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Real science is trying random stuff until you get slightly better performance out of your model and then creating contrived explanations for why you think it worked
btw yann lecun is the head of meta ai so this is just a couple of rich dickheads having a slap fight
Lecun has massively contributed to the past decades of progress in machine learning with his fundamental research. He may have sold his soul to Meta, but his work is definitely very respected, he’s not just another rich guy.
Sorry, but no. Science can be either trying out random stuff because there is no preexisting knowledge you could apply but you have something in mind you want to see what it does, sure. But science is also using the knowledge that’s already out there to make something new of it. Translation of knowledge from different approaches into something that you are interested in.
Unless you went for a real scotsmen kind of joke and I missed it…
Shit take, everyone sucks here
Now gather round chillun, sometimes, I say sometimes, you know, sometimes … one should shut up and be rich.
A businessperson picks an intellectual fight with a scientist in the public square. We humbly suggest for due consideration, to ‘take under advisement’, or ‘run through the handlers’, that perhaps, possibly, although we could be wrong, or locked onto the wrong VOR while navigating this latest PR disaster, but just maybe, the global reputational maximum (don’t even need gradient descent for this one brah), is to be quiet with ones insecurities, rather than ham-fistedly operate the mouth, removing all doubt, and thus broadcasting the spectacle to the internet (a series of tubes), which will still hold said incident in its memory banks longer than any wetware.
Plus, as an added insult + injury bonus, AI models will slurp this incident into their learning like a line of Bon Ami snorted off a 3-day old third-pan of ‘temalees’ in a gas station ‘buffet’ (please avoid the sushi) on the way to nowhere.
All nibbles and bytes are immortal now and forever more!
DWord to your motherboard.
Fuck, I really hate to agree with Elon on anything, but that is a ridiculous argument. LeCun must also really believe that trees only fall in the woods when someone is around to see it happen.
Also how transparently published and reproduced was Pfizer’s vaccine trials, considering a judge had to force the contents released, yet it was science right away. You can’t have cake and eat too.
Yeah, they’re both pretty wildly off base. Publishing papers that are vetted and used as a foundation for other work is science. Also, sorry, but developing advancements behind closed doors is still science. Oppenheimer’s secret research for the government is pretty fucking foundational. Thomas Edison wasn’t interested in sharing his ideas, but rather in selling them. Everyone remembers him.
This argument reads like two people having an ego trip past each other.
You were correct in the first, but the things you’re describing are product research and development.
All super important, but not exactly what I call science as a socially beneficial activity humans do specifically to learn the truths of the universe.
Science is strictly a social activity. You can’t have a social activity without the social component.
Again, fact-finding is not the same as science.
Science is just the process of testing things in the world in a reproducible way.
LeCun’s argument is good career advice (you only get credit for what others know you did), but it’s not factual correct.
Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isn’t right when it comes to science
honestly he should know better than to argue with a crazy person.
it doesn’t matter how right he is, musk will turn everything around and have fun while doing it.
The point of arguing with morons online is not to convince the morons. It’s to convince the spectators.
This particular moron is selling tickets to the venue he’s using to argue with him tho…
I’m not convinced that has the effect you think it does.
To me it just makes LeCun look worse for engaging with him. His research stands on its own and I don’t think convincing anyone of anything on xitter is going to have a worthwhile outcome for him.
Yep. All he’s achieving is by this is helping Twitter keep some of its legitimacy.
I assume by “he” you mean LeCun
yep
thanks to melon tusk, i don’t have to
The Musk likely knows who and what he himself is, even if only in the darkest and most sleepless hours of the night, but on the other hand, his followers eat this shit up like candy. “Survival of the fittest” - caveat: in the current climate, or rather the one from the last few decades - has led to him being put in charge of way more than he should, in the same manner that a cockroach is “fitter” than humans since they will outlast our having caused WWIII (unless we make it to space, which seems increasingly unlikely at this point, at least within any of our current lifetimes).
Anyway, it is important to remember that he does not do this for reason of mere stupidity - he literally gets paid to dish out this kind of shade.
