4/22/05
Collins and Pinch chs. 4 & 5

category: weird theories that scientists reject and some members of the public latch onto
now and then, though rarely, these turn out to be right
captures our distrust of experts and how hard it is to overthrow a paradigm
paradigm: dominant idea that is the basis of a whole field of science
can you decide whether a weird theory is right by experiment--not necessarily, questions of interpretation
in the end ideas are evaluated by whether they lead to useful things (by their fruits)

the problems of models:
why do policy-makers listen to economic models when they clearly aren't accurate enough to be useful?
people cannot agree on how to evaluate the accuracy of a model
but they often aren't very accurate in predicting the future
models have authority because they look scientific even if they are useless
better to blame the economists for a wrong prediction than to take responsibility for your own mistakes