Most of the points carry over to other domains as well (e.g., music, art, ballet, stage acting, spiritual traditions that have “gurus” or “masters”).
For example, there are many (e.g.) piano teachers who can trace their lineage back to Beethoven (and they know it off the top of their heads if you ask them), who are similarly overly deferential to historical masters, who see their knowledge and music in general as sacred knowledge. There is also the same extreme conservatism, and different teaching techniques and performance techniques cannot easily be tested.
[Edit: a pretty good test for whether these sorts of problems are characteristic of at least some practitioners of a given domain is whether (or how often) they get angry in the way preachers get angry at blasphemy and utter sentences that begin with “how dare (s)he …”.
Can anybody think of a domain where students spend decades learning, often with the same teacher or very few teachers, where the domain is the center of their life, which has existed for at least a few centuries, and where these problems do not occur with great frequency?]
Mathematics. No problems there because the wisdom of the ancients is still true.
Actually, a surprisingly large amount isn’t. For example, the entire use of infintesimals had to be rethought during the mid nineteenth century and replaced with rigorous constructions over the real numbers. It wasn’t until a century later that a rigorous use of infitesimals was constructed and it looked pretty different from the version used by Newton and the people after him.
Similarly, the question of how polyhedra’s Euler characteristic behaved advanced through a series of proofs followed by counterexamples to the “proofs.” (Although my understanding is that it wasn’t quite as extreme as what occurs in Lakatos’s “Proofs and Refutations.”)
Nicomachus in his treatise on perfect numbers (from around 100 CE) made a number of incorrect statements that took almost a thousand years to be shown to be wrong.
I think that the sort of epistemic viciousness talked about here is stronly correlated with having a single teacher for a very long period of time, in addition to the other factors mentioned elsewhere. For that reason, mathematics isn’t a good example, because people don’t study with just one teacher for 10 or 20 years or more like they do with martial arts and music study and many of the other fields in which the epistemic viciousness is common.
Most of the points carry over to other domains as well (e.g., music, art, ballet, stage acting, spiritual traditions that have “gurus” or “masters”).
For example, there are many (e.g.) piano teachers who can trace their lineage back to Beethoven (and they know it off the top of their heads if you ask them), who are similarly overly deferential to historical masters, who see their knowledge and music in general as sacred knowledge. There is also the same extreme conservatism, and different teaching techniques and performance techniques cannot easily be tested.
[Edit: a pretty good test for whether these sorts of problems are characteristic of at least some practitioners of a given domain is whether (or how often) they get angry in the way preachers get angry at blasphemy and utter sentences that begin with “how dare (s)he …”.
Can anybody think of a domain where students spend decades learning, often with the same teacher or very few teachers, where the domain is the center of their life, which has existed for at least a few centuries, and where these problems do not occur with great frequency?]
Mathematics. No problems there because the wisdom of the ancients is still true.
Actually, a surprisingly large amount isn’t. For example, the entire use of infintesimals had to be rethought during the mid nineteenth century and replaced with rigorous constructions over the real numbers. It wasn’t until a century later that a rigorous use of infitesimals was constructed and it looked pretty different from the version used by Newton and the people after him.
Similarly, the question of how polyhedra’s Euler characteristic behaved advanced through a series of proofs followed by counterexamples to the “proofs.” (Although my understanding is that it wasn’t quite as extreme as what occurs in Lakatos’s “Proofs and Refutations.”)
Nicomachus in his treatise on perfect numbers (from around 100 CE) made a number of incorrect statements that took almost a thousand years to be shown to be wrong.
I think that the sort of epistemic viciousness talked about here is stronly correlated with having a single teacher for a very long period of time, in addition to the other factors mentioned elsewhere. For that reason, mathematics isn’t a good example, because people don’t study with just one teacher for 10 or 20 years or more like they do with martial arts and music study and many of the other fields in which the epistemic viciousness is common.