Edit: case in point, the fact that we are discussing this now, and also the title of this post. If Elon had said “I respect you”, that would have been the end of the matter right there, but it would not have met his goals (or apparently, ours either).
Who he?
Neural networks, OCR, called one of the “godfathers of deep learning”, etc, etc.
He’s a brilliant, well known scientist.
The best emoji for defending your fragile self esteem: 🤣
For depicting your interlocutor as the soyjak and yourself as the chad, it’s almost as good as 🤡
Seems like a very elitist and gatekeeping perspective, specially considering how closed off the academic world is for the rest of society in some places, never mind expensive to publish. It’s also basically saying that if you, say, come up with a groundbreaking hypothesis, that that’s not science until you get a research paper out, and that might require mastery that goes beyond the hypothesis.
Sure, this might stop most of the looney theories from being called Science, but it also prevents public access in favor of those with the means and capacity to sustain an ever more complex geocentric model of the fashion of the times, from which any divergent theories must generally part from or involve renown in.
You think the person who made that hypothesis will die bitter and forgotten? Is that the general view of people who are not Scientists by Scientists? They might know what’s up, and might not want the gatekeeper to take all the credit, as is often the case in academic circles, and might just feel satisfaction in seeing their hypothesis gratified. They might place more importance in exploring and understanding reality than compensating personal insecurities. Perhaps it is science itself that might stagnate by stalling until it itself is able to discover these hypothesis under the properly accepted emeritus when they are eventually able to get to it.
Mostly it’s just looney theories, but given Musk is involved, I imagine this discussion involves proprietary patents that do have a lot of research involved and under peer review of teams under non-disclosure agreements. Then again, it’s Musk, could be mostly looney theories too.
It’s free to publish.
It doesn’t need to be published in a scientific journal. Publication in journals is the most streamlined way to go through the process, but you could publish your hypothesis and methodology to a blog and potentially get the same benefits.
Even patents need to be published. Publication is how discoveries are shared and verified.
You would still need to be recognized before someone more recognizable takes it and sticks their name on it the moment they see any validity in it. Plagiarism isn’t a myth, and good luck getting recognition even just for a hypothesis without a master and just as a hobbyist.
Academics want a well prepared research paper without evidencing crude freshman mistakes, and by its nature yours might be far cruder than academic standards. Even if you do end up releasing it and if it does by some miracle get acknowledged, it will by its nature take longer and run more risks from a lack of peer review that might discard it due to simple but correctable mistakes while running the risk of getting it plagiarized by someone capable of fixing it up, and no one is going to take a random blog as the proof of a preexisting theory over a research paper with a name with some masters to it that claims the idea was entirely theirs shortly thereafter. And if all you care about is the study of reality and science, why risk the heartbreak of getting personally involved?
Patents don’t need to be a full comprehensive research pieces, they just have to be enough to define and identify particular intellectual property.
I often fantasize about guerilla science done by serious people outside of official channels. While there are plenty of crackpots who desire this for political reasons, I would really like to see an open-source “journal” by and for those scientists who are in it purely for science and have become disenchanted with the current model which is compromised in some ways that prevents progress on certain concepts.
To be fair, it would probably be full of crackpot theories, which would make anything released on it a crackpot theory by association. Unless it involves a heavy but fair dose of educated moderation, and it’s already hard enough to simply get moderators that don’t simply want to reenact the Stanford prison experiment.
Not necessarily. Just because my theoretical journal wouldn’t be subject to the existing academic establishment it does not mean it would accept everything. This journal would be more rigorous because it would be composed exclusively by fidelity to the scientific process. I am not anti-academia, only acknowledging that the existing structures are so large and composed of so many egos that there is necessarily over-focus on some areas and under-focus on other areas as a consequence of the structure. My pretend journal wouldn’t be for everyone rejected from those institutions for explicit reasons of incompetence, it would be for those scientists who want to pool resources to do work that would not be easy to support on the current academic model.
How to you vet papers that are being submitted?
