Is "groupthink" in science a problem or a myth? - Big Think
The author of this article concludes that it is a myth. That what may appear to be groupthink is actually scientists correctly resisting new ideas that fail "to succeed where our current theories cannot". In other words, the new ideas fail because the technology is inadequate to measure their predictions, or they simply do a poorer job of explaining the data than do the prevailing theories.
The author uses the ancient battle of geocentricism vs. heliocentrism to illustrate his point. He correctly points out that geocentricism carried the day for so long because it better explained the available data than heliocentrism did.
Second, this purely secular article essentially debunks the secular myth of religion vs. science. Although the Pope did punish Galileo mildly, it was not due to religion or to the Church's opposition to science, but rather due to the facts that Galileo went out of his way to mock the Pope and that the science, at that time, did not support Galileo. The Galileo myth is not a good example of religion vs. science.
The author of this article concludes that it is a myth. That what may appear to be groupthink is actually scientists correctly resisting new ideas that fail "to succeed where our current theories cannot". In other words, the new ideas fail because the technology is inadequate to measure their predictions, or they simply do a poorer job of explaining the data than do the prevailing theories.
The author uses the ancient battle of geocentricism vs. heliocentrism to illustrate his point. He correctly points out that geocentricism carried the day for so long because it better explained the available data than heliocentrism did.
The reason that it fit the evidence better is that the available technology was insufficient to observe the contrary evidence. The earth's rotation was not able to be proven until the invention of the Foucalt pendulum in the 19th century and the first parallax of stars was not able to be observed and measured until the development of sufficiently advanced telescopes, also in the 19th century.Quote:
We often ask ourselves, "How was this possible?" How did this geocentric picture of the Universe go largely unchallenged for well over 1,000 years? There's this common narrative that certain dogma, like the Earth being stationary and the center of the Universe, could not be challenged. But the truth is far more complex: the reason the geocentric model held sway for so long wasn't because of the problem of groupthink, but rather because the evidence fit it so well: far better than the alternatives.
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The Earth does rotate, but we didn't have the tools or the precision to make quantitative predictions for what we'd expect to see. It turns out that the Earth does rotate, but the key experiment that allowed us to see it on Earth, the Foucault pendulum, wasn't developed until the 19th century. Similarly, the first parallax wasn't seen until the 19th century either, owing to the fact that the distance to the stars is enormous, and it takes the Earth migrating by millions of kilometers over weeks and months, not thousands of kilometers over a few hours, for our telescopes to detect it.
I have two thoughts after reading this article. First, although the author is correct that the reluctance of science to change is often due to lack of a better explanation rather than groupthink, groupthink can also and does exist in science. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Scientists are humans and, as such, are subject to all the frailties and problems of humans in general.Quote:
The reason it took so long to supersede the geocentric model of the Universe, close to 2000 years, is because of how successful the model was at describing what we observed. The positions of the heavenly bodies could be modeled exquisitely using the geocentric model, in a way that the heliocentric model could not reproduce. It was only with the 17th century work of Johannes Kepler who tossed out the Copernican assumption that planetary orbits must be reliant on circles that led to the heliocentric model finally overtaking the geocentric one.
Second, this purely secular article essentially debunks the secular myth of religion vs. science. Although the Pope did punish Galileo mildly, it was not due to religion or to the Church's opposition to science, but rather due to the facts that Galileo went out of his way to mock the Pope and that the science, at that time, did not support Galileo. The Galileo myth is not a good example of religion vs. science.
