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Rauch (and Peirce) are correct about the importance of collective or consillient knowledge. But it goes even further than that. The network of knowledge must extend not only among the collective minds of society, but also among the collective knowledge of society. There is a very real way that we can say that the Gorilla was discovered in Africa in 1847 even though it had been known about by humans for millennia. Because while it was known, the knowledge about them had not been integrated into the rest of our collective knowledge. When it was described "scientificially" that meant primarily that the facts about it were inserted into the rest of all we knew in a way that was consistent and coherent. There are pools of knowledge that may be "true" — such as Shamanism, mysticism, psychism — and that are even coherent within themselves — that we cannot integrate into everything else we know about the world, so they are excluded from science. If we are able to integrate what is new into everything else we know, we call that collective or network of knowledge, science. I like to think of science as the way we know things. Besides the other aspects of how we know things via science, such as being able to falsify it, the ability to integrate it into everything else we know is vital. Science is indeed a network, but also a network of facts.

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7dEdited

I think we are likely to eventually conclude that intelligence is inherently recursive, which makes the distinction between individuals and collectives somewhat vacuous. Individual minds ARE networks.

It’s still possible to have conscilience in an individual mind - you can run the Hegelian dialectic on your own if you want. Conversely, it’s possible for a hive mind to ape at “debate” while rejecting evidence that doesn’t fit its conclusion.

So rather than ignoring individual human beings and saying only the network matters, I think the true distinction that matters is:

- the evidence available on the network

- the processing power of the network

- the reward function allocating resources on the network

The last one is critical. Large groups often get things wrong that individuals can see correctly, because the groups are driven by reward functions that prioritize status within the group now, over advancing the group’s long term survival.

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This feels a LOT like “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

It was fashionable for a bit (and may still be) to dismiss teaching the scientific method in academia. I think that’s because people were teaching just the steps and not diving into it. In other words, they were failing in a way that I believe much of academia is currently failing by not being extremely explicit about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Being a sort of reactionary, I decided I would delve MORE into it and it seems like that works (though I don’t have anything but anecdotal evidence thus far).

I have taken to talking a lot MORE about the research step - letting students know that when I was their age I confused that step with the experimental step. But spending real time on that step - which is really just a form of trying to find out if the group as a whole has already figured out the answer to the question the observer currently has about the universe - allows me to very clearly tie back the final step, publication, in a way I never could do justice to before.

It allows me to tell the student that now THEY are participatory in this group sport we call “science.” And it is normally at this step that I reiterate how important it is to thoroughly describe and publish FAILED hypotheses because someone else may later have the same hypothesis and be saved enormous amounts of work by not having to go down the same blind alley.

Science is us telling stories about how the universe works but it contains a built in set of rules that allows us to slowly find out whether those stories are likely right or likely wrong. WITHOUT all the wrong stories we can’t make progress toward discovering the ones which are right.

Last point: one of the failures of teaching science in the U.S. today, in my mind, is that by and large we ONLY teach things we have already found to be true. What we really mostly teach is a sort of “history of science” rather than “how to DO science” at the primary, secondary, and even undergraduate levels. You don’t really start to DO science in school until you’re a grad student.

Even labs are what I call “cookbook labs” or exercises in going through the steps of finding something out that is already known. And that’s a shame. It really misses out on the deepest POINT of science which is ultimately epistemological. Science is the most practical form of showing “this is how I know that I know what I know.”

I really think if we approached teaching science in school STARTING from the direction of philosophy that we might get a lot more students interested in it.

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