If it is outside of your specific experience, how do you get someone else who is specialised to vet the paper?Fortunately I don’t need to have all the answers in my imaginary journal. I imagine it more as a cooperative enterprise among scientists who have become disenchanted with established academic paradigms and are looking to do the research and experimentation in that zone which is of interest to scientists themselves but not necessarily supported by the need to publish in the areas most emphasized by the academic establishment. This is not anything against what exists and what is being produced which I personally consider to be important, only to provide additional avenues to serve science in ways it’s not currently being served.
You’re right that credentials in this model are fuzzy. At least at the beginning it would be composed exclusively of scientists already working in their field who would want something like this. It could be possible that these scientists answering only to their immediate guerilla journal peers may see fit to support the research of an individual with no doctorate but who has demonstrated their self-education has made them capable of designing an experiment which can be quantified, criticized, and re-produced. Whether this standard would be agreed upon by the greater community would certainly be controversial with plenty of politics involved, but that reality it outside of the scope of my daydream.
As for the sustainability, it’s as in question as any open source project. It lives and dies based on peoples’ desire to do it only because they want to do it and others want to support them doing it. This couldn’t be a career alternative to academia because making it into a business or non-profit would defeat the purpose as it would attain the same vulnerabilities to a much more severe degree than the much larger and stable existing model.
How the Linux kernel “made it” and is still free and open source is - imo - one of the pinnacles of humanity.
It’s inspired so much other software to adopt the same philosophy, and modern humanity/science/society stands on those shoulders.I think science has missed that boat.
Or that pinnacle was before the tools to support such an open source atmosphere/community were around… So not missed the boat, but swam before the boat was built
That’s how things work in the AI community. Publications all go through various conferences and journals that are free to submit to. In many of these avenues, if you submit something, the cost is to get a certain number of papers reviewed (not necessarily doing it yourself, but you have to find someone capable of doing it). The publications are then made freely available for anyone to read. Everything is organized by the research community for the benefit of that same community.
Science is a specific social activity that humans engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or being creative, or reasoning. It’s a particular method of peer review that generates shared public knowledge.
These are technical terms we have refined over hundreds of years. Your heart is in the right place, but your opinions are uninformed.
Everyone is always a fan of going over to a dictionary and making only one definition of a word “the true one” because it falls in line with their particular argument of the moment.
We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you please, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use that word. That’s why we have multiple words for similar phenomena, and if you ignore the definitions then you can’t make yourself understood.
Science is a particular method of peer review…?
This thread prompted me to revisit what I think “science” means, and I’ve been through a number of different Wikipedia pages, dictionary definitions, etc. but that inquiry just reinforced that this “science == participation in the institutions/communities of science” idea just doesn’t seem to hold up.
Where does this idea come from? I keep seeing this “science is this very particular thing, it’s not just forming falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them,” but then when I look it up, the sources I find say exactly the opposite.
I think this theory of science is so prevalent in this thread because you have to adhere to it in order to dunk on Elon Musk.
I doubt most of these ardents would have taken this position in a random thread about sea cucumbers or something.
I like dunking on Musk as much as the next guy, but the amount of double-think people are willing to commit to to do it is always pretty off-putting to me.
It’s like every ArsTechnica article on SpaceX has people come out of the woodwork to say that their accomplishments are trash and not even worth reporting because of Elon, which, like, you have to be delusional if you don’t think SpaceX is absolutely killing it.
Lol I think you’re onto something. Maybe better off sticking to sea cucumber posts.
It did make me learn some things, though. The person who I was responding to told me to “See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science,” so I did, and I learned about the Demarcation Problem, Logical Positivism, and some new Karl Popper ideas. So, it has not led to a collaborative discussion, but it was pretty interesting, and I’m much more confident now about what’s reasonable to say about what “counts as Science.” Time well spent, IMO.
(In case you were wondering: Any activity performed while wearing safety goggles or glasses is technically science.)
See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science” is misguided.
If everything is “science” then nothing is “science.”
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science”
Well that’s a reach. I had to buy a new laptop charger and find facts about what voltage, etc. I needed… I certainly don’t consider that fact-finding exercise to be science, and I don’t think I said anything to suggest that.
