8077628
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
I don't understand why people feel the need to whitewash this, aside from a preexisting religious motive or mindlessly being contrary. Civilization went backwards after Rome fell. It took centuries to rediscover and reincorporate those parts of Western culture.
I worry that too many people secretly want to go back to being serfs.
There's a mature science, where knowledge is limited but accurate, where new findings cause a recontextualization but no paradigm shift, and the previous knowledge is preserved within its new context,, and immature science, where people are doing things wrong, reaching conclusions with inadequate evidence, and stuff gets thrown out during a "paradigm shift", i.e. when they start doing mature science.
Examples of mature science are physics with the incorporation of relativity and quantum physics, which preserved Newtonian physics, or biology, where the human genome project revealed that there were 1/3 as many genes in humans as was previously thought, at which the field barely batted an eye and shifted in a heartbeat to looking more at gene regulation. Clearly, these are huge changes in the fields, but they don't rise to the level of a Kuhnian "paradigm shift" since the old knowledge and vocab and understandings were preserved.
What's an immature science? Probably the social sciences, or those areas of other fields where there's reproducibility problems, p-hacking, and other dysfunctions. To the extent that these fields have overarching paradigms, they may suffer a "paradigm shift". But in mature science, there just aren't any paradigm shifts, in the Kuhnian sense, happening, because a mature science has sufficient evidence in hand before generating a "paradigm".
Kuhn was wrong. But "Paradigm Shift" is a flashy phrase and it captured the zeitgeist of the time it was written. At this point, anything that helps tame this pop-philosophy-of-science phenomenon is not unwelcome, especially because, yes, Kuhn's writings are supporting anti-realist postmodernist trash, without being especially misread.
Dropbox is violating their philosophy as a universal solution and squandering their key selling point for some small cost savings. What a horrible decision.