This is an interesting perspective, but sticking with the analogy, the situation may appeal more to the tasters than to the chefs, cookbooks, etc. The vast wilderness of mere facts does have some kind of savage beauty, but compressing that into coherent theory is more satisfying and sometimes useful!
Re: beavers in particular, it was cool to see that effort mentioned in the context of large scale collaborations and amateur+professional cooperation, and reflect on similar episodes in the history of science. Re: vast wilderness, computing and complexity is exactly where you’d expect to see natural-science style catalogues of funny looking phenomena due to the recency. Ahead of stuff like systematized comparative anatomy we gotta fill up the zoos and curio cabinets so the systematizers (who are themselves somewhat less likely to be explorers) have plenty of specimens to work with.
Comments
This is an interesting perspective, but sticking with the analogy, the situation may appeal more to the tasters than to the chefs, cookbooks, etc. The vast wilderness of mere facts does have some kind of savage beauty, but compressing that into coherent theory is more satisfying and sometimes useful!
Re: beavers in particular, it was cool to see that effort mentioned in the context of large scale collaborations and amateur+professional cooperation, and reflect on similar episodes in the history of science. Re: vast wilderness, computing and complexity is exactly where you’d expect to see natural-science style catalogues of funny looking phenomena due to the recency. Ahead of stuff like systematized comparative anatomy we gotta fill up the zoos and curio cabinets so the systematizers (who are themselves somewhat less likely to be explorers) have plenty of specimens to work with.