Comment by throwway262515
4 hours ago
Novelty. No textual extrapolation of a historical encyclopedia can predict new discoveries by actual people working with their five senses.
4 hours ago
Novelty. No textual extrapolation of a historical encyclopedia can predict new discoveries by actual people working with their five senses.
This is not at all clear to me. Reminded of that joke of how "A month in the lab can save you an hour in the library", thinking about some of the best science in history, the researchers often had very strong theory-based belief in their hypothesis, and the experiment was "just" confirmation. Whereas the worst science has people run experiments without a good hypothesis, and then attach significance to spurious correlations.
In other words, while experiments are important, I believe we can get a lot more distance from thinking deeply about what we already have.