Neal Blaikie wrote:
>
> multiple choice setup, neither answer would be completely accurate, and I
> don't think too many serious social scientists would call Mead a screwup
> because later generations have replaced her theories with ones that work
> better. This isn't how science works. Whether she turns out to be right or
> not, her significance is based on her contributions to an ongoing body of
> work.
Such an answer (if supplied by a social scientist) is one that I would
rate as indicating a continuing problem. Margaret Mead did not make a
small improvement that was later replaced by a large improvement. She
made a horrendous mistake and screwed up the entire field of anthropology
for decades. The only comparable error I can bring to mind is Minsky and
Papert killing off the entire field of neural networks, and hers was
vastly worse.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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