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Cargo cult science (1974)

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Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#131

Post by college_physics »

hinkley wrote: post #67
college_physics wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 beca…

Physics is not scifi. As the good professor might say, its stranger and always more surprising than the bizarre combinatorial pseudoscience our brains might concoct in the absence of experimental guard rails.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#132

Post by staunton »

caddemon wrote: post #106
staunton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more time teaching prior biology results than they do having students engage with what it means to be a scientist, in the limited time that they teach at all. "Students" are then sorted into a lab where they learn the specific scientific cookbook of the subfield an…

> a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too

Why? The way to learn a lot of prior knowledge is focused study and good teaching. Philosophy has little to do with it. I agree that it would make sense having more specialized lab workers (which definitely is a trade and should be learned while doing like one) assisting scientists whose education must be broader.

Another thing concerning the philosophy is that the current environment and competition for resources at research institutions rather discourages good scientific practice. E.g., it encourages overselling results while never attempting to reproduce them. This is getting better in my opinion, as e.g. in the open science initiative. However, I find it very hard to agrue that teaching more philosophy of science would do much good here. It's a problem of incentives.

Another question is whether science would actually progress faster (or in some other way better) if the philosophical ideals were followed more closely. I don't see how the situation in bio labs that you describe would benefit from all PhD students having heared three lectures on philosophy of science. The occasions where the philosophy actually informs decisions in the lab are very rare (though sometimes very important) and there seem to be enough people who know these things well enough for their purposes when this knowledge benefits the lab. When leaving academia, few students will have a chance to apply these concepts and most at least know that scientific methodology is a thing and will learn it if actually needed for what they do. Furthermore, most fields have their own somewhat incompatible folklore methodologies that do not easily generalize to unrelated problems.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#133

Post by college_physics »

908B64B197 wrote: post #87
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…

Ha ha, yes this is harder to copy structure is what I was alluding to. But I think, that too, is a conventional reading that doesnt really explain the disparity between regions.

Great universities, massive amounts of capital, reckless, lemming stylr investment behavior etc. exists in many places.

Imho the key difference is a deep seated and essentially naive american belief in technology as a "force for good". This helps coordinate society and over time creates the conditions for significant breakthroughs.

That naivete is in older parts of the world matched instead with lots of cynicism. They have seen waves upon waves of tech simply facilitate the next calamity.

That cynical view is closer to the truth as we can see in how digital tech has become increasingly a force for evil.

But the tragedy with tech is that "somebody will do it". You just hope it is eventually going to be shaped by societies that can control it and eliminate its worst implications

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#134

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

mwbajor wrote: post #121

"When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease." What about dark matter?

Astrophysicists are extremely motivated to find alternatives to dark matter.

The "problem" is that the evidence for the existence of dark matter, what fraction of the universe it makes up, where it is, and some of its general properties (e.g., temperature) come from many different directions, and they point to the same conclusions.

Dark matter is a relatively simple postulate that explains a large number of disparate observations, from the relative abundances of different atomic elements to the amount of gravitational lensing in distant galaxy clusters.

It's not that astrophysicists are straining to make everything fit into the dark matter paradigm. It's that everything seems to fit into the paradigm very naturally. That's what overcomes the queasiness over dark matter having never been directly observed in a lab.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#135

Post by Weneedlead »

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…

This is the exact problem with modern science.

Yes, you really should go and look back at that horn and thoroughly recheck if it really is what it seemed like to people several decades ago.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#136

Post by bjornsing »

caddemon wrote: post #106
staunton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more time teaching prior biology results than they do having students engage with what it means to be a scientist, in the limited time that they teach at all. "Students" are then sorted into a lab where they learn the specific scientific cookbook of the subfield an…

> Student experiences of course vary widely, and even for those that do the menial slog version of a bio PhD, the attitude surrounding it varies. Some seem to be happy for the guidance when their advisor is like this while others resent the lack of intellectual freedom.

This section I think captures the problem well: most good (future) scientists will recent the lack of intellectual freedom, while the less capable will appreciate the guidance. This mechanism pushes academia more and more towards mediocre Cargo Cult Science, is my impression.

And I think we’re seeing the same theme playing out all through society. It’s convenient for the conformists at the top that need cheap compliant laborers, and it’s good for the (many) mediocre conventional-minded that enjoy it. But it’s not good for results.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#137

Post by sidlls »

dougSF70 wrote: post #103
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…

As a counter point to this, by all accounts Millikan had worked out the charge on an electron but had not validated it by experiemnt. Knowing what thw result should be, he then designed an experiment to arri ve at this result. Not very scientific at all.

Hypothesis: the charge on an electron is X, as predicted by Y. Experiment: observe the charge on an electron. The experiment could have shown the charge to be other than X: in which case (assuming repeated experiments confirmed it) the hypothesis was wrong and a new one would have been needed. "Y" wasn't invented out of nothing: it was built on other observations, hypotheses, and theories. Seems pretty scientific to me, but I'm biased (since I'm a physicist).

I think at some point we (physicists) are just going to have to realize we're at the point where the models we have maybe should be taken for what they are (incomplete), and re-examine the data and construct new hypotheses to design experiments for. I'm certainly not the physicist to do that (I haven't been practicing for almost 15 years now, and even when I was I was not the Einstein caliber physicist to do it), but there will be someone or a group who do that. I hope soon, as I'd like to see it!

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#138

Post by Loquebantur »

staunton wrote: post #84
Loquebantur wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

If science had no methodology, it would hardly be able to produce results?

Of course it has and people reading "some Popper" in high school, evidently without understanding any of it, exemplifies my point. (By the way, evolution does not mean constant change of "everything", but gradual adaptation with most stuff staying constant)

The scientific method is a learning algorithm designed to discern truth. Claiming that was "of very limited use in most jobs" shows all kinds of things, it doesn't say anything about its obviously paramount importance.

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#139

Post by staunton »

Loquebantur wrote: post #138
staunton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

If science had no methodology, it would hardly be able to produce results? Of course it has and people reading "some Popper" in high school, evidently without understanding any of it, exemplifies my point. (By the way, evolution does not mean constant change of "everything", but gradual adaptation with most stuff staying constant) The scientific method is a learning algorithm designed to discern truth. Claiming that…

All that your comment says is that you disagree and think I'm stupid. Care to offer any object level arguments? For example, do you think making each university student take three lectures of philosophy of science would be better than the current system? What would it achieve and why do you think that? Did you learn something from reading and understanding Popper that you didn't know previously and that helped you in doing something you cared about?

Re: Cargo cult science (1974)

#140

Post by atleastoptimal »

low_tech_love wrote: post #127
atleastoptimal wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for both points, I’ll think about them. However, you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods. Just because education ”can” be useful, that doesn’t mean it ”is” useful. I wish every person in the world could have access to transformative education, but the truth of the matter is that almost no teacher out there can actually do that; most are just very well-intend…

Your comment only seemed to be about the current uselessness of education as a value-add for smart kids. You never mentioned the benefit it offered to average or less intelligent kids. Do you believe that their needs aren't being addressed either?

> you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods.

Not sure how my comment confirmed that. All I pointed out is the fact that your gripe with education seemed mostly focused on the failure to help smart kids, ignoring whether or not if helping other kids could be evidence for or against the effectiveness of the education system in the western world. With regards to that I have a question for you. Is the percentage of kids in any age cohort you consider "smart" a product of their educational environment, or is the proportion of smart kids to normal kids the same no matter what methods, within the realm of methods readily available to educators nowadays, we use?

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