People often talk about clusters of ideas. A common context here is the various different contrarian clusters. But ideas can often cluster for historical reasons that don’t have a coherent reason to connect. That’s well known. What may be less well known is that there are examples where one idea in a cluster can be discredited and as a result other, correct ideas in the same cluster can fall into disrepute. I recently encountered an example while reading Cobb and Goldwhite’s “Creations of Fire” which is a history of chemistry.
In the early 1800s Berthollet had hypothesized (with a fair bit of experimental evidence) that one could make the same compound with different ratios of substances. He also hypothesized what would later become to be known as the law of mass action. When the first claim was shown to be wrong, the law of mass action was also rejected, and would not become accepted again for about 50 years.
The upshot seems to be that we should be careful not to reject ideas just because they come from the same source as other, ideas which we’ve assigned low probabilities.
People often talk about clusters of ideas. A common context here is the various different contrarian clusters. But ideas can often cluster for historical reasons that don’t have a coherent reason to connect. That’s well known. What may be less well known is that there are examples where one idea in a cluster can be discredited and as a result other, correct ideas in the same cluster can fall into disrepute. I recently encountered an example while reading Cobb and Goldwhite’s “Creations of Fire” which is a history of chemistry.
In the early 1800s Berthollet had hypothesized (with a fair bit of experimental evidence) that one could make the same compound with different ratios of substances. He also hypothesized what would later become to be known as the law of mass action. When the first claim was shown to be wrong, the law of mass action was also rejected, and would not become accepted again for about 50 years.
The upshot seems to be that we should be careful not to reject ideas just because they come from the same source as other, ideas which we’ve assigned low probabilities.