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Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

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Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#41

Post by Retric »

ThomPete wrote: post #33
Retric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really understand a field without digging deep. A great example is how much students are willing to trust surveys before and after they do a large one. Another is mice running mazes, the numbers may look nice in theory, but they can hide a lot of problems.

I totally agree but the question is what constitutes a field. I once read about a whole series of areas where solutions to issues in one field happened from understanding from understanding another field. Unfortunately ver few people span over multiple fields and can call themselves experts. So the questions is whether we could spread out the expertise to more in between studies and letting go of literature as the on…

Honestly, University's or other places where people in diverse fields collaborate seem like the solution to this problem. Because, there are a lot of fields out there and 2^N sucks, but conversations take less effort than a deep dive. Bell labs comes to mind as a private sector version of this.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#42

Post by tormeh »

entee wrote: post #39

Speaking from the perspective of life science, I think the idea of the "article" and "review" as two separate complimentary parts of constructing knowledge actually makes a lot of sense. An individual article is an argument, with evidence for how some process works. A review looks at all the papers, getting the more global view of "knowledge" the OP seems to want. Perhaps in the spirit of the article we should have r…

Well, now Wikipedia is the review. Depending on the field, you may just do all the real research on Wikipedia and then add in citations in your paper to look professional.

How about a Wikipedia with original research? "Sciencepedia"? Each article gets a section for each editor. If you want to contribute you can either submit a pull request to an editor you view favourably or you can write your own section. Sections can be voted up or down.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#44

Post by ThomPete »

Retric wrote: post #41
ThomPete wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree but the question is what constitutes a field. I once read about a whole series of areas where solutions to issues in one field happened from understanding from understanding another field. Unfortunately ver few people span over multiple fields and can call themselves experts. So the questions is whether we could spread out the expertise to more in between studies and letting go of literature as the on…

Honestly, University's or other places where people in diverse fields collaborate seem like the solution to this problem. Because, there are a lot of fields out there and 2^N sucks, but conversations take less effort than a deep dive. Bell labs comes to mind as a private sector version of this.

The problem is that this collaboration does not happen because people are mostly "trapped" within their own field. My point is simply to remove the idea of literature as the container of knowledge as if knowledge is like literature (i.e. once written saved as a piece of knowledge)

Or put another way.

Instead of modeling knowledge after the way our brain best deal with structure we should leave the structuring to the machines and start approaching it more like an organism that can be explored. I think we are bound to see something along those lines soon.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#45

Post by ThomPete »

dluan wrote: post #40
ThomPete wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's in fact very true and there is a very good reason what that is the case. Most expert know more and more about less and less because in order to understand something you need to dig ever deeper to understand the specifics. What is needs is expert generalists that are able to understand several fields well enough to see where knowledge from one area can lead to understanding in others and vice versa.

Expert generalists are precisely the thing that's missing, especially with how younger scientists are trained. It's harder to fund an expert generalist. Freeman Dyson is a great example because at 89 he published the solution to the prisoner's dilemma, decades later than the original theoretical physics work.

Exactly!

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#46

Post by dalke »

return0 wrote: post #27
dalke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was Einstein's single idea that he worked on? The photoelectric effect, for which he won the Nobel prize, or special and general relativity? Or statistical mechanics like Bose-Einstein statistics? Because it seems to me like he worked on many ideas during his life.

the nature of spacetime and gravitation seem to have followed him to his death.

Certainly. But it was not the only idea he worked on, as I commented.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I interpret "Most of the great scientists worked on a single idea their entire life ..." as working on a single idea, to the exclusion of others.

Otherwise the statement would be "Most of the great scientists worked on an idea their entire life"

FWIW, using the list from http://listverse.com/2009/02/24/top-10-most-influential-scie... :

Marie Curie: received Nobel Prizes in Physics for her work in radiation and in Chemistry for her work in radium and polonium. If the idea here is "radiation" then Einstein's idea was "physics" and Darwin's was "biology"

Alan Turing: died entirely too young. Best known for early work in computers. Then switched to mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis.

