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Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isn’t right when it comes to science
honestly LeCun should know better than to argue with a crazy person.
it doesn’t matter how right he is, musk will turn everything around and have fun while doing it.
Yep. All he’s achieving is by this is helping Twitter keep some of its legitimacy.
The point of arguing with morons online is not to convince the morons. It’s to convince the spectators.
This particular moron is selling tickets to the venue he’s using to argue with him tho…
I’m not convinced that has the effect you think it does.
To me it just makes LeCun look worse for engaging with him. His research stands on its own and I don’t think convincing anyone of anything on xitter is going to have a worthwhile outcome for him.
I assume by “he” you mean LeCun
yep
thanks to melon tusk, i don’t have to
The Musk likely knows who and what he himself is, even if only in the darkest and most sleepless hours of the night, but on the other hand, his followers eat this shit up like candy. “Survival of the fittest” - caveat: in the current climate, or rather the one from the last few decades - has led to him being put in charge of way more than he should, in the same manner that a cockroach is “fitter” than humans since they will outlast our having caused WWIII (unless we make it to space, which seems increasingly unlikely at this point, at least within any of our current lifetimes).
Anyway, it is important to remember that he does not do this for reason of mere stupidity - he literally gets paid to dish out this kind of shade.
Edit: case in point, the fact that we are discussing this now, and also the title of this post. If Elon had said “I respect you”, that would have been the end of the matter right there, but it would not have met his goals (or apparently, ours either).
Who he?
Neural networks, OCR, called one of the “godfathers of deep learning”, etc, etc.
He’s a brilliant, well known scientist.
I like the sentiment, but there are non-peer reviewed papers that are real science. Politics and funding are real things, and there is a bit of gatekeeping here, which isn’t really good IMHO.
Also, reproducibility is a sticky subject, especially with immoral experiments (which can still be the product of science, however unsavory), or experiments for which there are only one apparatus in the world (e.g., some particle physics).
The things you’re describing are not science. This might seem nit picky but the scientific method as we know it today require that peer review and require methods of reproduction. Whether you can reproduce results is a different story.
The entire difference between research and science is whether or not you engage in the process of peer review and review often requires method of replication. So you usually can’t have one without the other. If you aren’t trying to have your paper reviewed by your peers, that’s fine, but that isn’t science.
To address the gatekeeping, I get it. We shouldn’t be using the word to demean people who do valuable research but don’t strictly engage in the scientific process. That’s really not important to do. However we should all be interested in preventing the scientific process from being muddied to include every R&D process under the sun. That’s all research, not science, and we call them separate things for a reason.
I think the word you’re looking for is merit, publication which are cited and peer reviewed hold much more merit than those who don’t.
Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. 1
Nothing in this quote requires external publication. Following the scientific method, publishing, peer reviewing and reproduction can all happen internally in organisation using independent teams. Those private publications hold but a fraction of the merit of publications in recognised journals, but are science nonetheless.
I don’t particularly agree. Publishing is a tricky thing in the private sector, and we’ve seen a lot of scientific suppression by companies. Peer review literally requires the field to assess your work, and doesn’t end with the publication, but is a process that continues forever. Reproduction is a major issue, especially in fields proximal to mine (neuroscience , Medicine and psychology) and the whole process of open science with this type of review process makes it much easier to create papers that are reproducible.
The external influence is basically a given to produce science that holds up.
I agree though, we can argue open science is much better and more reliable. We can argue privatly conducting a study and doing all the steps that would be conducted by the academic community within one organisation leads to more biased and less reliable results. But it’s still science by its very definition, I’d even argue denying that is a bit disrespectful to all scientists doing so.
Oh yeah strictly speaking if you follow the scientific method you are doing “science” however what the twitter thread is getting at and what I’m getting at is that science without the scientific process isn’t the same thing. Typically in a professional setting we just call that research.
The scientific process contains the scientific methods but there is an aspect of connection to the scientific community. I’d argue that if you’re using a company to build and develop a working base of knowledge through the scientific method, you’re failing at the building and organizing knowledge part of that science definition by not sharing what you know.
For sure, and calling Elon a twat would be an insult to twats out there. But saying “if it’s not published it’s not science” to one of the greatest grifters while having to explain the nuance of what you tweeted is a big L in my book.
Much more measured take than “if it’s not published, then it definitely is not science.”
