As Henry Farrell wrote to me in another email: “Processes of intellectual discovery are all about arguments between different (and sometimes stylized) positions. To use a machine learning analogy stolen from my collaborator, Cosma Shalizi—all of us put together are at best an ensemble of weak learners, each of which only grasps a few of the terms in a very long and complicated vector that we’re trying to model. It plausibly helps if we start from very different positions (each weak learner sees a different set of terms) as long as each of these positions reflect some aspect of the truth and
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