Niels Bohr: perhaps "nature of the atom" or "quantum mechanics"

Max Planck: Black-body radiation and special relativity

Charles Darwin: evolution (not really a small idea)

Leonardo da Vinci: not applicable

Galileo Galilei: astronomy (I can't think of a smaller "idea" for his body of work)

Nikola Tesla: umm, "electricity"?

Albert Einstein: see above

Isaac Newton: optics, gravitation, physics .. and then the Royal Mint, counterfeiting, and a whole lot of alchemy.

It's hard to conclude that these people worked on a single "idea", though some worked mostly in a single field.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#47

Post by jszymborski »

tormeh wrote: post #42
entee wrote: post #39

Speaking from the perspective of life science, I think the idea of the "article" and "review" as two separate complimentary parts of constructing knowledge actually makes a lot of sense. An individual article is an argument, with evidence for how some process works. A review looks at all the papers, getting the more global view of "knowledge" the OP seems to want. Perhaps in the spirit of the article we should have r…

Well, now Wikipedia is the review. Depending on the field, you may just do all the real research on Wikipedia and then add in citations in your paper to look professional. How about a Wikipedia with original research? "Sciencepedia"? Each article gets a section for each editor. If you want to contribute you can either submit a pull request to an editor you view favourably or you can write your own section. Sections c…

Wikipedia is not the review, not in the life sciences sense of the word.

A review, despite "reviewing" the literature, offers a unique perspective, and does have an argument, although one that is based solely on the aggregation of existing evidence and literature.

Wikipedia just describes parts of the field, reviews offer insight and perspective.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#48

Post by dalke »

jordigh wrote: post #38
dalke wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be a bit more concrete as I am having a difficult time trying to understand how this would work? To start with, if there is no activity in the bug tracker, doesn't that indicate success in the paper, because it contained no problems? Or should I put in a few silly errors (misplaced commas, typos in the citation list, etc.) in order to increase the bug activity? You suggest that programming prestige is based…

Every paper has problems. Yes, even typos should be mentioned. Why not? They might trip up someone. Perhaps instead of structuring the whole thing around papers, it should be something like Wikipedia and editing articles in it.

I still don't see a concrete explanation of how this would work. Instead, I see you tossing off possible solutions that don't pass even a basic test of feasibility.

Is bug tracker activity a sign of a good paper? Or a poor paper?

The use-case I objected to, from the original article, is:

> A dependency graph would tell us, at a click, which of the pillars of scientific theory are truly load-bearing. And it would tell us, at a click, which other ideas are likely to get swept away with the rubble of a particular theory. An academic publisher worth their salt would, for instance, not only be able to flag articles that have been retracted—that this is not currently standard practice is, again, inexcusable—but would be able to flag articles that depend in some meaningful way on the results of retracted work.

How would structuring it "something like Wikipedia" make this use-case more feasible? It seems instead like you are talking about a completely different topic.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#49

Post by tehchromic »

I see his point. What's true of scientific literature is true of all literature. But the solution doesn't match the ambition of the article's title. Charts and graphs, and all the high tech tools available are certainly potentially beneficial, but what's needed is a new product and center of culture, and that's a function of ethics. Those are always defined in terms of the challenge of their day. But tools with out ethics are dangerous indeed.

Re: Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”

#50

Post by kriro »

The two things that are most ridiculous about science in this day and age (imo, I work in the field)

1) Tons of papers get published without the underlying data. Why is there no easy system in place where I have to upload all data from experiments etc. and if the data isn't there to be verified -> questionable research at best (or in the current framework of science autoreject)

2) Paywalls and the entire publishing system. Most science is state funded in some way, shape or form and as such it should be available for free for all citizens.

I think publish and improve is an ok model but there's some issues like the author says it's pretty strange how the whole redacting a paper system works. It's also nontrivial to say "well I was wrong in my paper X as shown in papers Y and Z" (some sort of HTTP redirect to X/Z would be in order)

Maybe I'm just not aware of it but it would also be interesting to have a huge Dung-style argumentation system of papers for fields (X attacks Y, Z defends Y etc.). Might be a neat project if it doesn't exist.

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