Comment by keiferski
5 years ago
One theory is something like this: early modernism was so fruitful because those participating in it were still trained in classical methods. They mastered the rules before breaking them.
Picasso is a good example. He broke the rules of art in creative ways because he had such a firm understanding of artistic methods. Nietzsche, with his deep grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin philology, is another modern innovator.
Today, however, we’ve largely adopted the conclusions of the innovators. Rather than try and recreate what led to these breakthroughs in the first place. Discipline and training are mostly irrelevant in a world that is more concerned with novelty and shock value.
Also, perhaps the fruits that can be masterly picked by single individuals have been picked already.
Yeah, this. And this IMHO is one of the reasons science is in crisis today, because in many ways it is still being conducted according to the late-19th- and early-20th-century models. Scientists are not generally rewarded for doing good science (e.g. replicating previous results or engaging in pedagogy), but rather for making Big Discoveries, because that’s what all the great scientists did before. Trouble is that as time goes by there are fewer and fewer Big Discoveries to be made, and making them gets more and more expensive, while at the same time there are more and more people graduating with STEM Ph.D’s. So you have more and more people chasing fewer and fewer opportunities for career rewards. Another perverse consequence of this dynamic is the pressure to publish any old crap because Big Discoveries are presented in papers and so it is assumed that papers will lead to Big Discoveries despite the obvious logical fallacy. Often it becomes a full-fledged cargo cult [1]. (I once made a very successful career by publishing a lot of crap, so I’m in a position to know.)
Getting this right is a Really Hard Problem because there are entrenched interests for whom this poses an existential threat. There is a lot of power that comes from being an arbiter of truth in a society.
(I think one of the great unsung heroes of humanity is Jimmy Wales. He could have cashed in bigly on Wikipedia, but he chose not to, and as a result Wikipedia is one of the greatest repositories of objective knowledge ever assembled. And it’s free. It’s a freakin’ miracle. Arxiv is also big step in the right direction IMHO.)
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.h...
To give my thoughts about the term 'Big Discoveries': I think it's mainly from the influence of the Enlightenment to focus on discovering absolute, simple laws of nature, and analytically using these laws to obtain a greater understanding of the world. But recently we are now discovering that most of the phenomenon we empirically observe (whether it be chemistry, biology, or society) can't be deduced straightforwardly from those laws, and conversely there is a limit to how we can deduce absolute laws from empirical data, due to the complex nature of large dynamic systems (interplay between molecules, interplay between cells, interplay between humans). The grand problem of Complexity still haunts us to this day.
I think that in the near future there will be a mode shift about how we think about science and technology in general. Simulation will start to replace analytic reasoning (since logical deduction inside our heads has reached its limits of analyzing complex systems), and science will become more and more indistinguishable from engineering (The question of 'what is possible?' will begin to replace 'why is this possible?'). I'm both terrified and excited about this new era.
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I think science is in a crisis today for the same reason society is: the underlying ethics is a scientific realism have yet to be established. That's to say science, or the advancement of organized knowledge and the corresponding cultural realities are still oriented around anthropomorphic biases that were formed during the advent of global culture and embodied by the mystery religions. This made sense when the planet was a conquest, but not so much as a management strategy. Instead the ethics of science and culture need to be organized around ecological ethics: the reality of planetary stewardship is the challenge of the Anthropocene. This is a problem for scientific culture, because it's easy to build complexity on existing paradigms, it's harder to reorganize ones fundamental belief system. Example is being able to describe the surface of a black hole while people starve in the street. The problem of modern scientific progress is a problem of ethical reorganization, and once that is done (if it succeeds) then again we will be able to build systems of thought that appear new and foundational like the classical ones.
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This is all exactly correct. What too often is left out of these discussions is the labor pool and incentives. Too many cooks in the kitchen, because there are incentives to keep adding more cooks, as though increasing the researcher labor supply were a goal in itself, rather what it truly is, an obstacle to progress. Eternal September comes to academia too, a side effect of scale.
Curiously I think Jimmy Wales contribution was not that store of knowledge, but the community which keeps it alive. He has curated a sphere of unusual individuals working for free.
Otherwise somebody has likely already cloned or mirrored Wikipedia.
I think that argument, which I hear a lot, is a rather poor excuse. Currently it may seem like we're so far in our development, but in the future people will probably look back at our time and make the same argument. I think one big problem is 'hindsight is always 20/20', that is to say, great solutions may seem very simple and almost obvious in hindsight, while we ignore the fact that making the leap to get there was very hard at the time.
But is it a poor excuse?
I mean, in the past there could be a guy alone that discovers 10 math theorems alone and his proofs can be understood by highschool students.
Today we hail new proofs in maths that require 30 pages of proof that few people on Earth can understand.
The same for physics.
To me, the trend is clear.
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I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure Picasso would have.
IIRC he expressed the opinion that his mastery of traditional painting was a burden and had to be unlearned before he could make his best work.
I think you're referring to this quote:
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
...or this one:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
But he also did this:
It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
Ultimately, Picasso made a lot of witty, silly comments. I'm not sure I'd read much into them. Here's one of my favorites, although I can't seem to find an actual source:
Art is the currency of the infinite. I’m rich, I should know.
Ultimately, though, I'm not sure it's quite relevant to what I mean. Today, artists are still "taught" a lot of theory (too much, probably) and the educational goal isn't usually to be childlike.