Ime, there are two causes of heated scientific debates. (1) Conflicting or insufficient data. (2) Communication issues.
Cause (1) cannot usually be resolved without some sort of technological innovation.
Cause (2) is quite interesting because it is a social problem.
For example, someone comes to you with a markov decision problem and insists that no form of reinforcement learning could be a viable solution. Why would they do this? Probably because their understanding of RL differs from yours. Or your understanding of the problem differs from theirs. This can be solved by communication.
Stated differently, the topology of your “semantic map” of the domain differs from theirs. To resolve it you must be able to obtain an accurate mapping of their local topology around the point of disagreement onto yours.
Cause (1) cannot usually be resolved without some sort of technological innovation.
Cause (2) is quite interesting because it is a social problem.
For example, someone comes to you with a markov decision problem and insists that no form of reinforcement learning could be a viable solution. Why would they do this? Probably because their understanding of RL differs from yours. Or your understanding of the problem differs from theirs. This can be solved by communication.
Stated differently, the topology of your “semantic map” of the domain differs from theirs. To resolve it you must be able to obtain an accurate mapping of their local topology around the point of disagreement onto yours.