= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Book Recommendations - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (143)
Expand? I read Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" right after reading Popper, and the contrast was striking. Popper tries to define from first principles how science should be done, and fails; Kuhn examines how good science is done in the real world, and succeeds. His concept of "normal science" - which Ken Binmore expressed as something like "small problems conclusively solved, building on one another" - helps me differentiate between good and bad science more reliably than Popper's criterion of falsifiability. You could say I'm addicted to incremental advances the same way as others are addicted to paradigm shifts.
He's probably thinking of Paul Feyerabend; the best example for Feyerabend is probably his studies of Galileo - demonstrating that Galileo's observations did not prove his theories, his theories made poorer predictions than geocentrism, replication of his results often failed, and so on, and that Galileo succeeded more on account of non-empirical reasons such as theoretical elegance and social connections than on the then-merits of his theory.