Nastunya comments on Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs - Less Wrong
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I think a better way to use Kuhn's idea to interpret the process and effects of the skeptics leaving is through an ontological reflection on the group's essence: We can say that the group or discipline really started existing in a relevant sense (living out its core beliefs, "getting any real work done") *only after* the original skeptics were gone. Perhaps the discipline's increasingly inhospitable environment to internal dissenters is a more relevant place to draw the line of exactly when that discipline "[abandoned] the requirement of outside accessibility" than the group's own idea of when it started existing. Put another way, the skeptics, while technically belonging to what I'm considering the not-yet-self-realized group *were* the outsiders whose access was, in a sense, curtailed by a later change in tone of discussion, etc
Nastunya