Estimated reading time: 2 mins : 28 secs
The perils of Confirmation Bias and an illustration of why it might be that people who specialise in non-specialism are sometimes attacked for “cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies.”
Twin Peaks (You have to imagine the clouds...)
Twin Peaks
The Twin Peaks analogy comes from David Colander described in The Economist:
IN 1996, David Colander of Middlebury College, in Vermont, expressed his dissatisfaction with decades of economics by invoking a lofty analogy. He felt macroeconomists had clawed their way up a mountain, only to discover, when they broke through the clouds, that a neighbouring mountain would have taken them higher. . .
There was gentle resistance from some well-adjusted economists. Mr Colander’s analogy does not imply that economists are getting nowhere: they can make progress up their chosen peak, even if other, higher mountains beckon. . .
The twin peaks image has a further, unsettling, implication. To get from one peak to the other, economists will have to lose a lot of altitude first. To tackle questions in a fresh way, they may have to set aside many of their favourite techniques and methods. . .
A rickety bridge. Let's criticise it.
Hill-climbers and Valley-crossers
Steve Hsu paraphrases Lee Smolin:
Using Smolin’s analogy of hill climbing, the dominant strategy today in science is:
1) self-assess own climbing ability
2) choose suitable hill (perhaps inherited from advisor!)
3) climb to local maximum (write some relevant papers with incremental results)
4) squat on hilltop and defend against all attackers (make sure everyone cites your papers; get embedded in small community of researchers defending that hill)
5) train students and postdocs on your hilltop while secretly wishing you understood what other people were doing on their hilltops — suppressing the curiosity that originally got you into science.
And Jessica Palmer quotes Mark Buchanan discussing Lee Smolin:
Some scientists . . . climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. . . In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong scientific intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.
“This is the situation I believe we are in,” says Smolin, “and we are in it because science has become professionalized in a way that takes the characteristics of a good hill climber as representative of what is a good, or promising, scientist. The valley crossers we need have been excluded or pushed to the margins.”
Everybody agrees we need hill-climbers and valley-crossers. However, it seems to me there will always be people resentful at the price we have to pay for both. Conservative incrementalism and potential Confirmation Bias is the inevitable price of a specialism in hill-climbing, fuzziness (or just being plain wrong) and apophenia for the valley-crossers.
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Hello there.
I suppose you could see ‘dumbing down’ (or endumbening) as part of the process of climbing down the mountainside.
Yes, casual/social games are (mostly) rubbish. But when we get to the next peak…
Could argue that perhaps hill-climbing is an analogy fail as it relates to an obtainable goal, whereas say find the source of a river is more of an contiunal iteration?
True – but then you lose the valley-crossing part?
[...] is a Twin Peaks problem — which means we need valley [...]