This might seem nit picky but the scientific method as we know it today require that peer review and require methods of reproduction. Whether you can reproduce results is a different story.
Oooh, are we about to have a discussion on whether large portions of the soft sciences across the past several decades fail to be “real” science due to the reproducibility crisis?
Counterpoint: the scientific method is much simpler than you described.
- Fuck around
- Find out
- Write it down
The rest are details of the above or elitism.
I think the sticking point is this: if people can’t reproduce it then you missed writing down an important detail and therefore didn’t finish step 3.
The elitism is thinking peer review suffices for reproducibility.
I agree with you last point, and I really, really want to with the first.
Sometimes science feels more like an art, for chemistry at least. I suppose the counter-point to this is: if you provide sufficient detail to reproduce but your results are still difficult to reproduce reliably by others, then your process wasn’t very robust and should have undergone more development before publishing. Those details may be so minor that you don’t even realize that you overlooked something.
I mean that makes sense. I guess it would be fairer to say that enough should be written down its still usable in tracking down what is missing.
Imo both in the twitter are stupid. Like, no way engaging with musk could go well.
Yup, that poor guy that proved that vaccines cause autism gets unfairly maligned for his efforts; obviously his methodology was unethical but you can’t argue the findings.
I am a bit worried the response to this here is not a unified everyone’s an asshole in this screenshot.
Academic publishing is in a very sorry state for a long time by now. A lot of research that is published is not reproducible. A lot of actual research is also in fact never published like that because companies base their products on it and publish those results only as patents.
So just by trying to be smug and oppose the Muskie you show yourself to be an idiot. Well done.
It’s worth saying that ml is in a very different position to most of academic publishing.
All of the serious journals are free to publish and fully open access and a significant amount of publication includes enough code that things are mostly replicable. GitHub has done wonders for our field. Also many tech companies use publications as an indication of prestige and go out of their way to publish stuff.
We’re still drowning in too many papers and 95% of everything is shit, but that’s every field really. Talking to musk on twitter is the not right place for a nuanced discussion about publication.
“Nuance” and “discussion” did not appear to be part of either participant’s intent.
at least they’re partially right instead of completely wrong like elon
Partially right versus Elon is not something I would count as a win either.
if correctness is a marathon being more correct than elon is being able to tie your shoes
You can use all the metaphors you want, bottom line is you are still arguing online with a man child.
i’m agreeing with you lmao
lol fair enough
The rules and conventions to do science today are quite well known and understood by educated people (including of course Helen Mosque) … but any rules have exceptions :
Project Manhattan to produce the atomic bomb was secret science : in many countries military will have secret science development. Pharmaceutical companies will do as well.
People in those projects will not have recognition by the wider public but they will have recognition from their group.yes, but even within those “secret groups”, there are SOP and conventions of intergrity.
Thanks ! … if anyone else wants to know :
SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. Within secret scientific research groups, SOPs are established guidelines or instructions for carrying out routine operations to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance with regulations. These SOPs help maintain integrity, confidentiality, and efficiency within the research group.Secret scientific research groups? Lol. Anyone with a passing familiarity with government work knows about SOPs.
GPT told me it was “Standard Operating Procedure” in the context of the previous comment. That wasn enough for me. I didn’t have to know it applies to your job in an English speaking country.
You’re over here asking GPT about “secret scientific research groups” but wanna point out that it’s an English acronym? You could’ve asked Encyclopedia Britannica instead and gotten the right answer.
Heck, I can think of a half dozen other examples of things that aren’t published and/or can’t be reproduced but would be considered science.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it “isn’t science”?
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn’t have any reproducible experiments?
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn’t worthy of publication not science?
I like dunking on Elon as much as the next guy, but like, “only things that are published get the title of ‘science’” seems like a pretty indefensible take to me…
How about all the research that goes into microchips in modern computers? All extremely secretive. Using published science only, it would be impossible to create today’s PC or phone
Another great example.
i agree because what I usually mean when i talk of science is scientific work even if this work doesn’t result in proving that an hypothesis is right so that it becomes a scientific theory.
For me the main criteria is to follow the scientific method.I’d say it’s just research. Science is a group activity by necessity, even if the scientific method is not.
What makes science a group activity by necessity?
Why is one person employing the scientific method to better understand the world around them “not doing science”?
