What I’m seeing is that this happens in both directions. There is a philosophy of science problem called unconceived alternatives that we can use the Internet to eat away at. But, if somebody’s take is that science is just fine as it is, then systems which permit people to compare and contrast concepts, models and worldviews will never even get built.
It used to be that free expression originated on our university campuses. It’s not clear to me that this remains a value which is held by scientists and science professors today. The problem is the pattern – not the individual instances.
We see many of the same type of complaints being lodged against this system over many years, and very little being done about it. This went viral just a few weeks ago …
The current system of cartography in science is scientometrics. It’s based upon the notion that we should graph citations. The citations are apparently used as a metric to gauge worth of research. The biggest problem is that a great number of now-accepted ideas were originally rejected by peer reviewers as absurd. If your goal is innovation, citations would seem to not necessarily be the best metric to use (at least not by itself).
