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Bruno_Coelho comments on Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 08:37PM

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Comment author: Bruno_Coelho 10 May 2013 04:18:19PM 2 points [-]

To him(Kuhn) evidence don't maintain old paradigms statuos quo, but persuasion. Old fellas making remarks about the virtues of their theory. New folks in academia have to convince a good amount of people to make the new theory relevant.

Comment author: JoshuaFox 11 May 2013 08:34:54PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, "Science advances one funeral at a time", but this, from Wikipedia, is a pretty good summary of a typical "scientific revolution":

"...Copernicus' model needed more cycles and epicycles than existed in the then-current Ptolemaic model, and due to a lack of accuracy in calculations, Copernicus's model did not appear to provide more accurate predictions than the Ptolemy model. Copernicus' contemporaries rejected his cosmology, and Kuhn asserts that they were quite right to do so: Copernicus' cosmology lacked credibility."