What I observed in Finance, where we share some common ground, is that - problems are well identified (they are not material blackswan) - problems are voluntarily ignored, and dissenters ridiculed (they are organizational blackswan) - we pretend afterward something prevented us to see the reality, and we build a system to get better information, which will be ignored...
Taleb have a blunt behavior... I've read (in Pour la Science french SciAm avatar) that to be a revolutionary scientist you need not to be nice... most great are sharky, egotic. nice people follow the rules and stay on the usual road... they hear the critics. As he says himself he just raise well known fact... Same for Kuhn... they both packaged inconvenient knowledge, known by all professionals in their private life, rejected by consensus in public, ... They try to shock to raise awareness, and get their minutes of fame... fair game. When you talk in private with researchers or finance professionals, you see they are aware of peer-review manipulation, manufactured consensus, streetlight effect,moral hazard, pathological incentives, dependency on hierarchy, conservatism, money hunting... there is even papers on that which are carefully ignored like LENR papers. about the fact the problems were known since long, it seems that history is well rewritten, to hide the bullying against dissenters, or to invent pretended weaknesses to explain the delay to admit facts. prepare to roll over the floor laughing loud when consensus will explain that LENr was researched seriously for 25 years, despite some anecdotical opposition... and that the key breakthrough were done in a university... another fact is that the ideas are often distorted, first by the academic works who create either a fairy tale or a strawman. I see Kuhn ideas absolutely reversed in critics against post-modernism... transforming the desperate diagnostic of kuhn on incommensurability of paradigms during controversies because of respective denial, into a pretended absolute relativism. as if the problem was Kuhn, and not the denial of data and groupthink we all observe. like when people explain that rejection of Semmelweis (and 2 others similar scientist claiming the same during 1 century), was due to conservatism of aristocrats... and carefully ignore it was strangely solved when a chemist proved that "spontaneous genesis" was a bad theory, and proposed germs... strangely as soon as germs were an accepted theory, hygiena get accepted... Science as a community is aristotelian, especially physics today, and that is the problem... Streetlight effect, paradigm locking, incommensurability, false consensus... 2013/10/9 Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> > Alain Sepeda <[email protected]> wrote: > > Your answer is wise and cool... >> >> > >> after digging into the horse manure of LENR history, I have some desire >> to be nasty and non-professional. >> > > Naturally. Who wouldn't feel that way! > > Notice that Huxley was ridiculing the Archbishop in his response. It is > contradictory to ridicule someone when you are telling them "don't > ridicule!" > > There has been a great deal of ridicule directed toward cold fusion. The > most famous example is Lindley, the editor at Nature calling for > "unrestrained mockery, even a little unqualified vituperation." > > http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LindleyDtheembarra.pdf > > > >> After some studies of behavioral economics, reading Taleb, Benabou, >> Roubini, I rationally think this nasty instinct is simply... useful >> darwinian selected behavior . >> > > I think so too. > > You seem to think highly of Taleb. I read only one of his books, "The > Black Swan." I was not so impressed. He gave many example of events or > technical problems that he claimed the experts ignored. I myself knew about > nearly all of his examples. Experts did not ignore these things. They > anticipated them, and warned against them. > > Taleb has a high opinion of his own intelligence. He thinks he knows > things that the rest of us overlook, or that we are blind to. I disagree. > > He makes some good points though. > > - Jed > >