But okay, I don’t have a textbook handy, but let’s see what we can find out about the Philosophy of Science:
Philosophy of Science - Wikipedia
Seems to pretty clearly indicate “lots of interesting and useful ideas, no consensus.” Peer review mentioned 0 times. The “Defining Science” section links to a page for the demarcation problem, so let’s go look at that.
Demarcation Problem - Wikipedia
“The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields.”
And the article basically continues to that effect, IMO: Demarcation is difficult, unclear, and there is no consensus. Peer review mentioned 0 times.
Maybe it’s just Wikipedia that has this misconception. Let’s check some other sources.
The Philosophy of Science - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
“Despite this diversity of opinion, philosophers of science can largely agree on one thing: there is no single, simple way to define science!”
Re: Demarcation problem:
“Modern philosophers of science largely agree that there is no single, simple criterion that can be used to demarcate the boundaries of science.”
Starting to sound familiar. Lots of opinions from Aristotle to Cartwright, none of whom highlight peer review or acceptance by the institutions as criteria. The page does talk about empiricism, parsimony, falsification, etc. though, consistent with other sources.
Glossary - “science” - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
This one is simple:
Our knowledge of the natural world and the process through which that knowledge is built. The process of science relies on the testing of ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world. Science as a whole cannot be precisely defined but can be broadly described by a set of key characteristics. To learn more, visit A science checklist.
Let’s look at the checklist.
Science is embedded in the scientific community - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
The page heading sounds pretty prescriptive, and that’s about the closest I can find that claims “if it’s not peer reviewed, it’s not science.” The body (IMO rightfully) describes the importance of community involvement in science, but doesn’t say anything like “it’s not science unless it involves the community.”
Take this excerpt about Gregor Mendel:
However, even in such cases [as Gregor Mendel’s], research must ultimately involve the scientific community if that work is to have any impact on the progress of science.
So yes, sharing his findings with the world was why it was able to have an impact, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret that he wasn’t doing science while he was working in isolation, or that it only became science retroactively after it was a) shared, and b) accepted.
Let’s take a look at another textbook and see what it says:
1.6: Science and Non-Science - Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science
This chapter suggests that you can take two approaches to demarcation:
- What makes a theory scientific or non-scientific?
- What makes a “change in a scientific mosaic” scientific?
For theories - They’re clear that there are no clear universal demarcation criteria, but offer these suggestions:
- Suggestion 1: An empirical theory is scientific if it is based on experience.
- Suggestion 2: An empirical theory is considered scientific if it explains all the known facts of its domain.
- Suggestion 3: An empirical theory is scientific if it explains, by and large, the known facts of its domain.
For changes - This pertains specifically to whether a change to “a scientific mosaic” is scientific or not, which necessarily pertains to a scientific community. But I’d argue that this analysis seems pretty clearly downstream of a priori participation in a scientific community, not attempting to define science as such.
Didn’t read the whole textbook, so I might still be missing something, but the focus in the chapter is still definitely on the properties of the inquiry, not on the scientific institutions surrounding it.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Also looked at the entries for Scientific Method and Pseudo-science, which seem to be consistent with the other sources
TL;DR/Conclusion
So I’m still getting a really strong signal that:
- Science/non-science doesn’t have a clear demarcation line, and that problem is called the Demarcation Problem. It has a special name because it’s still a big deal.
- Ideas about what is science vs. non-science focus mostly on the properties of the inquiry: Is it a testable, falsifiable hypothesis that can be investigated with empirical observations?
- Scientific communities are still super important, and you can make statements about how scientific activity should interact with communities, but community involvement is not usually a factor in demarcation
- Peer review is useful and stuff, but has little interaction with the science/non-science demarcation question… I don’t think it came up in any of the sources I looked at
So… Do I still seem misguided? Are Wikipedia and UC Berkeley and this textbook called “Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science” and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy all also misguided? Or am I just interpreting them wrong?
Like I started this investigation feeling 100% ready to learn that my concept of “what Science is” was misguided… But idk, I did a bunch of reading based on your suggestion, and I gotta say I feel pretty guided right now.
