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!
Cargo cult science (1974)
91–100 of 164 posts
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#92Sabine 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.
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#93Earlier 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!
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)
#94Earlier 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…
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#95Earlier 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?
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#96Earlier 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...
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#97Earlier 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…
Re: Cargo cult science (1974)
#98Sabine 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
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)
#99Earlier 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?
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)
#100Earlier 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?
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.