Post

It's anti-pluralistic nonsense. Makes wrong assumptions about scientific results (e.g., that they're inevitable) and about the relationship between individual scientists and scientific progress.

As an editorial, this comes across as a cheap attempt to take credit for resolving scientific disputes on the journal's own pages. Science is hard and progress is slow. Get on with the program.

Agree that they don't in the slightest settle things once and for all, but I think they can be a valuable exercise in trying to find enough common ground between two positions to state what a disagreement amounts to more concretely. That's part of the scientific process but not a replacement.

Finding common ground between two internally incoherent theories might not be so insightful, though.

You mean this specific consciousness one? I agree it wasn't very valuable. Although, the lack of clearly testable predictions it generated and the weak link to the theory is perhaps enlightening to the rest of us. Not sure it told us much we didn't already know about consciousness science though

But what if they’re important scientists?

Exactly the point of this exercise I imagine!

ideally certain editorial boards will be charged with issuing Important Scientist credentials, which will be laminated and worn on a lanyard.

I don't know, maybe instead of fighting each other, scientists can actually work together to solve a mutually-relevant problem? Maybe they should try that. But, then again, that would mean caring about science, not just who is right...

It's also possible for all to continue performing the best research they can, accumulating and observing evidence, developing parallel lines of investigation, allowing different ideas/models/theories to coexist until the evidence undeniably favors some over others instead of forcing a timeline.

💯💯💯 I swear, psychologists will do anything to come up with a new term or trend to appear more relevant.

Also while we're on the topic..."adversarial collaboration?" That's a weird way to spell "kink," because the adversarial collaborator was his wife. If "adversarial collaboration" involves me boning my collaborator, I don't think it's all that adversarial.

And like...even then, his "adversarial collaboration" with Tversky didn't end well. Sure, he spoke about it fondly when he was an old man and near the end of his life, but before Tversky died, he hated the guy. They stopped working together because Tversky kept stealing credit.

Even these prototypical examples either weren't actually adversarial, or didn't end well and were only remembered fondly in retrospect once one half of the collaboration was literally dead. And this was with a group of well-off Israeli academics from the same cultural backdrop.

It’s the times. I think the crunch in American academia is catalyzing folks to act more aggressively on items they had on the back burner. It’s knives out for stagnant theories that have controlled discussions for years. One example I’m seeing it with is foundation models in neuroscience.