That is true, instrumental rationality is not taught systematically, not as far as I know, anyway. It is also true that scientists are subject to the same biases as the rest of us. Could be one reason why some people seriously discuss Boltzmann brains or other incarnations of the anthropic principle. Fortunately, they are rarely taken seriously. The point about curiosity stopper is also well taken. Some other points are not as good. For example:
If you come up with a bizarre-seeming hypothesis not yet ruled out by the evidence, and try to test it experimentally, Science doesn’t call you a bad person.
Science doesn’t, but your advisor, your department or your granting agency will quite likely show you an error in your ways.
Maybe if you’re super lucky and get a famous mentor, they’ll tell you rare personal secrets like “Ask yourself which are the important problems in your field, and then work on one of those, instead of falling into something easy and trivial”
This is a recipe for failure, unless you get lucky. You can think about deep problems, but you ought to work day-to-day on tractable ones. Einstein switched from the latter to the former, and achieved very little.
Be more careful than the journal editors demand; look for new ways to guard your expectations from influencing the experiment, even if it’s not standard.
That is true, instrumental rationality is not taught systematically, not as far as I know, anyway. It is also true that scientists are subject to the same biases as the rest of us. Could be one reason why some people seriously discuss Boltzmann brains or other incarnations of the anthropic principle. Fortunately, they are rarely taken seriously. The point about curiosity stopper is also well taken. Some other points are not as good. For example:
Science doesn’t, but your advisor, your department or your granting agency will quite likely show you an error in your ways.
This is a recipe for failure, unless you get lucky. You can think about deep problems, but you ought to work day-to-day on tractable ones. Einstein switched from the latter to the former, and achieved very little.
This advice is true, but also pretty standard.