ChristianKl comments on Rational subjects and rational practitioners - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
How do you define the "bulk of the subject"? Take physics from wikipedia:
Having five competing theories seems like controversy to me. It's just that as a layperson I don't understand what the core of the controversy is about.
Molecular biology is the only one of those where I took classes at university. I don't think that the field is without controversy. It's just that outsiders don't get much information about it.
The stated goal of the human project was: Project goals were to among others:
They didn't determine all the basepairs of human DNA. After getting to 92% the declared their project a success. They then pretended that the other 8% doesn't matter. Happy coincidence isn't it? The stuff that's hard to sequence is also practically unimportant...
The extend to which those 8% matter is up for debate.
Determination of protein structures is a bit similar. Most of the protein sequences we have were created through crystellizing proteins. We don't really know exactly how big proteins move when they aren't crystallized and are surrounded by water and other stuff that's in the cell. It's practical to assume that we basically know how a protein looks like when we know how it looks like when it's crystellized.
For outsiders it's easy to understand history, psychology or sociology controversies. For the hard sciences it's hard for outsiders to understand the controversies within the field.