James Evans
University of Chicago, USA
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The social limits of scientific certainty
This talk will explore how social connection between scientists places soft but strong limits on what science can know and discover. This includes empirical demonstrations of how centralized networks of scientists decrease the truth value of collective certainty, how large teams shrink the search space of science, and how scientist flocking correlates investigations, slows discovery and limits the size of future understanding. I then explore the importance of research patterns and science policies that maintain productive disconnection between disciplines and networks to accelerate advance by increasing the value of ensembling and ultimate recombination.