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Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Before, I'd thought of science as absolute truths about the universe which we could only discover, linearly. Afterwards, I learned that science is as much a political process as any other major institution, that scientists are not immune to human psychological biases, that the process of getting scientific theories accepted is just as subject to selection bias ("the old generation dying out") as the things it studies, and that science is effective to the extent that it acknowledges these biases in a way that faith does not.

For a real mindbender, read Kuhn (history of science), Carlota Perez (economics), and Stephen Jay Gould (evolutionary biology) in rapid succession. There're very similar ideas there around paradigm shifts, selection bias, and responses to environmental change there, appearing in many disparate domains.




Kuhn needs to be put into perspective, though (just as Feyerabend). See Chalmer's What is this thing called Science? for an introduction and much more material. And Gould has some good stuff (The Mismeasure of Man is challenging), but he's controversial, and some of his ideas (NOMA, ie the notion that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria") are, dunno, not convincing.




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