Why do you think this is so important? As far as I can tell, this is not how humanity made progress in the past.
This actually seems to me exactly how humanity has made progress—countless fields and paradigms clashing and putting various perspectives on problems and making progress. This is a basic philosophy of science perspective, common to views as dissimilar as Kuhn and Feyerabend. There’s no one model that dominates in every field (most models don’t even dominate their field; if we look at the ones considered most precise and successful like particle physics or mathematics, we see that various groups don’t agree on even methodology, much less data or results).
But I think the individuals who contributed most to progress did so by concentrating on particular models that they found most promising or interesting. The proliferation of models only happen on a social level. Why think that we can improve upon this by consciously trying to “find or build various decently-motivated-if-imperfect models”?
None of that defends the assertion that humanity made progress by following one single model, which is what I was replying to, as shown by a highly specific quote from your post. Try again.
I didn’t mean to assert that humanity made progress by following one single model as a whole. As you point out, that is pretty absurd. What I was saying is that humanity made progress by (mostly) having each individual human pursue a single model. (I made a similar point before.)
I took Will’s suggestion to be that we, as individuals, should try to pursue many models, even ones that we don’t think are most promising, as long as they are “decently motivated”. (This is contrary to my intuitions, but not obviously absurd, which is why I wanted to ask Will for his reasons.)
I tried to make my point/question clearer in rest of the paragraph after the sentence you quoted, but looking back I notice that the last sentence there was missing the phrase “as individuals” and therefore didn’t quite serve my purpose.
This actually seems to me exactly how humanity has made progress—countless fields and paradigms clashing and putting various perspectives on problems and making progress. This is a basic philosophy of science perspective, common to views as dissimilar as Kuhn and Feyerabend. There’s no one model that dominates in every field (most models don’t even dominate their field; if we look at the ones considered most precise and successful like particle physics or mathematics, we see that various groups don’t agree on even methodology, much less data or results).
But I think the individuals who contributed most to progress did so by concentrating on particular models that they found most promising or interesting. The proliferation of models only happen on a social level. Why think that we can improve upon this by consciously trying to “find or build various decently-motivated-if-imperfect models”?
None of that defends the assertion that humanity made progress by following one single model, which is what I was replying to, as shown by a highly specific quote from your post. Try again.
I didn’t mean to assert that humanity made progress by following one single model as a whole. As you point out, that is pretty absurd. What I was saying is that humanity made progress by (mostly) having each individual human pursue a single model. (I made a similar point before.)
I took Will’s suggestion to be that we, as individuals, should try to pursue many models, even ones that we don’t think are most promising, as long as they are “decently motivated”. (This is contrary to my intuitions, but not obviously absurd, which is why I wanted to ask Will for his reasons.)
I tried to make my point/question clearer in rest of the paragraph after the sentence you quoted, but looking back I notice that the last sentence there was missing the phrase “as individuals” and therefore didn’t quite serve my purpose.