Well, modern science is interdisciplinary, it relies on resource sharing and peer review to reach consensus, which all require many people. In practice, it’s merely research without collaboration if contributions aren’t being made because Science isn’t defined when you apply the scientific method. Science is what we do collectively. So when offshoot research is vetted, it becomes part of the science.
This reminds me of a few people I’ve met who believe themselves to be scientists who claim to do science by themselves, but in reality, it’s numerology nonsense. They’re arguably researching a system they invented but nobody worth their weight would take them seriously.
Why is one person employing the scientific method to better understand the world around them “not doing science”?
Why is “research” not the appropriate label?
So, first and foremost it is important to recognize we are having a definition argument. The crux of our disagreement is over the definition of “science,” specifically as it relates to the act of doing it.
Now, obviously anyone can claim that any word means anything they want. I can claim that the definition of “doing science” is making grilled cheese sandwiches. That doesn’t make it so.
So, as with all arguments over the definition of words, I find appealing to the dictionary a good place to start. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science Which, having read through all the possible definitions, does not seem to carry any connotation of mandatory collaboration.
Now, the dictionary is obviously not the be all and end all. Words have colloquial meanings that are sometimes not captured, or nuance can be lost in transcribing the straight meaning of the word. But I think that the onus is on you to justify why you believe that meaning is lost.
And note, what I’m not arguing is that science isn’t collaborative. Of course it is. There are huge benefits to collaboration, and it is very much the norm. But you have stated an absolute. “Science isn’t science without collaboration.” And that is the crux of our disagreement.
And as to why I wouldn’t just call it “research.” First, I see no reason to. By both my colloquial definition and the one in the dictionary (by my estimation), it is in fact science. But, more importantly, if we take your definition, you are relegating the likes of great scientists like Newton, Cavendish, Mendel, and Killing to the title of mere “researchers.” And I find the idea of calling any of those greats anything short of a scientist absurdly reductive.
I mostly agree with you.
But you have stated an absolute. “Science isn’t science without collaboration.”
I don’t think that’s what I’m saying, at least, that’s not my stance. I’m trying to say that how we formally define Science is one thing. But in practice, Science can only be collaborative because of the complexity of topics, the nuance that needs to be captured in experimental design, and the human error that needs to be avoided. There’s also the connotation that science is the collective body beyond its works that encompasses a community, a culture, a history, a way of thinking, and so on. If you’re “doing science”, then we have the mutual understanding that you’re participating in all of the above, because otherwise, you’re just conducting independent research that could eventually find its way into the whole.
But if it doesn’t ever find its way into the greater body of science, how can we label that as doing science if it hasn’t made an impact besides personal profits? And even if those findings work as advertised in a product, how do we know that the hand-waiving explanation in this black box isn’t true? It does nothing for our understanding. I won’t argue that it works as a colloquial term because a theory could mean whatever possibility popped into someone’s head even if it’s wrong. Strictly speaking, a theory is much more than a plausible thought and I think that analogy carries on.
you are relegating the likes of great scientists like Newton, Cavendish, Mendel, and Killing to the title of mere “researchers.”
That’s a relic of what worked back then but their independent research eventually made it into the science, which is consistent with what I’m saying. Labeling them as researchers takes nothing away from their great achievements. I see no issue with calling an apple a fruit when broadly speaking.
If you aren’t saying that “science isn’t science without collaboration,” can you give an example of something that is science without collaboration? I only ask because you state that’s not what you’re saying, but follow it up with what, to my attempt at reading comprehension, is you just restating the thing you said you aren’t saying.
And I would argue science done in secret can have enormous impacts beyond “simply profits.” The Manhattan Project for example. I think it would be absurd to say what was going on there was anything but science, but there was no collaboration with the greater scientific community or intent to share their findings.
And look, of course you can be a researcher without being a scientist. Historians are researchers but not scientists obviously. But when what you are researching is physics and natural sciences, you are a scientist. That’s what the word literally means. When your definition requires you to eliminate Sir Isaac Newton, maybe it’s your definition that’s wrong.
You say you see no problem with calling an apple a fruit when broadly speaking. Neither do I. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be absolutely delusional to insist that an apple wasn’t actually an apple.
Because you can’t employ the scientific method with only one person.
You need at least 2 to perform peer reviews.
