This one was new to me and a great read - thanks. Recently listened to a podcast with George Church and somewhere he noted that one should be very careful in stating what cannot be done or is impossible, yet the willingness to do so probably plays no small part in driving innovation. How it is done matters, however. The constant sniping that says "not good enough yet" is far less intellectually interesting than a blunt declaration of impossibility. Dreyfus ends up somewhere in between, I suspect.
I don't know, I feel like Lighthill may well have had the right of it? It really would be half-a-century before anything they had in mind become remotely feasible.
While it's true that science sometimes advances through compelling magic tricks, that doesn't mean that compelling magic tricks are a suitable target for large-scale federal funding. Government funding is a contraindication for the production of compelling magic tricks!
I'm coming from a cognitive neuroscience background, where sometimes a subfield really is absolute bupkiss and needs to be shelved; maybe for a decade, maybe forever.
I suppose I see it both ways. Lighthill seemed to enjoy himself a little too much, but he did the job he was asked to do well enough. And it probably was the right the call from an SRC inundated with hokey research projects they couldn't make much sense of. That said, like Minsky and Papert in 1969, I'm not sure he needed stick the boot in with quite as much glee (though as Tom Haigh points out the cooling effect produced by both moments wasn't nearly as drastic as is generally assumed).
I suppose that sometimes you are looking for a hatchet-man, but the only man willing to take the job is, ah, disturbingly enthusiastic about the hatchet.
This one was new to me and a great read - thanks. Recently listened to a podcast with George Church and somewhere he noted that one should be very careful in stating what cannot be done or is impossible, yet the willingness to do so probably plays no small part in driving innovation. How it is done matters, however. The constant sniping that says "not good enough yet" is far less intellectually interesting than a blunt declaration of impossibility. Dreyfus ends up somewhere in between, I suspect.
I don't know, I feel like Lighthill may well have had the right of it? It really would be half-a-century before anything they had in mind become remotely feasible.
While it's true that science sometimes advances through compelling magic tricks, that doesn't mean that compelling magic tricks are a suitable target for large-scale federal funding. Government funding is a contraindication for the production of compelling magic tricks!
I'm coming from a cognitive neuroscience background, where sometimes a subfield really is absolute bupkiss and needs to be shelved; maybe for a decade, maybe forever.
I suppose I see it both ways. Lighthill seemed to enjoy himself a little too much, but he did the job he was asked to do well enough. And it probably was the right the call from an SRC inundated with hokey research projects they couldn't make much sense of. That said, like Minsky and Papert in 1969, I'm not sure he needed stick the boot in with quite as much glee (though as Tom Haigh points out the cooling effect produced by both moments wasn't nearly as drastic as is generally assumed).
I suppose that sometimes you are looking for a hatchet-man, but the only man willing to take the job is, ah, disturbingly enthusiastic about the hatchet.