Supporting evidence for this is in the news this week

(this is the second copy of this comment, the first was regrettably lost in a browser crash. Use systems that back up your comments automatically)

This advice seems to fly in the face of Richard Hamming's advice to keep an open door. However perhaps the difference is subtle: Hamming suggested to have an open door but not necessarily to share your secrets, so perhaps there is room for a big science mystery cult to retain its own mysteries at every level of initiation. Perhaps there is a middle ground[1] to be found between this and current 'open science' wherein secrets and ritual are more emphasized, but where the public has the ability to always query deep into the bureaucracy of the science temple/university.

More likely, however the best approach is all of the above, some kinds of thinking are enhanced by a certain size of a team, and there may be some problems that require an open-science sized 'ingroup', and some problems that are more tractable with an ingroup the size of a mystery cult.

• 1 (keep in mind the middle ground is not necessarily the best path -- it's just a path)

The question may have once been which poet gets quoted when rainbows are brought up. If Keats isn't adding to the discussion in a meaningful way anymore since his metaphors will play second fiddle to the ones that of Newton, which were wonderful and exciting enough that Newton was driven to poking himself in the eye with a needle over them. I don't know if Keats even in his heyday could have claimed that. It may have been that his views on rainbows were propagated in some ingroup, until someone from that ingroup quoted them to someone in an ingroup with exposure to Newton's ideas on the same. They would have looked bad when that happened, but they would likely bring up the same thing to a person who might quote Keats to them, and so on until Keats himself was bested at his own game.

The problem isn't that Science is taking away from Rainbows, the problem is that Science is taking the power of controlling perception and justifying belief (mostly in other people) from Keats. No kidding he's going to be unhappy about it.

Science changes the poetry dynamic Keats' is used to because suddenly there's competition for what gets associated with what idea in such a way that poets don't necessarily get first dibs in the minds of people that they care about. Similar to how Galileo got in trouble for changing the scope of mathematicians from strictly below philosophers, this may be another instance of Newton changing how we view things by raising the social position of those who participate in science to where it is acceptable to challenge the status of a poet. Poets were important enough in Keats' day that the heads of governments had their own poet on staff.

Keats just could not keep up with what was actually still wonderful to the people he would have seduced with his ideas: Darwin came later, and found wonder still left:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. " - Charles Darwin

Of course this dynamic may be changing yet. This framing of the problem leaves open the possibility that our personal ability to perceive wonder can get very broken when our computer systems produce the models for us, as described by radiolab (tl; dr when you have computer systems that can derive laws describing phenomena better than we can understand the reason behind those laws, but which nevertheless describe those systems that generate the phenomena, we may be at something of a loss when it comes to our 'right' to perceive wonder). Being unable to physically train your brain to assign wonder to wonderful thing seems to be a different problem than this one, more of a disability rather than anything.

Either way, the question is guaranteed to have an answer. You even have a nice, concrete place to begin tracing—your belief, sitting there solidly in your mind.

In retrospect this seems like an obvious implication of belief in belief. I would have probably never figured it out on my own, but now that I've seen both, I can't unsee the connection.

I remember about three dreams per night with no effort. Sometimes when I wake up I can remember more, but then it's impossible for me to remember them all for long. If I want to remember each of four or more dreams, I have to rehearse them immediately, otherwise I will usually forget all but three. The act of rehearsing makes it harder to remember the others, and it's weird to wake up with 6-7 dreams in my mental cache, knowing that I can't keep them all because after I actively remind myself what 3-4 were about the others will be very faint and by the time I have thought about five the others will be totally gone.

In related(?) news, often my brain wakes up before my body, and I can't move so much as my eyeballs! It's like the opposite of sleepwalking.

If I'm lying in bed, totally "locked in" and remembering a slew of dreams, I know I am awake. No one has complicated thoughts about several dreams from totally different genres while experiencing that one is unable to move a muscle without being awake.

If I'm arguing to the animated electrified skeleton of a shark that has made itself at home in my pool that he'd be better off joining his living brother in a lake in the Sierra Nevadas, who is eating campers I tell him to in exchange for hot dogs...I have a good chance of suspecting it's a dream, even within the dream.

Neither of these are tests, of course.

Looks like somewhere along the transition to lesswrong, the trackback to this related OB post appears to have been lost. It's worth digging a step deeper for the context, here.