Peer review isn’t typically included in the list of steps to the scientific method. Or, if it is, it’s a coda, not part of the main steps.
Dictionary.com for example lists the commonly accepted steps, and then follows it up with “usually followed by peer review and publication.”
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-method
Note the “usually.”
It’s also worth noting that there is no real “formalized” or “official” scientific method. Just some agreed upon commonalities. Any dozen science books will give you a dozen different graphs of the steps, and no two will be the same.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it “isn’t science”?
I would say it isn’t science yet. I’d say once you published it and other people confirmed he was right, then it would be science. Until then it’s just research. Stating that it must be right just because Albert Einstein said it is disrespectful to the work of a lot of people, not least of whom is Albert Einstein
Do you also assert that my other two examples aren’t science?
If so, why?
If not, then I feel like my point still stands and don’t feel strongly enough to argue semantics over this particular one.
Ultimately this is a fight over the definition of words, and I think 99.9% of people (and the dictionary) would define all my examples as science. If you want to split the hair of saying, “that wasn’t science, it was just scientific research,” have at it, but I’ll just call you a pedant, lol.
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn’t have any reproducible experiments?
Yes. It’s just a hypothesis. If you could reproduce conditions similar to the big bang and see the same thing happen, then it would be science. If we can look at our universe through our instruments and see that the universe could have formed no other way (or at the very least that this way is by far the most plausible), then those experiments would be science. Speculation on its own, however, is not science.
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn’t worthy of publication not science?
I disagree that there could be such research. An anticlimactic conclusion is an important conclusion nonetheless, and no less worthy of publication than an earthshaking one. If people who edit scientific journals disagree they can take it up with me. That team in China that thought they created a superconductor and then found out they hadn’t, found out an extremely effective way to not create a superconductor, and now no one needs to try that exact way again.
Fair enough. I’ll engage, lol.
Would you say that Sir Isaac Newton was a scientist? His research was almost entirely solo and was of limited release until much later.
Stephen Hawking has no published reproducible experiments as far as I’m aware. Is he not a scientist?
Is someone conducting research into a scientific field a scientist, or are they required to publish something before they can claim that title?
Honestly, I find arguments over how words are defined kind of exhausting, so maybe we should just cut to the heart of the matter. None of the definitions of science I can find in any dictionary include the word collaboration. Do you think that that’s a failure of the dictionary? And even if you do, do you think people who are operating under the belief that the dictionary definition is correct are wrong for doing so?
Semantic arguments (which, as you say, do not, ultimately, matter) aside, the point that the Twitter user in the post we’re commenting on was trying to make is that science is best when it’s shared, and that when the results of an experiment are not published, mankind as a whole is the lesser for not knowing them. The poster chose to do this in a somewhat drastic way by redefining “science” to exclude experiments whose results were not shared. As many commenters on this post (including yourself) pointed out, this new definition is unnecessarily strict, and that redefining it as such was not necessary in making the point nor ultimately warranted.
I do, however, agree with the point.
Absolutely agreed with the sentiment. Collaboration is integral to most scientific endeavors. Especially in the modern era. I think we’re in the same page on that point.
But, like, if the person had asserted something like, “grilled cheese is only grilled cheese when you eat it with tomato soup,” and then Elon responded with, “that’s a dumb take, since you can totally have a good grilled cheese without tomato soup,” I don’t think it’s “totally owning him” to list off a ton of reasons why you believe any grilled cheese without tomato soup is an invalid grilled cheese.
Like, we can all agree that grilled cheese is best with tomato soup. That doesn’t change the fact that arbitrarily changing the definition of grilled cheese to be “only when paired with tomato soup,” is actually just kinda dumb.
You mean Sir Isaac Newton, who believed in Alchemy and wrote many things on the subject?
He only became a scientist after his work was peer reviewed.
Believing in alchemy isn’t quite the slam dunk you think it is, since at the time we didn’t even know atoms existed, lol. It turns out that people who have massive gaps in the information available to them come to wrong conclusions sometimes, lol.
You’re just restating the position that I’ve already argued a ton elsewhere in the thread, so instead I’ll ask for a moment of introspection.
Do you believe you would have taken this stance if Elon Musk hadn’t taken the opposite one?
You are currently arguing that Isaac Newton wasn’t a scientist until that moment someone found his notebooks, at which point he magically became one. You’re arguing that none of the people who did the research on nuclear physics during WW2 that led to the development of the atomic bomb were scientists, since none of that research was intended for publication or peer review.
