Truth is neither absolute nor timeless. But the pursuit of truth remains at the heart of the scientific endeavour But philosophers of science, over the past half-century, have turned against the representation of science as a ceaseless forward march toward truth. It is just not how science works, how it moves through history. It flies […]
Progressivism – RSA Journal
Forward thinking: Rather than marching ahead, assuming that progress is linear and that others are following, we must stop to make the case for change When the RSA was founded in 1754, the concept of ‘progress’ as we know it was just emerging. Over the course of the 18th century, it developed from being an idea […]
Why the Ivy League could end up like the big 3 carmakers: utterly disrupted
Schools choose what students can study and motivate by authority. Whatever content they teach, behaviorally they teach compliance. Knowledge, analysis, and compliance were valuable generations ago, in the age of the knowledge worker, not when facts are available instantaneously, as today. America’s top universities today are like America’s Big 3 car manufacturers of the 60s: hugely profitable, projecting growth […]
Alien Knowledge – When Machines Justify Knowledge
The infusion of AI (alien intelligence) is bringing into question the assumptions embedded in our long Western tradition. We thought knowledge was about finding the order hidden in the chaos. We thought it was about simplifying the world. It looks like we were wrong. Knowing the world may require giving up on understanding it. The […]
We Need a GitHub for Academic Research
Down with the static, old-fashioned scholarly paper. Communicating the results of scientific studies remains rooted in printing presses and elegant typography. One striking exception to this pattern is the way that academic scientists report the results of new research. As they have for centuries, scientists continue to write papers that summarize the results of their […]
