Conjecture

A model that keeps working by adding a patch for each misfit cannot be disputed while it works almost perfectly, so what breaks it is not argument but the growing count of observations that do not fit. Ansary's ch. 14: in the Ptolemaic system "Each time a new glitch was found, another disk was added," and "it couldn't be disputed because it worked almost perfectly, almost being the key word here." What changed was that "when people fixated on observation, they began to spot little things that didn't quite add up," and the stakes were high because "A society's ideas about those lights tended to reflect the narrative that gave its world meaning." Clay's step: our own knowledge layer needs a count of patches per claim, because a claim kept alive by qualifications looks healthy until the count is visible.

How groups think together