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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”

#71

Post by jonlucc »

anifow wrote: post #68

It seems the problem is that the author is trying to create a representation of knowledge, whereas research papers are more of a logging of work done. His approach may be a perfect fit for an experiment in meta-research. You could run periodic reviews of articles released in specific topical areas and create summaries of the findings. Any time those findings change, its a git commit, and you can track this change ove…

This sounds like an update to the format of textbooks. They sort of work like this already: as new versions come out, they include the latest revisions in the field. On the other hand, they also serve their publishers by putting out new versions with little or no improvement to continue earning money.

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

#72

Post by jonlucc »

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…

Another thing that complicates this in the life sciences is that techniques aren't standard. If I use 8 month old rats and draw blood in the morning, I will likely have different gene expression and protein content than your study that uses 4 month old rats of the same strain and draw blood at night.

Each article includes these details, and it is very hard to know if the result is more generally true, or only true for the conditions of my study.

It is for this reason that reviews are important and difficult to replace with some constantly-updating model of information release.

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

#73

Post by jonlucc »

tikhonj wrote: post #22

Personally, what really gets me with the current publishing regime is how fashion-driven it is (at least in many parts of CS). Oftentimes, it feels like the most challenging aspect of producing publishable research at first is not rigor or novelty or writing a sufficiently readable complete paper but hitting something sufficiently "interesting"—largely a function of what happens to be popular at the moment. Publishin…

In biology, there are a large number of very specific niche journals such that a paper on a topic out of vogue is likely to land in a more specific journal. This is not without drawbacks, but it sort of works.

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

#74

Post by secstate »

jonlucc wrote: post #72
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…

Another thing that complicates this in the life sciences is that techniques aren't standard. If I use 8 month old rats and draw blood in the morning, I will likely have different gene expression and protein content than your study that uses 4 month old rats of the same strain and draw blood at night. Each article includes these details, and it is very hard to know if the result is more generally true, or only true fo…

Hrm. But if each article includes these details but there is no way to generalize the findings, how is a review going to help? Scientist A doing the study claims X effect when using 8 month old rats and drawing blood in the morning. Scientist B comes along and says, "looks like sound science to me, conclusion is valid!"

But Scientist B has no idea if some gene expression and protein content are the result of the blood draw time, the age of the rats, or the temperature of the lab. How can ANY review be effective if there are no other studies on 8-month old rat blood drawn in the morning in a colder room?

The problem with comparative studies here is also a problem with peer reviews, and more generally, a problem with life sciences and the idea of controls v. variables.

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

#75

Post by cafebeen »

kriro wrote: post #50

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 s…

These things take time and money to build and maintain though, and there's very little of that to go around unfortunately.

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

#76

Post by flycaliguy »

alcinos wrote: post #65
jgmjgm wrote: post #5

I what is missing from the article is an understanding of the incentives of academics. Quite often putting a piece of research "to bed" is the goal. Why? Because any good academic has a long list of things they want to get to. Very few people want to get mired in the (inevitable) problems that arise in a paper for eternity. This is why there are review papers that summarize the state of the knowledge at a given point…

To me, the main problem with papers in their current shape is that they are required to be more or less self-contained. When one wants to state a result that improves a little bit the knowledge in a well established field, he has to waste time and space stating the definitions and preliminary results necessary to understand his result. This is counterproductive both for the author and the reader interested only in th…

I don't know. I think the act of forming a paper up from scratch is an essential element in the process of research. It really isn't a waste of time and space in the sense that proper research will require these definitions and preliminary results be carefully reviewed by the author anyways. Why not have them type it out for us? Or for their own sake even.

A wiki style database of information could be an exciting resource for kicking off new ideas. When scientists conduct research within this database though, findings and methodology must be to a high enough standard. Marks of high quality research include well defined terms and contextualized prior results.

If you want to get straight to the new information, read the abstract up top, skim the middle and read the results and discussion.

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

#77

Post by kijin »

anifow wrote: post #68

It seems the problem is that the author is trying to create a representation of knowledge, whereas research papers are more of a logging of work done. His approach may be a perfect fit for an experiment in meta-research. You could run periodic reviews of articles released in specific topical areas and create summaries of the findings. Any time those findings change, its a git commit, and you can track this change ove…

Exactly. The problem is that papers aren't worth what the rest of the world think they are. Nobody who is working on the cutting edge of a given field give a damn about the papers that are published in the field's major journals. Papers are little more than permanent records of what people talked about at some conference several months before, and through other informal channels even earlier. By the time they're published, they're already old news. They may be worth some archival value, but that's about it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world thinks of papers as the primary method by which scientists exchange ideas. This is a myth. Sure, there some scientists (mostly in developing countries, or those coming from a different field) who rely on papers to figure out what their colleagues are up to, but if so, that's only a reason to improve real-time communication, not a reason to turn papers into real-time communication tools.

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

#78

Post by linhchi »

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.

> the solution to the PD

Dyson truly proposes a great solution lying in PD. That is a huge oversight for game theorists when they let an outsider do that.

However, it's not the ultimate solution. It's an extremely interesting aspect (a strategy, a style of play) of the PD that game theorists somehow have never seen and articulated in maths.

For the evolutionary fitness of the extortioner solution that Dyson discovers:

Evolution of extortion in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games http://www.pnas.org/content/110/17/6913.abstract

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

#79

Post by carljoseph »

xiaq wrote: post #12
jgmjgm wrote: post #5

I what is missing from the article is an understanding of the incentives of academics. Quite often putting a piece of research "to bed" is the goal. Why? Because any good academic has a long list of things they want to get to. Very few people want to get mired in the (inevitable) problems that arise in a paper for eternity. This is why there are review papers that summarize the state of the knowledge at a given point…

Exactly. We often have the idea of "solved problem" in science, but very few of them in software development (overgeneralizing a bit, any field of technology). This is probably because science is often about "what" (what is the fastest algorithm for matrix multiplication?), "whether" (does P = NP?), while technology is often about "how" (how to implement matrix multiplication efficiently?). Once you solve a problem i…

That's just simply not correct - scientific endeavour and the scientific method is an ongoing prospect. You never actually solve anything, instead you refine the parameters in which a given solution is deemed correct.

Newton "solved" the equations of gravity, Einstein "solved" them too, and now quantum mechanics is "solving" them yet again. None are wrong, but also none of them make the problem solved.

The idea of a "solved problem" in science is a dangerous one IMHO.

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