Apparently people want some clarification on what I mean by anti-library. It's a Nassim Taleb term which refers to books you own but haven't read, whose main value is to remind you and keep in mind what you don't know and where to find it if you want to expand that knowledge.

If the point you're trying to make is: "the way we go from preparadigmatic to paradigmatic is by solving some hard problems, not by communicating initial frames and idea", I think this points to an important point indeed.

Still, two caveats:

• First, Kuhn's concept of paradigm is quite an oversimplification of what actually happens in the history of science (and the history of most fields). More recent works that go through history in much more detail realize that at any point in fields there are often many different pieces of paradigms, or some strong paradigm for a key "solved" part of the field and then a lot of debated alternative for more concrete specific details.
  • Generally, I think the discourse on history and philosophy of science on LW would improve a lot if it didn't mostly rely on one (influential) book published in the 60s, before much of the strong effort to really understand history of science and practices.
• Second, to steelman John's point, I don't think he means that you should only communicate your frame. He's the first to actively try to apply his frames to some concrete problems, and to argue for their impressiveness. Instead, I read him as pointing to a bunch of different needs in a preparadigmatic field (which maybe he could separate better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
  • That in a preparadigmatic field, there is no accepted way of tackling the problems/phenomena. So if you want anyone else to understand you, you need to bridge a bigger inferential distance than in a paradigmatic field (or even a partially paradigmatic field), because you don't even see the problem in the same way, at a fundamental level.
  • That if your goal is to create a paradigm, almost by definition you need to explain and communicate your paradigm. There is a part of propaganda in defending any proposed paradigm, especially when the initial frame is alien to most people, and even the impressiveness require some level of interpretation.
  • That one way (not the only way) by which a paradigm emerges is by taking different insights from different clunky frames, and unifying them (for a classic example, Newton relied on many previous basic frames, from Kepler's laws to Galileo's interpretation of force as causing acceleration). But this requires that the clunky frames are at least communicated clearly. 

Curated. I've heard this book suggested a few times over the years, and feels like it's a sort of unofficial canon among people studying how preparadigmatic science happens. This review finally compelled me to get the book. 

There's something quite funny in that I discovered this book in January 2022, during the couple of days I spent at Lightcone offices. It was in someone's office, and I was curious about it. Now, we're back full circle. ^^

I do think this review would be a lot better if it actually distilled the messy-bits-that-you-need-to-experientially-stew-over into a something that was (probably) much longer than this post, but, much shorter than the book. But that does seem legitimately hard.

Agreed.

But as I said in the post, I think it's much more important to get the feel from this book than just the big ideas. I believe that there's a way to write a really good blog post that shares that feel and compresses it, but that was not what I had the intention or energy (or mastery) to write.

It sounds cool, though also intuitively temperature seems like one of the easiest attributes to measure because literally everything is kind of a thermometer in the sense that everything equillibrates in temperature.

Can't guarantee that you would benefit from it, but this sentence makes me think you have a much cleaner and simplified idea of how one develops even simple measuring device than what the history shows (especially when you don't have any good theory of temperature or thermodynamics).

So would say you might benefit from reading it. ;)

If you enjoyed Inventing Temperature, Is Water H2O? is pretty much the same genre from the same author.

Yeah, I am a big fan of Is Water H2O? (and the other Chang books). It's just that I find Is Water H2O? both less accessible (bit more focused on theory) and more controversial (notably in its treatement of phlogiston, which I agree with, but most people including here have only heard off phlogiston from fake histories written by scientists embellishing the histories of their fields (and Lavoisierian propaganda of course)). So that's why I find Inventing Temperature easier to recommend as a first book.

My another favorite is The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking. It gets you feeling of how unimaginably difficult for early pioneers of probability theory to make any advance whatsoever, as well as how powerful even small advances actually are, like by enabling annuity.

It's in my anti-library, but haven't read it yet.

It is my pet peeve that people don't (maybe can't) appreciate how great intellectual achievement first order logic really is, being the end result of so much frustrating effort. Because learning to use first order logic is kind of trivial, compared to inventing it.

I haven't read it in a while, but I remember The Great Formal Machinery Works being quite good on this topic.

It's rare that books describe such processes well, I suspect partly because it's so wildly harder to generate scientific ideas than to understand them, that they tend to strike people as almost blindingly obvious in retrospect.

Completely agreed!

I think this is also what makes great history of science so hard: you need to unlearn most of the modern insights and intuitions that didn't exist at the time, and see as close as possible to what the historical actors saw.

This makes me think of a great quote from World of Flows, a history of hydrodynamics:

There is, however, a puzzling contrast between the conciseness and ease of the modern treatment of [wave equations], and the long, difficult struggles of nineteenth-century physicists with them. For example, a modern reader of Poisson's old memoir on waves finds a bewildering accumulation of complex calculations where he would expect some rather elementary analysis. The reason for this difference is not any weakness of early nineteenth-century mathematicians, but our overestimation of the physico-mathematical tools that were available in their times. It would seem, for instance, that all that Poisson needed to solve his particular wave problem was Fourier analysis, which Joseph Fourier had introduced a few years earlier. In reality, Poisson only knew a raw, algebraic version of Fourier analysis, whereas modern physicists have unconsciously assimilated a physically 'dressed' Fourier analysis, replete with metaphors and intuitions borrowed from the concrete wave phenomena of optics, acoustics, and hydrodynamics. 

(Also, thanks for the recommendations, will look at them! The response to this post makes me want to write a post about my favorite books on epistemology and science beyond Inventing Temperature ^^)

Thanks for the links!

But yeah, I'm more interested in detailed descriptions of how things actually work, rather than models of ideal governance.

Thanks!

After checking them, it feels like most of your links are focused on an economic lens to politics and governance, or at least an economic bent. Does that seem correct?

And of course just reading the rule books for the various governments or parts of the government -- for the US that would be looking at the Constitution and the rules governing internal processes for both the House and Senate. Parlimentary systems  will have similar rules of governance.

Looking at the organizational charts likely also help -- what are the committee structures and how does legislation flow through.

Yeah, ideally I would prefer to read an overview and model of these, but I agree that if it doesn't exist, then reading the docs and charts is probably the simplest alternative.

That said I'm not sure I would view political governance as truely having any gears. I think all the rules tend to become more like the Pirate's Code in Piarates of the Caribbean: more like guidelines than hard and fast rule.

I would guess that there are probably gears level model of how the governments actually work. Whether these are exactly the models provided in rules and guidelines, I'm not sure, but assuming not.

The true deep philosophical answer was... I wanted to separate cakes from bread (in french we have patisserie and boulangerie), but couldn't find any obvious one in english (seems like indeed, english-speaking countries use baking for both). So I adapted the "patisser" verb in french, hoping that I would get away with a neologism given that english is so fit for constructing them.

My bad. Thanks for the correction, edited the post.