s the balance here? shouldn’t it be the opposite?)
· Kuhn: talks about essential tension(?).
·
· Democracies: process for disrupting top down hierarchies through regularly-planned elections
·
· Vs. hereditary Monarchies: but I think it works like that sort of, as opposed to having like a hereditary monarchy where the same family might be in place for a long time.
Some open questions
- For me, it would be useful to have in the same place (here) the set of premises about ideologies and how render science and religion, for example, fundamentally alike (e.g., ritual, celebrity, claims to truth)
- The dynamic tension, fragmentation, and articulation seem distinct in science (so they do indeed make science different). But what about the esoteric vocabulary? I imagine that religion tries to make its language accessible to as wide of an audience as possible, to scoop up as many converts as possible. I'm not sure that this was stated explicitly, but does that seem right?