tisdag 3 februari 2015

General new theories less Pareto-sensitivethan fine-tuning

Some who deny that "peer review" retards science claim that stagnation can be explained by only or mostly economically increased expensiveness, citing the Pareto principle. But the claim that it would be more harsh on breakthrough theories than on fine-tuning of existing ones ignores the fact that more general theories makes a greater number of predictions. Since there is always an individual variation in the cost of experiments, a greater number of predictions means that there is a greater chance of at least one of them being cheaply testable. Fine-tuning of existing theories makes much fewer new predictions. So if the Pareto principle was the culprit behind stagnation, fine-tuning of existing theories would have been more severely stagnated than breakthroughs to more general theories.

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