If you wanna throw something else to read my way though, I’ll happily have a look at it.
I did follow your link to UC Berkeley (the first one I clicked), and wouldn’t you know it, as I expected, they claim the following:
Huh, look at that. Apparently involving “the scientific community” is part of science.
Again, this is from your link, which you didn’t read, I assume because your patron saint, Dunning-Kruger, frowns on reading.
That’s not like a big gotcha, lol… I actually said “Let’s go look at that checklist,” and had a link to it (in a quote). Those checklist items correspond directly to section headings, and I quoted and responded to the even-more-strongly-worded section heading directly.
In fact, I included it as the best evidence I found for your point: That if I read any textbook on the philosopy of science, it will spell out how “science” is “a particular method of peer review.” Well… I found some evidence that kind of points that way, and a whole boatload that suggests that that isn’t really thought of as part of the Demarcation Problem. I wasn’t going in trying to “be right,” that’s just what I found.
Like I put quite a bit of work in good faith to try to understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t feel like you’re trying to meet me half way.
Look, here’s my point more concisely: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any. Given that science is ostensibly just the activity that scientists engage in, and all of them do peer review, that’s probably important, right?
When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from other, similar activities. The fact that my efforts encounter a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation” or “fact finding”. If science could be captured with such broad strokes, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!
Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth, apparently without reproducibility or peer review. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.
What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review seems to be an indispensable feature of science. Do you have your own definition or suggestions?
P.S. just for future discussions, please don’t use Wikipedia for philosophy or mathematics. It’s a good resource of dates and names but that’s about it. For philosophy you can use textbooks or the Stanford Encyclopedia.
Oh thanks for editing in an example-- that wasn’t there when I wrote my reply, but what did you think of the other Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy links I provided?
That article that you linked (Scientific Pluralism) is an interesting read, but it’s more about the importance of diversity in the scientific community… it doesn’t really address the Demarcation Problem, and it doesn’t discuss peer review or anything as far as I could tell.
Mentioning in passing that “science is social” (which is IMO uncontroversially true in a non-demarcation way, btw) is a few shades away from “any textbook will tell you that science is a particular process of peer review.” I think the Science and Pseudo-Science entry that I linked is more germane.
I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” throughout history, such as Newton, actually considered themselves natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’t make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isn’t — need counter examples). The Royal Academy of Sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon had pointed out that “science requires an intellectual community” (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — standing on the shoulders of giants and all that).
Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’m guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.
Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’t science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.
Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results,“ which is what Elon Musk seems to think.
never mind expensive to publish.
Academic world is very not happy about it either. Academic world hates journals publishing corporations.
See lawsuits against ResearchGate, lawsuits against Sci-Hub and lawsuits against many students and academics that shared scientific papers.
This is why the machine learning community will go through ArXiv for pretty much everything. We value open and honest communication and abhor knowledge being locked down. This is why he views things this way. Because he’s involved in a community that values real science.
ArXiv is free and all modern science should be open. There were reasons for publications in the past, since knowledge dissemination was hard, and they facilitated it. Now the publications just gatekeep.
ArXiv, bioRxiv and cyberleninka.
EDIT: Today I Learned that cyberleninka now has English version of it at cyberleninka.org
Science, real science like Elon is describing, happens when you write stuff down. “Published science” is where the glamor is but that’s, quite obviously, not what Elon was talking about.
So sad to see bitter people lash out at the successful. (projection is also a classic trait)
Science requires peer review, so just keeping it all private isn’t doing much for the scientific community as a whole
Published science requires peer review. Big difference.
“good for the community” isn’t relevant to being science.
Yann LeCun is not a good person, but at least he’s significantly smarter than Elon
I wish he was even smarter so that he would choose not to play chess with a pigeon.
I really don’t mind him making Musk look like an idiot
I know nothing about him, what did he do?
For starters, he’s both French and works for Meta. 😏
But beyond that, from a professional perspective this guy has pioneered so much stuff that we take for granted today; like check scanning and OCR. I mean he is touted as one of the godfathers of ai.
okay. that doesn’t tell me much about why he’s a bad person though.
