The Alien Space of Science: Sampling Coherent but Cognitively Unavailable Research Directions
- View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Scientific discovery is constrained not only by what is true, but by what is cognitively available to researchers.
- Many directions are coherent in light of the literature yet unlikely to be proposed because no existing community combines the relevant concepts, methods, and intuitions.
- Modern language models inherit this bias, recombining high-density regions of the literature when prompted for novel ideas.
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- View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Scientific discovery is constrained not only by what is true, but by what is cognitively available to researchers.
- Many directions are coherent in light of the literature yet unlikely to be proposed because no existing community combines the relevant concepts, methods, and intuitions.
- Modern language models inherit this bias, recombining high-density regions of the literature when prompted for novel ideas.
Sources: Arxiv