For this month's discussion meetup, we will be discussing "Notes on the Inexact Sciences" from the pseudonymous Suspended Reason. Here's the abstract:
Popular wisdom warns us against premature optimization. And yet, in a quest for public legitimacy and tidy problem domains, many fields discourage vitally necessary descriptive and conceptual work in favor of statistical analysis and laboratory experiments. Topics of unprecedented complexity are tackled using rote, mechanical approaches, by researchers who routinely fail to realize how much linguistic and conceptual clarification is a precondition of headway. Meanwhile, sociological and professional incentives prevent the sorts of synthetic work that might de-provincialize researchers' theories, and initiate exactly those conceptual refactorings which would advance the discipline.
We've got references to Wittgenstein! Cargo cults! David Chapman! As always, feel free to come if you haven't done the reading.
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