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Cargo cult science (1974)

calteches.library.caltech.edu

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Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#61

Post by hinkley »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #60
hinkley wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or die".

I don’t get that complaint. It’s like hearing a software engineer complaining “write code or get fired”, yeah, well, that’s your literal job?

Have you been reading the threads about the reproducibility crisis that pop up here regularly? Essentially some people worry we have more people who need to write papers than we can sustain with our current research horizon, and people are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic.

As Feynman used to say, "The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#62

Post by LudwigNagasena »

hinkley wrote: post #61
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get that complaint. It’s like hearing a software engineer complaining “write code or get fired”, yeah, well, that’s your literal job?

Have you been reading the threads about the reproducibility crisis that pop up here regularly? Essentially some people worry we have more people who need to write papers than we can sustain with our current research horizon, and people are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic. As Feynman used to say, "The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."

To all reproducibility problems I say “publish more”. Do you plan to do a study? Register it and publish your methodology before data collection. Have you collected data? Publish it. Have you finished the study? Believe it or not, publish it.

Do you want to do a 20 year long study on a particle collider built specifically for you right after finishing your PhD? Well, sorry, you have to build your reputation so that society sees that you are not one of those people who “are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic”.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#63

Post by dang »

Related:

Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 - March 2021 (69 comments)

Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 - Sept 2019 (33 comments)

Cargo cult data science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 - Aug 2017 (40 comments)

Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 - Dec 2016 (37 comments)

Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 - May 2016 (38 comments)

Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 - Oct 2013 (62 comments)

Feynman's Cargo Cult Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571 - Aug 2010 (25 comments)

Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (.PDF) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150 - Dec 2009 (4 comments)

Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140 - July 2009 (17 comments)

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#65

Post by hinkley »

akiselev wrote: post #57
hinkley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately…

> The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bos…

Also not a physicist, but I think the distinction being made here is that Higgs et al explained existing phenomenon that did not make sense within the existing theory, and oh by the way if we're correct we've also created a hole in the standard model where a particle exists with certain properties that were a bit nebulous.

For instance special relativity explains gravitational lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be discovered, but also explained other problems. The theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past to the present and the present to the future:

This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory that require to be sure that this is 'true' instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or giant particle accelerators.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#66

Post by hinkley »

Tostino wrote: post #56
hinkley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately…

> The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.

Higgs et al didn't just predict the boson though, right? His team explained other properties of particle physics and their model also predicted a particle.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#67

Post by hinkley »

college_physics wrote: post #41
hinkley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately…

> That's 40 years. Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries and extrapolates a judgement. (1) it took more than that from the first gravitational wave detector to an actual discovery

I'm going to start repeating myself in separate replies here.

Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be plausible based on data already at hand and data they could collect.

Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of opportunity for some other theory to explain the same phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences that let us do new things like build Foundation power supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#68

Post by vkou »

precompute wrote: post #50
willis936 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serial contrarian jumps on table and shouts. More at 11. A telltale sign of a crank is attacking career scientists, which is her brand. What insight is she offering? Destroying is easy, creating is hard. Lies spread faster than truth. In general she is a force of confusion rather than enlightenment. It's too bad because she seems capable, if only she'd follow through rather than chase headlines.

A "Career Scientist" is very, very bad news!

A career contrarian can be even worse. A career scientist actually needs to justify their output, to their peers and the people signing the cheques.

And if not career scientists, who exactly do you think should be making a living... Doing research?

Undergrads? The admins? The timecube guy? Nobody?

There's a lot of problems with science as it's done today, but that snipe is a banal, tribalistic take that is all-too-common.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#69

Post by User23 »

hinkley wrote: post #18

Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy le…

Feynman mentions a similar point in QED when he talks about the "science" of proton decay. The proton hasn't had the courtesy to actually decay in an experiment, so all they do is keep publishing increasingly high lower bounds on the proton's half-life.

It's fascinating that someone can make a career out of a phenomenon not being observed.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#70

Post by marcosdumay »

lisper wrote: post #52
marcosdumay wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't Oh, yeah, engineering and all the other practices are rooted on this. Science is not.

Science may not be "rooted" in this, but it is nonetheless still a pretty good bet that a scientific expert knows things that non-experts don't.

Well, if he works assuming he knows those things, he will fail in doing science.

(Unless by those things you mean the scientific method, because scientists usually practice that one.)

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