John Cook draws on the movie Redbelt to highlight the difference between staged contests and real-world fights. The main character of the movie is a Jiu Jitsu instructor who is willing to fight if necessary, but will not compete under arbitrary rules. Cook analogies this to the distinction between academic and real-world problem solving. Academics and students are often bound by restrictions that are useful in their own contexts, but are detrimental to someone who is more concerned with having a solution than where the solution came from.
Robin pointed arbitrary restrictions in academia out to us before, but his question then was regarding topics neglected for being silly. Following Cook's line of reasoning, are there any arbitrary restrictions we have picked up in school or other contexts that are holding us back? Are there rationalist "cheats" that are being underused?
This can be pushed further: law/moral/ethics are often "holding us back". The use of dissection of human body has been forbidden/allowed many time in history and this affected our knowledge of anatomy and medicine. Many physical and psychological experiments that have been done before cannot be reproduced today, for they were "unethical".
Some famous experiments were even against the legislation of that time: Louis Pasteur has tested his rabies vaccine illegally.
This vaccine was first used on 9-year old Joseph Meister, on July 6, 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog. This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy. However, left without treatment, the boy faced almost certain death from rabies.
Although it is difficult morally, one might concede that within the mass of pseudoscientifc Nazi data some shreds can be valuable to researchers, as a small portion of the hypothermia data has proven to be. Of course, such data should be used only in the most exceptional circumstances and only in the absence of ethically derived data.
This seems absurd. The experiments were horrid an... (read more)
John Cook draws on the movie Redbelt to highlight the difference between staged contests and real-world fights. The main character of the movie is a Jiu Jitsu instructor who is willing to fight if necessary, but will not compete under arbitrary rules. Cook analogies this to the distinction between academic and real-world problem solving. Academics and students are often bound by restrictions that are useful in their own contexts, but are detrimental to someone who is more concerned with having a solution than where the solution came from.
Robin pointed arbitrary restrictions in academia out to us before, but his question then was regarding topics neglected for being silly. Following Cook's line of reasoning, are there any arbitrary restrictions we have picked up in school or other contexts that are holding us back? Are there rationalist "cheats" that are being underused?