What disciplines don't exist but could?
This question is hard to think about because of how immersed we all are in current paradigms,
The list of things that we call scientific disciplines today was not inevitable. Had historical events gone differently, divisions might be in very different places. For example, top UK universities such as Cambridge have departments of geography while many elite US universities explicitly divided geography into multiple departments, only some of which they label as science.
Although these divisions have real world consequences in what kinds of work are done and by whom, they also hint at a more difficult but potentially more impactful question: what disciplines don’t exist but could? This question is hard to think about because of how immersed we all are in current paradigms, but that’s exactly why trying to think about it, even if doing so feels like flailing, is important. It’s probably the case that we’re somewhere near the middle of scientific progress and so many of our existing paradigms should be wrong in important ways. This means there’s a chance for this kind of thinking to succeed. Moreover, non-incremental thinking is likely to be an increasingly important domain for humans if you believe that AI will handle a growing fraction of incremental work in the future.
We’ll be the first to say we have almost no idea how to do this in practice beyond continuing to flail, so maybe we need a discipline of thinking thoughts that are hard to think. Nancy Nersessian’s Creating Scientific Concepts proposes that making and manipulating conceptual models while treating them as intermediate could be a real approach here, but this is unlikely to be the only way forward.
Maybe what we actually need is a discipline of how to teach our children to do this. Reading is powerful but doesn’t come naturally. Perhaps conceptual leaping will become the next reading.
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