Big Thinking & Stinking

2 Comments

1. 

   Marie2 on August 19, 2012 at 11:42 am

   Good article.  Nice insight here:

   And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.

   What is so easily minimized in true paradigm shifts is the length of time it takes between the origin of a new paradigm until that becomes the new normal.  The investment by societies in the old normal is too great to quickly or easily make way for the new.  For example,

   Despite the near universal acceptance today of the basic heliocentric idea (though not the epicycles or the circular orbits), Copernicus’ theory was originally slow to catch on. Scholars hold that sixty years after the publication of The Revolutions [and that was decades after he began formulating and sharing it] there were only around 15 astronomers espousing Copernicanism in all of Europe, “

   In scientific communities, Darwin’s evolution paradigm is well accepted, but within the populace of communities that cling to ancient philosophical/religious belief paradigms, evolution is rejected.  And in the US that rejection has increased in size over the past fifty years and reversing what many grew up accepting as a question that was settled decades before we were born.    

2. 

   hoarongbien on August 21, 2012 at 5:42 am

   i do not think big think will make us to successful