Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

magazine.jhsph.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 79 posts

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#31

Post by mattmanser »

jamesrcole wrote: post #27
mattmanser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got it backwards. It's not like a bunch of philosophers sat round and came up with the scientific method and until they did that there was no science. Scientists experimented and tried to justify their conclusions (sometimes badly or incorrectly), which lead to the philosophy of science. Karl Popper was a recent philosopher, not a forming giant of science, he rationalized the scientific method with falsifiabil…

I'm a big fan of science, and I think a lot of philosophy is dubious, but what you're saying doesn't sound right to me. Didn't Francis Bacon have a lot to do with the initial codification of the ideas behind the practice of science?

That was when it started to split. Also, don't forget he was born after what is traditionally regarded as the start of the scientific revolution. Copernicus was already dead when he was born. 80 years after Revolutions, Francis Bacon published his theory.

I'm not saying his philosophy wasn't a major contributor, but he was around at the time Philosophy and Science were splitting up and he formalized what the scientists were already starting to do.

Just in case anyone doesn't know, this all happened 400 years ago. That was the beginning of the end of philosophy having any influence on Science.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#32

Post by rquantz »

jmmcd wrote: post #7

> We need big thinkers We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs for all these PhDs. > The success of science and technology will always lead to new ethical dilemmas. How do you spot them and try to work with society before they become problems? A better appreciation of ethics is likely to address what has become an epidemic of retractions in the scientific literature. All the recent retra…

> We need big thinkers We need some, but there aren't anywhere near enough big-thinking jobs for all these PhDs.

Yeah, man, jobs! It's all about jobs! Jobs jobs jobs! Steve Jobs! Jobs jobs!

How about this? The world needs big thinkers in ways other than their capacity as economic actors. Einstein worked at a patent office. The work he did there (for the patent office) was not his primary contribution to the world at that time.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#33

Post by jamesrcole »

lmm wrote: post #28
jamesrcole wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that all important innovations are incremental. Historically that is clearly not the case.

Not at all clear to me. Examples?

Incremental innovations of the sort you are talking about means extending some pre-existing framework. There are obvious examples of important developments that involved developing different frameworks, which took many years to fully justify with evidence. The heliocentric view of the solar system, Newtonian physics, natural selection, relativity...

EDIT: I would also argue that developments like the printing press and the world wide web would have been difficult to justify as incremental extensions of existing work.

I'm not saying these developments came from nowhere, nor that they didn't build on previous work. I'm specifically arguing against the idea that it's fruitful to just focus on work that would be seen as incremental improvements on existing work.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#34

Post by roymurdock »

lmm wrote: post #28
jamesrcole wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that all important innovations are incremental. Historically that is clearly not the case.

Not at all clear to me. Examples?

There's a popular paradigm shift theory that posits that we tend to adopt frameworks that explain the world, then work incrementally within those frameworks until they cease to make as much sense/have as much explanatory power as they once did.

Then someone (Newton, Darwin, Einstein) comes along and assembles a new framework based on new observations/theories that do a better job of explaining things. Eg the switch from creationism to evolution, or from newtonian physics to relativity.

Here are some more examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Examples_of_par...

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#35

Post by foldr »

mattmanser wrote: post #11
vacri wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy is also responsible for the scientific method and things like the null hypothesis. There's a strong tendency for 'hard science' folks to look down their noses at philosophy, but the truth is that the fundamentals of their research is squarely due to the philosophy. Philosophy is responsible for scientists developing the methods of rigorous observation. Source: I once looked down my nose at philosophy, then…

You've got it backwards. It's not like a bunch of philosophers sat round and came up with the scientific method and until they did that there was no science. Scientists experimented and tried to justify their conclusions (sometimes badly or incorrectly), which lead to the philosophy of science. Karl Popper was a recent philosopher, not a forming giant of science, he rationalized the scientific method with falsifiabil…

>Ultimately present day philosophy, last I looked and certainly since Wittgenstein, is all about playing with word meaning and almost upfront about it, but pg argues in reality it always was like that.

Have you read any present day philosophy? That's at best a description of some of the worst tendencies of analytic philosophy, which peaked in the 40-50s. (Many philosophers these days identify as "analytic" in the broad sense of "not continental", but that is more to do with sociology than anything else.)

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#36

Post by Fede_V »

lmm wrote: post #21
emanuelev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite agree that the post PhD job market is kind of challenging as there are few companies tackling big questions. However, if you forget the job market, the argument the guy is making is absolutely spot on. There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast". Although one might argue that it actually makes sense (career-wise or whatever), it is intrinsic in such a system to penalise pursuing bi…

> There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast". With an increasing number of researchers isn't that a great thing? If you publish your little incremental innovations then everyone can build on them. If you try to build your giant all-encompassing framework before you publish any of it, you'll have to do it all yourself (if it even amounts to anything).

It would be if what got published were plenty of incremental papers. That's the case in certain fields (deep learning comes to mind) - but in other fields, such as the life sciences, you instead get a bunch of results that claim to be groundbreaking and novel - but in practice end up being very difficult to reproduce (like the STAP controversy).

Why? Because small incremental improvements cannot get published in high impact journals, and high impact journals are the currency to scientific prestige/grants/tenure.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#37

Post by Fede_V »

jamesrcole wrote: post #25
Fede_V wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, pretty much exactly this. In the abstract, I fully support teaching science PhDs more about Quine, Russell, Popper, Carnap - they are all great thinkers who had very intelligent ideas. In practice, PhDs at top tier institutions are far too concerned with the day to day rat race that the history of ideas is not likely to be a serious priority. As long as the competition for stable positions will remain so fierce…

> In practice, ... You're arguing that what happens to be the case now is how it should be. Do you think this is the best way for it to be, and if so, why?

Absolutely no. However, as the parent comment pointed out, the root problem is the broken incentives - the lack of philosophical sophistication of scientists is at best a 3rd order term.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#38

Post by bthallplz »

I find it odd that one's exposure to and encouraging of bigger-thinking is somewhat reserved until the PhD level and that, after a long while of not exposing or encouraging such, our systems had ever expected people to suddenly think big once at the PhD level.

It may be more productive to have the expectation of bigger-thinking introduced earlier and let that expectation be realized more fully at the PhD level.

Re: Put the “Ph” Back in PhD

#40

Post by lmm »

roymurdock wrote: post #34
lmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all clear to me. Examples?

There's a popular paradigm shift theory that posits that we tend to adopt frameworks that explain the world, then work incrementally within those frameworks until they cease to make as much sense/have as much explanatory power as they once did. Then someone (Newton, Darwin, Einstein) comes along and assembles a new framework based on new observations/theories that do a better job of explaining things. Eg the switch f…

The switch to relativity seemed pretty incremental to me. Einstein's special relativity work builds hugely on that of Lorentz published one year before.
Post reply on HN