>>12560682I agree with most of what he said in principle. It's one of those books where you really have to read it and consider it properly because I've never met anyone who's actually read it in real life who thought his ideas were stupid but I have seen quite a lot of people trying to take the fact that he doesn't think the scientific method actually exists to somehow claim that he's an idiot and dismiss his ideas when I doubt these people have actually read his book, or they've made up their minds to disagree with him and then search the book for gotcha moments.
I think there is quite a compelling case for not relying on method in science, and I do agree with him that rooting ourselves to method does ultimately lead to stagnation. I think any theorist ultimately agrees with these ideas deep down, since many theories are to some extent anti methodical, or rather develop in an anti methodical way where people kind of dream up all sorts of far out ideas for how something might work and then they figure out a theory that makes sense, then as Grothendieck once said we turn around and frantically erase all traces of our flights of fancy so we look like soberminded intellectuals.
We are actually seeing a lot of what he criticised in this book play out today where we get so bogged down in the method that funding has also followed us and fixed us into very rigid lines of exploration where you're basically only allowed to do science if you know what you're going to figure out.
In the end, I think he's right, and science would be better and discover more and discover more rapidly if we allowed ourselves to break from method and just explore.
