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Cargo cult science (1974)

calteches.library.caltech.edu

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Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#81

Post by analog31 »

User23 wrote: post #69
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.

Folks talk about the lack of support for things like replication studies and the publication of negative results in the life sciences, as contributing to the widely proclaimed replication crisis.

Establishing a solid negative result that rules out hypotheses is worthwhile if unglamorous.

Citing an upper bound on the half-life is all that can be credibly reported. It's how you put an error bar on something that's non-negative but consistent with zero.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#83

Post by staunton »

hinkley wrote: post #65
akiselev wrote: post #57

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. 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 draggin…

> special relativity explains gravitational lensing

You mean general relativity

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#84

Post by staunton »

Loquebantur wrote: post #73
bjornsing wrote: post #4

I find myself thinking of this speech more and more often. It seems to apply to more and more of society, as I see it. The scariest versions I’ve personally come across is Cargo Cult Medicine and Cargo Cult Courts…

The central problem is the methodology of science not being taught explicitly anywhere. It should be part of the school curriculum, instead a scientism-version is part of folklore.

There isn't even such a thing as "the methodology of science". People disagree about it and it is constantly evolving. Who should write that curriculum?

Sure, there's a lot of common ground that could be taught (and it is taught in some places, we read some Popper in high school). But it's also very abstract, difficult to teach without extensive examples and of very limited use in most jobs. Hardly "the central problem".

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#85

Post by precompute »

vkou wrote: post #68
precompute wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-co…

That would've been a great reply had the title of the main post not been "Cargo Cult Science".

For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute / uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table... not the point here. One can still have integrity). The career scientist couldn't care less about being right, only about how many citations he's gonna get and whether anyone's going to discover any flaws in his paper.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#86

Post by atleastoptimal »

smogcutter wrote: post #72
low_tech_love wrote: post #71

His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily like when I abandoned the belief in god many years ago. There is that nagging feeling I can’t shake that, no matter how I look at it, I can’t negate the null hypothesis that organized education is basically useless . Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think educational institutions shouldn’t exist…

This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.

Yeah, he seems to be making it a matter of "well the smart people, the ones who really matter, don't need education, so all the sub 99th percentile students don't really matter because the smart ones aren't benefitting"

So teaching kids to read, understand logical inference, showing them different parts of the world and how to look at it, doesn't matter because the wonderful gifted kids would have happened upon those insights anyway? It seems pretty reductive to assume the point of education is just to foster a small cadre of geniuses. Does every other non-gifted kid not deserve to be helped by education because they couldn't have educated themselves?

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#87

Post by 908B64B197 »

college_physics wrote: post #11

Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.

> copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet

If only they did.

Entrepreneurship, Great Universities, celebration of failures (having 2 failed startups is seen as a badge of honor to VCs) and privately administered capital (low tax rate!) willing to take risk. These are the elements vital to any potential foreign Silicon Valley competitors and they only exist here in America.

All of the "Silicon Valley of X" initiatives I've seen were either led by bureaucrats with no ties to the valley or by who had little to no understanding of these fundamental traits. It was beanbag chairs and people writing JS on MacBooks (for 1/3 of what people who actually came to the valley made).

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#88

Post by BizarroLand »

lanza wrote: post #59
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…

Eh, your analogy isn't apt. The problem in physics is that the space of possible theories has been searched so exhaustively that what these physicists are doing is just about the only choice. To make your analogy close to physics -- imagine you found a unicorn horn and can tell from the biological makeup that it is indeed a horn grown from some sort of horse-like mammal. If you searched 99.9999% of the earth for anim…

> The problem in physics is that the space of possible theories has been searched so exhaustively that what these physicists are doing is just about the only choice.

Can't say I agree with that one. I think we're capping out on the physics that Einstein and ilk laid out for us to explore. This is an ideal time in the next 20-40 years for a new revolutionary genius to figure out the next big thing.

I'm not going to make any sci-fi prognostications but I have a feeling like there's a new threshold to cross coming up, one of those unknown unknowns that we'll suddenly figure out thanks to a flash of insight by the right person being in the right place at the right time kind of things.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#89

Post by cycomanic »

precompute wrote: post #85
vkou wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-co…

That would've been a great reply had the title of the main post not been "Cargo Cult Science". For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute / uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table... not the point here. One can still have integrity). The career scientist couldn't care less about being right, only about how many citations he's gonna get a…

Why? Do you believe the same is true for other occupations as well? So does a doctor just care how many prescriptions they make, or a police person about how many people they arrest? Have you considered that people aspire to other goals except money, despite they being paid for it?

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#90

Post by User23 »

analog31 wrote: post #81
User23 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Folks talk about the lack of support for things like replication studies and the publication of negative results in the life sciences, as contributing to the widely proclaimed replication crisis. Establishing a solid negative result that rules out hypotheses is worthwhile if unglamorous. Citing an upper bound on the half-life is all that can be credibly reported. It's how you put an error bar on something that's non-…

Sure, but when an event supposedly happens on average less frequently than once every 10^32 years maybe it’s time to consider the possibility that the sought phenomenon never occurs. At least that appeared to me to be what Feynman was getting at.

The life sciences equivalent would be a study of unicorn sightings. None so far, but they could be out there so please fund my research!

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