French
Moeder van God…
He bought a blue checkmark.
There’s private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those aren’t academic science with it’s peer review and publication.
I agree that for it to be science it needs to be reproducible, but obviously publication could happen internally. It just ends up as science that no one else can benefit from, which is contrary to what most scientists actually want.
Musk is just an ass who doesn’t want to share his toys.
The part 1 when musk was like “that’s nothing” to 40 publications per year. Lmao what a fucking dumbass.
Controversial opinion. If you really publish 40 papers per year you are not really a big part of the actual research. Just other people including you because politics and all you do, hopefully, is proofreading them.
They both come across as pompous asses in this one.
If you develop a product in secret, take it to market, and make a fortune off it, far more people will know your name than almost any scientist.
They’ve been feuding for a while so I’d be surprised if they both didn’t try to one-up the other insufferably.
Spot on
Sure, but then you aren’t considered a scientist nor your work science.
If you science in a lab and no one is around to review it did you make a science?
The difference between science and fucking around is writing it down - Adam Savage
The second, implied part, is that writing it down is for OTHER people to learn from.
So, although I hate the eletist gatekeeping language… I think I agree more with the professional scientist than I do the professional clown.
Corollary: If it can’t be reproduced you’ve failed to write down something critical.
well it still goes back to the original arguement that it has to be published and reproducible.
else it would be forgotten and “re-discovered” again at a later stage.
some scientific discoveries of the mordern era were actually discovered by earlier ancient people before mordern science started recording such discoveries.
Does it have to be a new discovery to qualify as “science”?
The rules and conventions to do science today are quite well known and understood by educated people (including of course Helen Mosque) … but any rules have exceptions :
Project Manhattan to produce the atomic bomb was secret science : in many countries military will have secret science development. Pharmaceutical companies will do as well.
People in those projects will not have recognition by the wider public but they will have recognition from their group.The Manhattan Project, being a project with no end game but genocide, really shouldn’t fucking be considered science; not unless you’re gonna crack out and try and tell me that indiscriminate, horrific mass murder deserves to be acknowledged in the same breath as mathematics and medicine.
But science doesn’t care about morality. Maybe you’re thinking about religion?
It’s fair to say that the Manhattan Project wasn’t a “science first” project, but to deny that science was happening is…misguided, let’s say.
“First do no harm” is an axiom of medicine that more of you STEMlords should probably internalize, so maybe stow the condescension. I categorically refuse to accept a tool of mass genocide being counted next to that which would save lives and objectively measure our reality.
yes, but even within those “secret groups”, there are SOP and conventions of intergrity.
Thanks ! … if anyone else wants to know :
SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. Within secret scientific research groups, SOPs are established guidelines or instructions for carrying out routine operations to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance with regulations. These SOPs help maintain integrity, confidentiality, and efficiency within the research group.Secret scientific research groups? Lol. Anyone with a passing familiarity with government work knows about SOPs.
GPT told me it was “Standard Operating Procedure” in the context of the previous comment. That wasn enough for me. I didn’t have to know it applies to your job in an English speaking country.
Heck, I can think of a half dozen other examples of things that aren’t published and/or can’t be reproduced but would be considered science.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it “isn’t science”?
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn’t have any reproducible experiments?
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn’t worthy of publication not science?
I like dunking on Elon as much as the next guy, but like, “only things that are published get the title of ‘science’” seems like a pretty indefensible take to me…
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it “isn’t science”?
I would say it isn’t science yet. I’d say once you published it and other people confirmed he was right, then it would be science. Until then it’s just research. Stating that it must be right just because Albert Einstein said it is disrespectful to the work of a lot of people, not least of whom is Albert Einstein
Do you also assert that my other two examples aren’t science?
If so, why?
If not, then I feel like my point still stands and don’t feel strongly enough to argue semantics over this particular one.
Ultimately this is a fight over the definition of words, and I think 99.9% of people (and the dictionary) would define all my examples as science. If you want to split the hair of saying, “that wasn’t science, it was just scientific research,” have at it, but I’ll just call you a pedant, lol.