You can start by explaining what it means for something to have a definition by reducing to the idea of a 'concept':

''

The classical theory of concepts, also referred to as the empiricist theory of concepts,[2] is the oldest theory about the structure of concepts (it can be traced back to Aristotle[3]), and was prominently held until the 1970s.[3] The classical theory of concepts says that concepts have a definitional structure.[1] Adequate definitions of the kind required by this theory usually take the form of a list of features. These features must have two important qualities to provide a comprehensive definition.[3] Features entailed by the definition of a concept must be both necessary and sufficient for membership in the class of things covered by a particular concept.[3] A feature is considered necessary if every member of the denoted class has that feature. A feature is considered sufficient if something has all the parts required by the definition.[3] For example, the classic example bachelor is said to be defined by unmarried and man.[1] An entity is a bachelor (by this definition) if and only if it is both unmarried and a man. To check whether something is a member of the class, you compare its qualities to the features in the definition.[2] Another key part of this theory is that it obeys the law of the excluded middle, which means that there are no partial members of a class, you are either in or out.[3]

The classical theory persisted for so long unquestioned because it seemed intuitively correct and has great explanatory power. It can explain how concepts would be acquired, how we use them to categorize and how we use the structure of a concept to determine its referent class.[1] In fact, for many years it was one of the major activities in philosophy - concept analysis.[1] Concept analysis is the act of trying to articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the membership in the referent class of a concept.[citation needed] Arguments against the classical theory

Given that most later theories of concepts were born out of the rejection of some or all of the classical theory,[4] it seems appropriate to give an account of what might be wrong with this theory. In the 20th century, philosophers such as Rosch and Wittgenstein argued against the classical theory. There are six primary arguments[4] summarized as follows:

It seems that there simply are no definitions - especially those based in sensory primitive concepts.[4]
It seems as though there can be cases where our ignorance or error about a class means that we either don’t know the definition of a concept, or have incorrect notions about what a definition of a particular concept might entail.[4]
Quine's argument against analyticity in Two Dogmas of Empiricism also holds as an argument against definitions.[4]
Some concepts have fuzzy membership. There are items for which it is vague whether or not they fall into (or out of) a particular referent class. This is not possible in the classical theory as everything has equal and full membership.[4]
Rosch found typicality effects which cannot be explained by the classical theory of concepts, these sparked the prototype theory.[4] See below.
Psychological experiments show no evidence for our using concepts as strict definitions.[4]

Prototype theory

Main article: Prototype theory

Prototype theory came out of problems with the classical view of conceptual structure.[1] Prototype theory says that concepts specify properties that members of a class tend to possess, rather than must possess.[4]Wittgenstein, Rosch, Mervis, Berlin, Anglin, and Posner are a few of the key proponents and creators of this theory.[4][5] Wittgenstein describes the relationship between members of a class as family resemblances. There are not necessarily any necessary conditions for membership, a dog can still be a dog with only three legs.[3] This view is particularly supported by psychological experimental evidence for prototypicality effects.[3] Participants willingly and consistently rate objects in categories like ‘vegetable’ or ‘furniture’ as more or less typical of that class.[3][5] It seems that our categories are fuzzy psychologically, and so this structure has explanatory power.[3] We can judge an item’s membership to the referent class of a concept by comparing it to the typical member - the most central member of the concept. If it is similar enough in the relevant ways, it will be cognitively admitted as a member of the relevant class of entities.[3] Rosch suggests that every category is represented by a central exemplar which embodies all or the maximum possible number of features of a given category.[3] Theory-theory

Theory-theory is a reaction to the previous two theories and develops them further.[3] This theory postulates that categorization by concepts is something like scientific theorizing.[1] Concepts are not learned in isolation, but rather are learned as a part of our experiences with the world around us.[3] In this sense, concepts’ structure relies on their relationships to other concepts as mandated by a particular mental theory about the state of the world.[4] How this is supposed to work is a little less clear than in the previous two theories, but is still a prominent and notable theory.[4] This is supposed to explain some of the issues of ignorance and error that come up in prototype and classical theories as concepts that are structured around each other seem to account for errors such as whale as a fish (this misconception came from an incorrect theory about what a whale is like, combining with our theory of what a fish is).[4] When we learn that a whale is not a fish, we are recognizing that whales don’t in fact fit the theory we had about what makes something a fish. In this sense, the Theory-Theory of concepts is responding to some of the issues of prototype theory and classic theory.[4]""

See chapters 1-9 of this document for a more detailed treatment of the argument.