Go read Kevin Kelly’s impor­tant essay “Spec­u­la­tions on the Future of Sci­ence”. In par­tic­u­lar, read the sec­tions on “Com­bi­na­to­r­ial Sweep Explo­ration”, “Evo­lu­tion­ary Search”, “Mul­ti­ple Hypoth­e­sis Matrix”, “Pat­tern Aug­men­ta­tion”, “Adap­tive Real Time Exper­i­ments”, &c.

Now think not merely about sci­ence, but engi­neer­ing as well. Think about what makes one dif­fer­ent from the other. His­tor­i­cally, that is.

(Via 3quarksdaily)

3quarksdaily:

The last is a line from what bids fair to be one of the man­age­ment books of the year. Hard Facts, Dan­ger­ous Half-​​Truths and Total Non­sense (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press), by Stan­ford pro­fes­sors Jef­frey Pfef­fer and Robert Sut­ton, is a com­pelling tour of man­age­ment con­ven­tional wis­dom and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and a stranger to fact — bol­locks, in fact. Every poten­tial man­ager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of any­thing, even a whelk stall.

The way it’s done is chang­ing:

WHAT makes a sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion? Thomas Kuhn famously described it as a %u201Cparadigm shift%u201D%u2014the change that takes place when one idea is over­taken by another, usu­ally through the replace­ment over time of the gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists who adhered to an old idea with another that cleaves to a new one. These rev­o­lu­tions can be trig­gered by tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, such as the con­struc­tion of the first tele­scope (which over­threw the Aris­totelian idea that heav­enly bod­ies are per­fect and unchang­ing) and by con­cep­tual break­throughs such as the inven­tion of cal­cu­lus (which allowed the laws of motion to be for­mu­lated). This week, a group of com­puter sci­en­tists claimed that devel­op­ments in their sub­ject will trig­ger a sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion of sim­i­lar pro­por­tions in the next 15 years.

Will the century-​​old aca­d­e­mic sci­en­tific cul­ture adapt, or snap? What do those two out­comes mean, exactly?