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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;beef1020, post: 2804923, member: 24544&quot;]Because he was arguably, with David Bowers, the most prolific numismatist of his generation. </p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I dislike judging people&#039;s professional work by their private deeds, it amounts to an ad hominem attack.&nbsp; For the record, Sheldon and Breen&#039;s numismatic contributions are both a mixed bag.&nbsp; Sheldon&#039;s grading scale is awful but his early copper work still stands up.&nbsp; Breen&#039;s breadth is impressive, but he was more than willing to ignore the difference between speculation and fact.</p><p><br /></p><p>[USER=71723]@V. Kurt Bellman[/USER], very interesting points.&nbsp; I have a slightly different take away message from that era of social science thought, and it ties in with the Sheldon grading scale.&nbsp; Remember that the scale was originally meant as a value scale more than a grade scale.&nbsp; The value of a coin was simply the basal value multiplied by the numeric grade, so a coin graded 20 with a basal value of $2 had a value of $40 while the same coin in a 12 was valued at $24. </p><p><br /></p><p>This was the same approach he used in his medical work, trying to compare easily recognized features and force them to have deeper, more meaningful, connections.&nbsp; The problem is, social science is good at finding correlations but not as good at finding causation.&nbsp; Combine this with our brains bias towards pattern recognition and narrative, and you can end up with a lot of garbage passing for knowledge.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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