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn’t have any reproducible experiments?
Yes. It’s just a hypothesis. If you could reproduce conditions similar to the big bang and see the same thing happen, then it would be science. If we can look at our universe through our instruments and see that the universe could have formed no other way (or at the very least that this way is by far the most plausible), then those experiments would be science. Speculation on its own, however, is not science.
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn’t worthy of publication not science?
I disagree that there could be such research. An anticlimactic conclusion is an important conclusion nonetheless, and no less worthy of publication than an earthshaking one. If people who edit scientific journals disagree they can take it up with me. That team in China that thought they created a superconductor and then found out they hadn’t, found out an extremely effective way to not create a superconductor, and now no one needs to try that exact way again.
Fair enough. I’ll engage, lol.
Would you say that Sir Isaac Newton was a scientist? His research was almost entirely solo and was of limited release until much later.
Stephen Hawking has no published reproducible experiments as far as I’m aware. Is he not a scientist?
Is someone conducting research into a scientific field a scientist, or are they required to publish something before they can claim that title?
Honestly, I find arguments over how words are defined kind of exhausting, so maybe we should just cut to the heart of the matter. None of the definitions of science I can find in any dictionary include the word collaboration. Do you think that that’s a failure of the dictionary? And even if you do, do you think people who are operating under the belief that the dictionary definition is correct are wrong for doing so?
Semantic arguments (which, as you say, do not, ultimately, matter) aside, the point that the Twitter user in the post we’re commenting on was trying to make is that science is best when it’s shared, and that when the results of an experiment are not published, mankind as a whole is the lesser for not knowing them. The poster chose to do this in a somewhat drastic way by redefining “science” to exclude experiments whose results were not shared. As many commenters on this post (including yourself) pointed out, this new definition is unnecessarily strict, and that redefining it as such was not necessary in making the point nor ultimately warranted.
I do, however, agree with the point.
Absolutely agreed with the sentiment. Collaboration is integral to most scientific endeavors. Especially in the modern era. I think we’re in the same page on that point.
But, like, if the person had asserted something like, “grilled cheese is only grilled cheese when you eat it with tomato soup,” and then Elon responded with, “that’s a dumb take, since you can totally have a good grilled cheese without tomato soup,” I don’t think it’s “totally owning him” to list off a ton of reasons why you believe any grilled cheese without tomato soup is an invalid grilled cheese.
Like, we can all agree that grilled cheese is best with tomato soup. That doesn’t change the fact that arbitrarily changing the definition of grilled cheese to be “only when paired with tomato soup,” is actually just kinda dumb.
You mean Sir Isaac Newton, who believed in Alchemy and wrote many things on the subject?
He only became a scientist after his work was peer reviewed.
i agree because what I usually mean when i talk of science is scientific work even if this work doesn’t result in proving that an hypothesis is right so that it becomes a scientific theory.
For me the main criteria is to follow the scientific method.I’d say it’s just research. Science is a group activity by necessity, even if the scientific method is not.
What makes science a group activity by necessity?
Why is one person employing the scientific method to better understand the world around them “not doing science”?
Well, modern science is interdisciplinary, it relies on resource sharing and peer review to reach consensus, which all require many people. In practice, it’s merely research without collaboration if contributions aren’t being made because Science isn’t defined when you apply the scientific method. Science is what we do collectively. So when offshoot research is vetted, it becomes part of the science.
This reminds me of a few people I’ve met who believe themselves to be scientists who claim to do science by themselves, but in reality, it’s numerology nonsense. They’re arguably researching a system they invented but nobody worth their weight would take them seriously.
Why is one person employing the scientific method to better understand the world around them “not doing science”?
Why is “research” not the appropriate label?
So, first and foremost it is important to recognize we are having a definition argument. The crux of our disagreement is over the definition of “science,” specifically as it relates to the act of doing it.
Now, obviously anyone can claim that any word means anything they want. I can claim that the definition of “doing science” is making grilled cheese sandwiches. That doesn’t make it so.
