Major scientific institutions talk a big game about innovation, but the reality is that many of the mechanisms designed to ensure quality—peer review, funding decisions, the academic hierarchy—explicitly incentivize incremental rather than revolutionary progress.[1]

Thomas Kuhn's now-famous notion of paradigm shifts was pointing at precisely this phenomenon. When scientists work within what Kuhn called "normal science," they're essentially solving low- to medium-stakes puzzles within their field's accepted framework. While it's fairly easy to evaluate the relative quality of work that occurs within any given paradigm, Kuhn argued it's nearly impossible for scientists to reason about the relative power of different paradigms for a given field—especially when they have already drank the paradigmatic kool-aid.

Max Planck captured this idea succinctly in his biting statement that "science advances one funeral at a time."[2]

There are no shortage of examples of this occurring throughout the history of science:

• Ignaz Semmelweis [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.