"The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles"
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Fisher is doing something sly here: he’s dressing a turf war as a defense of clarity. By framing “modern scientific teaching” as a machine that “neglect[s] the great books,” he isn’t just lamenting lost classics. He’s warning that pedagogy can become an arms race in novelty, where being up-to-date substitutes for being right.
The line’s bite comes from its hierarchy of value. “Relatively unimportant modern work” isn’t a blanket dismissal of new research; it’s a shot at the incentives that elevate incremental, fashionable findings above foundational ideas. Fisher knew the difference intimately. As a statistician who helped formalize inference, experimental design, and population genetics, he watched whole fields drown in method and measurement while missing what those tools were for: isolating principles from noise.
His most pointed phrase is “masses of detail of doubtful truth.” That’s not anti-empiricism; it’s anti-clutter. Fisher is calling out the way education can launder uncertainty into authority by sheer volume: if you bury students in data points, p-values, and citations, the scaffolding starts to look like the building. “Obscure principles” lands as the real accusation. The purpose of teaching, in Fisher’s view, is not to warehouse the latest papers but to train judgment: how to weigh evidence, recognize structure, and understand why a result should generalize.
Context matters: early 20th-century science was professionalizing fast, fragmenting into specialties, and rewarding publication throughput. Fisher’s complaint reads like an early diagnosis of a problem that now has a name: information overload masquerading as rigor.
The line’s bite comes from its hierarchy of value. “Relatively unimportant modern work” isn’t a blanket dismissal of new research; it’s a shot at the incentives that elevate incremental, fashionable findings above foundational ideas. Fisher knew the difference intimately. As a statistician who helped formalize inference, experimental design, and population genetics, he watched whole fields drown in method and measurement while missing what those tools were for: isolating principles from noise.
His most pointed phrase is “masses of detail of doubtful truth.” That’s not anti-empiricism; it’s anti-clutter. Fisher is calling out the way education can launder uncertainty into authority by sheer volume: if you bury students in data points, p-values, and citations, the scaffolding starts to look like the building. “Obscure principles” lands as the real accusation. The purpose of teaching, in Fisher’s view, is not to warehouse the latest papers but to train judgment: how to weigh evidence, recognize structure, and understand why a result should generalize.
Context matters: early 20th-century science was professionalizing fast, fragmenting into specialties, and rewarding publication throughput. Fisher’s complaint reads like an early diagnosis of a problem that now has a name: information overload masquerading as rigor.
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| Topic | Teaching |
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