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Paradigm shifts occur when a new way of looking at the world occurs at the same time when the old way is increasingly unable to account for observations. The shift is a replacement, of one system of knowledge with a new one. There is another possibility and that is a rejection of any paradigm at all.
A paradigm represents the predominate system of human reasoning through communications and argumentations. Whether expressed through rhetoric or mathematics, the communication of ideas is from one human mind to another (or to a group). Paradigm is a description of the foundational assumptions that permit these human rational discussions to occur at all.
We are living in a new era where we have an alternative partner in our communications: machines, and more specifically with large volumes of data of great diversity where each is updated quickly. There is an increasing number of people whose original ideas are developed by rationalizing with data instead of with people, and they express their ideas as analytics that become data for others to absorb.
Increasingly, even our interpersonal communications use machines as intermediaries. Our ideas get translated into data and the data then gets retranslated to language at the other end. The machine in the middle assures that the arguments are recorded while in the past such recording was rarer due to the cost and often edited before committing to a publication. Now, all arguments can be recorded and many of them are recorded. The record becomes data. Human thought joins the observational data in our data stores.
This change in the communication partners, machines instead of humans, presents a challenge to the necessity of any paradigm at all. Human rhetoric (in the broadest sense) relies on a paradigm to make any transfer of understanding possible. Now, we can consume exhaustive data on any topic directly.
Sharing of understanding emerges by looking at the same data. It does not really matter how a person internally explains his understanding about the data. Instead, what matters is that we are able to look at the same raw data about as quickly as we can argue in language.
In this age of data, we don't need paradigms any more. The next paradigm shift may be to retire, once and for all, the notion of a paradigm, the notion of human rational argumentation. We can instead focus our efforts on collecting more data, checking the data for reliability, and on expressing our thoughts through key performance indicators derived from algorithmic processing of the data.

KENeumeister 5 June 14
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This post presumes far greater intelligence than that which resides in humans.

Paradigm shifts occur not necessarily as an intelligent nor logical response to when "the old way is increasingly unable to account for observations."

Paradigm shifts occur when any group holds credibility for any number of logical or illogical reasons. The behavior of the Stock Market is one of the best examples.

"Understanding" can be the wholesale adoption of purely illogical nonsense, just because the neighbors did it. Marketing studies consistently show that is how most of us choose our cars.

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Interesting perspective

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