Michael Nielsen wrote another long thought-provoking essay (for his book, I guess):
............Two clarifications are in order. First, when I say that these are examples of scientific facts beyond individual understanding, I'm not saying a single person can't understand the meaning of the facts. Understanding what the Higgs particle is requires several years hard work, but there are many people in the world who've done this work and who have a solid grasp of what the Higgs is. I'm talking about a deeper type of understanding, the understanding that comes from understanding the justification of the facts.
Second, I don't mean that to understand something you need to have mastered all the rote details. If we require that kind of mastery, then there's no one person who understands the human genome, for certainly no-one has memorized the entire DNA sequence. But there are people who understand deeply all the techniques used to determine the human genome; all that is missing from their understanding is the rote work identifying all the DNA base pairs. The examples of the LHC and the classification of the finite simple groups go beyond this, for in both cases there are many distinct deep ideas involved, too many to be mastered by any single person. ..............
.................Such scientific discoveries raise challenging issues. How do we know whether they're right or wrong? The traditional process of peer review and the criterion of reproducibility work well when experiments are cheap, and one scientist can explain to another what was done. But they don't work so well as experiments get more expensive, when no one person fully understands how an experiment was done, and when experiments and their analyses involve reams of data or ideas.
Might we one day find ourselves in a situation like in a free market where systematic misunderstandings can infect our collective conclusions? How can we be sure the results of large-scale collaborations or computing projects are reliable? Are there results from this kind of science that are already widely believed, maybe even influencing public policy, but are, in fact, wrong?
Discuss.....
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I would, and do, say that science does not reside in the head of a single person. It never has, no matter how encyclopedic the knowledge of one individual. Science is a collective process that involves skills, expertise, knowledge and resopurces that are distributed over large groups of people (and always has been). In Leewenhoek's day, he may have ground his own lenses, but he didn't make the glass. Today, pipette skills are as crucial to the process as the skills of a theoretician or mathematician. The overall interactions of these concerted expertise sets is what makes science what it is.
As to peer review, I think he misunderstands what that is for. It is not about filtering nonsense or approving results. It is like someone saying, "Yes, this is worth discussing".
This is touchy and thought provoking. I will have to think about this. This will be a great topic for a future debate....
But hasn't this always been the case? Hasn't it never been otherwise? It's tempting for many people to consider that we're so submerged and almost drowning in complicated technology, science, progression, development, design, and other forms of refined understanding that we can't possibly know it all. The counterpart to that stance that often accompanies it is a consideration that things must have been simpler in 'the old days' when it is imagined a much more pastoral mindset prevailed. It is imagined that a person of today could easily behold the understanding of pretty much everything in the life of someone in this unspecified past time.
Of course, this couldn't be the case. A person from 1000 years into our future would possibly have as partial and incomplete an understanding of their own time as we do of ours, and through the lens of their own time's interpretation of shared reality, which would be as different to ours as ours is of, say, the pre-Modern era. But it would be flawed to think that they could encompass everything we strive to understand, with ease. It would simply be a different focus. Their shared-attention cursor would be looking at a different range. Their interpretation of understanding would comprise different constituency.
If only I understood that stuff about Einstein and causal vs predictive determinism, but its, you know, complicated.
Hm, originally I'd have been the first replier, but with a distraction, it looks like the post has gone from new to archaic before I got in.
Just in case there are still people looking in here, and because I have found this theme interesting for years ...
Beyond agreeing with Wilkins that science does not and never has resided in the head of any single person, I also believe it doesn't matter that it's distributed. For a particular example that's been much abused, consider climate models. No single person could build a modern climate model from scratch. Even if they had all the relevant areas of knowledge, there wouldn't be enough time to do it.
But you're delusional (there are many such, sadly) if you think this puts the models beyond serious testing. My expertise is more towards the icy end of things, for instance. So when I look at a climate model, I look though that lens of expertise. Someone who is concerned with El Nino probably would never look at the sea ice cover, and might have a hard time seeing what was wrong even if they did. (And vice versa w.r.t. me) But I look at, say, the sea ice thickness and immediately see a serious problem. Atmospheric folks might consider 30 Watts per m^2 to be a pretty good flux imbalance (takes work to get it that small). But for me, looking at sea ice thickness, this is a HUGE term. It obliterates (or doubles the mass of) the Arctic sea ice pack in a single year.
And this is the key to science -- it has to hang together all the way across. What is an acceptable tolerance in one area can be very crude by the perspective of another. That more particular area can then cause a significant review in the cruder portions. Not least, they provide a new lens for analysis. Scientists don't like to stop with 'well, looks good enough'. Usually it's a matter of 'rats, can't tell which method is better'. Show up with a way of telling, and people get much more interested.
Actually, I've just thought of another aspect to this, too.
I think there needs to be two types of people in science - those that have deep expertise in their own field, and are regarded as authorities (or are on their way to be that). There also needs to be the sort of person that isn't embedded into a particular topic, but while widely understanding most stuff in the gestalt of contemporary understanding, flits about like a butterfly across many disciplines, probably not even recognising the boundaries, and in effect collects understanding 'objects' as they go. This occasionally results in a cross-pollination of product from people who are too deep in their own holes to see over the edge.
You want those people to be deep in their own holes - digging them deeper, not wider, but you also want those people floating above the holes, seeing down into them, visiting them, and polluting the output of one into another as they go.
The deep hole diggers maintain the deep understanding of today's cursor of understanding, progressing further and uncovering the unseen more and more.
The visiting flyers won't have deep understanding at all, and don't claim to be authority on anything, but do have enough of an intuitive understanding to detect well-formedness in results and research, and by definition to detect failure of such, and also enough of a pattern-matching tendency to know where they've seen something familiar, somewhere else in a different hole some time ago.