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Cargo cult science (1974)

calteches.library.caltech.edu

91–100 of 164 posts

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#91

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!

What's wrong with scientist as a career?

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#92
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…

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.

She’s not the only or first one to criticize contemporary physics funding, and the focus on mathematical beauty to guide new theories. String Theory received a lot of blowback for how much time it sucked up without empirical results because the math was very appealing. Funding is finite, and so are careers.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#93
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Placing an upper limit on the half life means that zero is within the reported bounds, so they are considering the possibility.

Whether to fund difficult research, when it's reasonable to give up, and when it escapes beyond reasonable definitions of science, are separate questions. Physics is wrestling with these questions in a number of areas, such as the search for an empirically testable theory that reconciles quantum mechanics and gravity.

The life sciences have no equivalent. Precision measurement is not their bag, which is OK. Physics is the first to arrive at such a roadblock. Maybe the search for proofs of some famous math conjectures is an analogy to draw guidance from.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#94
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Counterpoint: there are major unresolved puzzles in symplectic geometry, and every indication is that they touch on deep physics. It could easily take research mathematicians fifty more years to build a clear picture of what's going on.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Honesty and playing by the rules is often the domain of the new, shiny-eyed initiates. Unfortunately, not having integrity is often easier for most people.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#96
post #79
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

idk the amount of experiments / work vying for funding is far bigger than what can be funded. and if a big chunk of the funds is allocated to building bigger accelerators then a lot of experiments or other work might not get funded. im not saying its better to fund other projects over the next big accelerator or dark matter detector, but i dont think its right to say there is nothing else to do besides that...

There's other physics to do, but it's not fundamental physics. The science questions for which we need accelerators can't be answered any other way.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#97
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

The state of physics these days is we have 100 physicists of Einstein's calibre alive right now, but not enough experimental data for them to make any headway on fundamental questions. For all we know, someone already published the theory of everything, but because there was no way to test it, it got ignored completely.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#98
post #45
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…

I don't see what the problem with Sabine's analysis is? I thought it was great. Shouldn't particle physicists have more expectations of what they expect to find rather than we want to find X and we are going to search the entire energy frontier to find it. The problem is that the energy frontier is limitless so the ROI could be extremely poor unless we had a good idea of what we expect

If we knew what to expect, it would be engineering not science. The fact is, we have tried having expectations, most notably supersymmetry, and those haven't turned out very well because we are literally venturing into the unknown. Part of the fun is that sometimes a wild theory works out (GR, Higgs) and sometimes it doesn't.

I think if we push the energy frontier one more time, there's no real reason to expect us to find anything -- but there's also no reason for us not to find anything.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Lol not trying to be snarky but if you think academics push out papers for purely monetary reasons then I suspect you are very far from academia in your day to day life. Of course PIs have goals besides money! If their main goal was ever money they're an idiot for sticking to the university lab, and it's not like science profs didn't have other career opportunities available.

That doesn't change the fact that the most common non-monetary goal of academics is in fact pretty well aligned with behaviors such as: publishing very frequently/flag planting, farming citations on old publications, exaggerating work in presentations and media press releases, etc. Not all of these behaviors are inherently bad but they easily can be and too often are taken to an extreme.

Said goal is of course intellectual credit, or from a more cynical lense pure ego stroking. And it is indeed a rampant non-monetary incentive in academia.

Anyway, I don't see the problem with someone who has recently pursued a PhD or beyond in academic science ripping on "career scientists". This is the sort of (mostly) informed criticism that science should welcome. Though some are overly negative, they usually still have relevant insights into problems in their field, and it is silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That is markedly different from someone that frequently criticizes scientists from the outside while lacking any actual insight into the relevant technical complications, especially if that person is casting a wide net in what they criticize.

The goal of a lot of modern scientific criticism is to further the conversation amongst those presently in the field, and help those adjacent to the field make more informed decisions - including prospective/very early career trainees, potential interdisciplinary collaborators, and anyone that has a role in directing possibly relevant funding opportunities. If criticisms get co-opted by other individuals for irrelevant goals that is unfortunate but it does not make the criticism invalid.

It's also somewhat difficult in the social media age to avoid commentary that gains steam in the scientific community from reaching broader public exposure, which indeed opens it to misinterpretation. But the alternative of walled off information a la the old school journal publication system is obviously problematic for other reasons.

That is a long winded way of saying that I think some amount of harsh publicly viewable criticism is sorely needed by a number of scientific fields right now, including my own (very much not physics). The fact that criticisms which from what I can gather where initially internally directed eventually gained such external exposure tells me that the message resonated with many scientists, even if just earlier career ones. Whether this person has started to profiteer on their cynicism is tangential to the validity of the original core message IMO.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>So does a doctor just care how many prescriptions they make, or a police person about how many people they arrest?

Someone hasn't heard of ticket quotas before have they? Or the pharmaceutical companies that were effectively buying off doctors for years by expensive trips based on their ability to prescribe the drugs they were selling. We've had to add regulations to these above two 'fields' to prevent exactly this from happening, and in many places it still does.

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