So, as with all arguments over the definition of words, I find appealing to the dictionary a good place to start. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science Which, having read through all the possible definitions, does not seem to carry any connotation of mandatory collaboration.
Now, the dictionary is obviously not the be all and end all. Words have colloquial meanings that are sometimes not captured, or nuance can be lost in transcribing the straight meaning of the word. But I think that the onus is on you to justify why you believe that meaning is lost.
And note, what I’m not arguing is that science isn’t collaborative. Of course it is. There are huge benefits to collaboration, and it is very much the norm. But you have stated an absolute. “Science isn’t science without collaboration.” And that is the crux of our disagreement.
And as to why I wouldn’t just call it “research.” First, I see no reason to. By both my colloquial definition and the one in the dictionary (by my estimation), it is in fact science. But, more importantly, if we take your definition, you are relegating the likes of great scientists like Newton, Cavendish, Mendel, and Killing to the title of mere “researchers.” And I find the idea of calling any of those greats anything short of a scientist absurdly reductive.
I mostly agree with you.
But you have stated an absolute. “Science isn’t science without collaboration.”
I don’t think that’s what I’m saying, at least, that’s not my stance. I’m trying to say that how we formally define Science is one thing. But in practice, Science can only be collaborative because of the complexity of topics, the nuance that needs to be captured in experimental design, and the human error that needs to be avoided. There’s also the connotation that science is the collective body beyond its works that encompasses a community, a culture, a history, a way of thinking, and so on. If you’re “doing science”, then we have the mutual understanding that you’re participating in all of the above, because otherwise, you’re just conducting independent research that could eventually find its way into the whole.
But if it doesn’t ever find its way into the greater body of science, how can we label that as doing science if it hasn’t made an impact besides personal profits? And even if those findings work as advertised in a product, how do we know that the hand-waiving explanation in this black box isn’t true? It does nothing for our understanding. I won’t argue that it works as a colloquial term because a theory could mean whatever possibility popped into someone’s head even if it’s wrong. Strictly speaking, a theory is much more than a plausible thought and I think that analogy carries on.
you are relegating the likes of great scientists like Newton, Cavendish, Mendel, and Killing to the title of mere “researchers.”
That’s a relic of what worked back then but their independent research eventually made it into the science, which is consistent with what I’m saying. Labeling them as researchers takes nothing away from their great achievements. I see no issue with calling an apple a fruit when broadly speaking.
If you aren’t saying that “science isn’t science without collaboration,” can you give an example of something that is science without collaboration? I only ask because you state that’s not what you’re saying, but follow it up with what, to my attempt at reading comprehension, is you just restating the thing you said you aren’t saying.
And I would argue science done in secret can have enormous impacts beyond “simply profits.” The Manhattan Project for example. I think it would be absurd to say what was going on there was anything but science, but there was no collaboration with the greater scientific community or intent to share their findings.
And look, of course you can be a researcher without being a scientist. Historians are researchers but not scientists obviously. But when what you are researching is physics and natural sciences, you are a scientist. That’s what the word literally means. When your definition requires you to eliminate Sir Isaac Newton, maybe it’s your definition that’s wrong.
You say you see no problem with calling an apple a fruit when broadly speaking. Neither do I. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be absolutely delusional to insist that an apple wasn’t actually an apple.
Because you can’t employ the scientific method with only one person.
You need at least 2 to perform peer reviews.
Peer review isn’t typically included in the list of steps to the scientific method. Or, if it is, it’s a coda, not part of the main steps.
Dictionary.com for example lists the commonly accepted steps, and then follows it up with “usually followed by peer review and publication.”
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-method
Note the “usually.”
It’s also worth noting that there is no real “formalized” or “official” scientific method. Just some agreed upon commonalities. Any dozen science books will give you a dozen different graphs of the steps, and no two will be the same.
How about all the research that goes into microchips in modern computers? All extremely secretive. Using published science only, it would be impossible to create today’s PC or phone
Another great example.
I’d say someone should get Musk some burn cream, but he can afford to get it himself.
I’ve got some Icy Hot I could maybe give him. I don’t use it.
also some OC spray for his face.
