Criticism and science

I note that Nassim Taleb is coming in for a good deal of fairly personal criticism in some quarters from his new book Antifragile, which is perhaps not unexpected since he takes no pains in his book to hide his disdain for the work of some prominent public and academic figures.  I also note that these attacks, or at least the ones I have read thus far, make little or no attempt to refute his fundamental technical arguments.  Indeed, it not clear that some of the critics even understand the underlying technical arguments.

It reminds me again that science is essentially a community effort, not an individual effort. We tend to glorify a few scientists (Einstein, Newton, etc) as if they, and they alone, are responsible for the great advances in our knowledge. Individual awards like the Nobel prizes support this misguided view. But in fact science is the slow, painful, often tedious accretion of the work and findings of many, many, many people, few of whom ever get their moment in the public eye.  Kepler gets great credit in textbooks for formulating the laws of planetary motion, but he couldn't have done it without the years of astronomical observations, collected one cold night after another, by Tycho Brahe, who in turn owed his ability to collect those observations to legions of optical workers and budding astronomers who preceded him and refined telescope design by trial and error.

In this respect, criticism (at least when it isn't just a personal attack) is a critical part of the scientific system. Initial hypotheses are almost always wrong, if not completely than at least in details, and it is the unremitting criticism of peers that refines the hypothesis and surfaces the errors and inconsistencies. I assume that after the first flush of personal attacks are past, we will get some serious study and criticism of Taleb's mathematical underpinnings to his arguments that will advance the field yet further.