November 12, 2019
For today
Read Chapter 12 and do the reading quiz
Work on your project.
Today
Notebook 8
Notebook 9
The problem of altruism
Project check in
For next time:
Read Kuhn, Objectivity, Value Judgment and Theory Choice and prepare to discuss the reading questions below.
To prepare for the quiz, read about the NK Model.
Work on your project, and turn in a notebook running on Binder or Colab.
For your project 2 notebook, you are welcome to get it running on Binder or Colab.
If you need to install anything on Colab, here's an idiom:
import sys
IN_COLAB = 'google.colab' in sys.modules
if IN_COLAB:
!pip install empiricaldist
And if you need to download a data file, I suggest
import os
if not os.path.exists('brfss.hdf5'):
!wget https://github.com/AllenDowney/ElementsOfDataScience/raw/master/brfss.hdf5
You can store the notebook on GitHub and run it in Colab.
Once you have it working, you can generate a link to it.
Background:
1) Kuhn was a historian of science. In 1962 he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which introduced the term "paradigm shift". From Wikipedia :
'Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge, and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.'
2) "Structure" was not as clear, on some points, as it could have been, and some readers took the ball and ran with it. Kuhn spent a substantial part of the rest of his career/life trying to rein them in. Objectivity, Value Judgment and Theory Choice. was one part of that.
Reading questions:
1) What interpretation of "Structure" is Kuhn reacting to?
2) What, according to Kuhn, are the characteristics of a good scientific theory?
3) What are the problems with applying these criteria?
4) If all that is true, it sounds like science is not objective in the way we might have assumed. Does that mean it's just "mob psychology"?
You also might want to watch this video
Here's a nice Big Sort example: https://github.com/jzerez/ThinkComplexity2/blob/master/notebooks/chap09-complete.ipynb
And here's a nice Sugarscape with population pressure: https://github.com/thearchitector/ThinkComplexity2/blob/master/notebooks/chap09-mine.ipynb