Richard, thanks for the reference to Kuhn. I was aware of his "paradigm shift" concepts, although I have not yet read his writings.
Pondering this question, I came across an example in a field which I studied. To me, the fact that it is in another field provides some distance which highlights the AGI situation. I hope that the following is not too far afield for this list, nor too obvious to those knowledgeable in the history of science. Maybe it's even interesting! In diachronic linguistics, most scholars try to reconstruct an unattested parent language only a thousand years or so before the earliest attestations of language families, as for example, Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Semitic. However, some eminent professors, such as Aron Dolgopolsky, claim to be able to reconstruct far earlier, to a proto-language which is the ancestor several steps back from the more commonly reconstructed proto-languages. What do the respected professors in the field think about these rebels, called Nostraticists? (My views are identical to the establishment; I claim no fearless independent-mindedness.) They think that - The Nostraticists are NOT pseudo-scientists. Their techniques are the same as mainstream scholars, but they push the evidence to more speculative conclusions. They do work that is on the edge of weird, but only on the edge. - The Nostraticists' reconstructions cannot be called provably wrong; rather, they do not have the evidence for well-founded conclusions. They are triangulating too far using noisy, sparse data and uncertain lines of reconstruction. - The Nostraticists may well be proven right. Indeed, similar hypotheses about very large language groups gained acceptance by the consensus. - Future methodologies may help, but we have absolutely no idea what those methodologies might be. - The Nostraticists are NOT Young Turks. In fact, their school had a small golden age decades ago -- and the leading Nostraticists were young, then -- but Dolgopolsky and others of the school are now old, retired, or deceased. There may be a few new scholars in the field, but it didn't take off. - A grad student who is turned on by the Nostratic approach can seek out a professor and study with them. This is very rare in practice. Such a student will NOT automatically be considered an academic leper, but may be left at the margins of the academic consensus. - The Nostraticists' ideas excite a sense of wonder, even in the most jaded. - Requests for speculation on the Nostraticists' far-out ideas will not be met with energetic visions of future possibilities, but with a cautious, lukewarm, "we just don't know." A layperson might be disappointed at what appears to be a total lack of imagination and intellectual courage. The comparison to AGI is by no means exact, but it does highlight the scholarly conservativism and the avoidance of speculative -- even though scientifically based and potentially very fruitful -- paths of inquiry Joshua ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
