Oddly Influenced

• DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
• David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021

• Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'
• Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, "The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)
• Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"
• Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001
• John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not read, but I have listened to a podcast conversation with him.
• James Suzman, "Why 'Bushman banter was crucial to hunter-gatherer's evolutionary success", derived from his book Affluence Without Abundance, 2017
• Peter Freuchen, Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, 1961 
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975

Credits

Image of a veterinarian succussing a Holstein cow courtesy Dawn Marick, DVM, MS, DACVIM(LA).

• David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011

People mentioned

Einar W. Høst

• David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011
• Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000

Credits

Picture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

• Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
• The 1968 Software Engineering Conference
• An objection to the trading zone
• Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.
• Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000

Credits

Roulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

• Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
• Wikipedia on academic genealogy
• @made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned
• Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998
• Context-driven testing website and book
• The Agile Fusion workshop description
• People mentioned: Lisa Crispin, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, GeePaw Hill, Simon Peyton-Jones

Credits

An image from an undated review of a staging of "Fiddler on the Roof". DuckDuckGo claims it's CC-licensed, but I can't tell. I'm gonna risk it.

• Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962
• Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?", 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.)
• Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970. (The proceedings of a 1965 conference on Kuhn's ideas. It cannot have been fun for Kuhn.)

Credits

Flask from DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997

Credits

Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997

Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, unfinished
Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition, unfinished

Programming languages: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir, Elm, Purescript

Credits

Photo of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lakatos in a nutshell

Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme.

To be progressive, a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment. This is in contrast to the mainstream account of science, which emphasizes that it's rational to believe in a theory only if its predictions are not (yet) refuted. Lakatos's argument is that real scientists don't abandon beliefs because they're refuted. Indeed, "theories grow in a sea of anomalies, and counterexamples are merrily ignored."

While anomalies or counterexamples are generally shelved to deal with later, some are too telling to ignore. Scientists react by producing an protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Those are of two sorts:

1. The good kind are theories in their own right that also lead to novel predictions and confirmations.
2. "ad hoc" hypotheses are those purely created to defend the research programme, to explain away counterexamples. They don't lead to useful predictions.

Note that you can't tell from the outside which category a protective theory falls into. That's discovered over time.

Unlike the hard core, parts of the protective belt can be dropped or replaced.

A research programme is degenerating if:

1. it does not lead to stunning new predictions (at least occasionally...);
2. all its bold predictions are falsified; and
3. it does not grow in steps which "follow the spirit of the programme". That most likely means that it's no longer building by finding implications of its hard core. Instead, the researchers spend their time constructing ad hoc protective theories.

A research programme can recover from degenerating and become progressive again.

The wikipedia article has more detail. It's pretty good as of this episode's publication date.

References

The standard reference is Lakatos's Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978, Currie & Worrell (editors). I personally found a series of Lakatos's transcribed lectures more useful for this episode. They're in For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, 1995, Motterlini (editor). Lakatos and Feyerabend were both friends and sparring partners with very different views about science. Unfortunately, Feyerabend didn't save most of Lakatos's letters, and Feyerabend's letters tend more toward gossip than debate about issues. It's quite a loss, given that Lakatos died young (age 51).

I don't mention it in the podcast, but Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, 1976, Worrall and Zaher (editors) is a wonderful book. It's a series of fictional conversations between a teacher and his students that recapitulates the history of Euler's polyhedron formula, V-E+F=2.  As with his later Methodology did for science, Lakatos demonstrates that mathematics isn't just a steady accumulation of knowledge. Mathematicians don't just play the definition-theorem-proof game; they also use techniques like "monster barring". You'll be surprised by how entertaining it is.

Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, (first edition, 1950). Wikipedia article.
The Millikin oil drop experiment.
The manifesto for Agile software development.
Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (second edition, 2004).
Edward Yourdon, Death March (first edition 1997).
My Bothered Bolsheviks are described in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power (1878-1928), 2014.

Credits

Imre Lakatos courtesy Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

James Shore: website, The Art of Agile Development, AOAD book club, twitter

Mentioned

Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, 2010
Jeff Patton: website, story mapping articles, story mapping book, twitter
Gojko Adzic: website, book on impact mapping, impact mapping website, twitter
Diana Larson: website, twitter
Alistair Cockburn: website, twitter
Jessica Kerr: website, twitter, symmathesy
Michael Feathers: website, twitter

Miro collaboration app
Gather.town a collaboration app mimics more properties of physical space

Pictures

A Patton-style story map
An Adzic-style impact mapping
A Shore-style cluster map
A sequence diagram

Credits

Shoreline image by Flickr user dronepicr, CC BY 2.0