Would you have said Oppenheimer wasn’t a scientist outside of the context of this image we’re responding to?
At this point I just feel like I’m arguing against people who are knowingly taking a position they never would have taken if not to “own Elon Musk.” It’s the knee jerk reaction of “I can’t agree with that person I hate, so I’ve gotta argue the opposite.”
Which, look, I get the hate and like to see him dunked on as much as the next guy, but it’s the definition of arguing in bad faith if you don’t actually believe the thing you’re arguing for.
The Manhattan Project, being a project with no end game but genocide, really shouldn’t fucking be considered science; not unless you’re gonna crack out and try and tell me that indiscriminate, horrific mass murder deserves to be acknowledged in the same breath as mathematics and medicine.
But science doesn’t care about morality. Maybe you’re thinking about religion?
It’s fair to say that the Manhattan Project wasn’t a “science first” project, but to deny that science was happening is…misguided, let’s say.
“First do no harm” is an axiom of medicine that more of you STEMlords should probably internalize, so maybe stow the condescension. I categorically refuse to accept a tool of mass genocide being counted next to that which would save lives and objectively measure our reality.
She’s wrong though, everything following the scientific method is science. The fact that you didn’t pay out of your ass to publicize your research doesn’t matter. Of course it reaches less people, but that’s a separate issue.
Yann LeCun is a dude
With all these “she” talk in this comment section, I was like when did LeCun change gender?
I don’t even do anything remotely related to AI, but I know LeCun is a dude.
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The scientific method includes peer reviewing.
You don’t have to post it on a commercial database, only free one will do. But it needs to be accessible by the world.
Does it require independent peer review though? How do you achieve that
withwithout publication? The predatory publication system is a different point.Edit: fix without
Wouldn’t this imply that science didn’t exist before academic publication existed? Was zero science conducted before the ~1600s then?
Well you’re not entirely incorrect with that assumption. What we call science today is actually the Scientific Method Which is a much more skeptical approach to science than the earlier methods, hence the credibility. I like many others agree that the fees built into the system is quiet absurd and the process is not perfect, but currently that is the only legit way to get others evaluate your research.
The word “legit” there is doing alot of work.
I ask with genuine curiosity, as I am not an academic and come from a software development mindset
Why is paid-for services the only “legit” way to get others to evaluate your research? Why is it not kosher to publicly publish your research, and simply invite peers to evaluate it? This idea is essentially the entire process behind Open Source Software, and is the backbone of most modern tools/programs/apps/software/linux development.
What does paying a publishing company provide you, as a researcher, that makes it worth it?
I don’t know what to tell you man, sometimes even I wonder if it’s worth it at all. Publishing to a journal is such a difficult task. Before submitting your paper you need the approval of two other well-established individuals. Then you send in your paper to your selected journal and each one has some specific format and policies, which many are arbitrary and inthe end of the day depends on the person reviewing your paper. This can take weeks of back and forth.
However if you think you did something noteworthy, as far as I know, this is how you get it in front of the eyes of your peers. Even then there’s a chance that your paper gets ignored lol.
So like many others in this thread, I’m not a fan of this process because even though it’s strict, a lot of bs still passes through
Fair point, I should specify “modern science”. There’s quite a gap of scientific quality between traditional medicine and modern science based medicine for example.
No, peer reviewing can happen in many ways. But it needs to be public.
Sending letters also allows for peer reviewing.
Was zero science conducted before the ~1600s then?
I mean, yes. The framework of studying things that we understand as science did not always exist.
Every time someone thinks science and studying natural phenomena are the same thing Newton sheds a single tear from his non-poked eye.
Possibly. I can’t come up with any major results that wasn’t either logic, engineering or tradition. But it’s an interesting question. What might count as science before then?
Pretty sure it was like this:
Before the 20th century most famous physicists referred to themselves as “natural philosophers,” not scientists. The P in PhD is for philosophy. The word “science” refers to a modern social phenomenon, a sort of peer-review methodology that generates shared public knowledge.
not as a discipline. If you publish an experiment to the extent it can be reproduced, it is science, so its happened before but in a less intentional fashion
everything following the scientific method is science
I’m fairly certain “report conclusions” is a pretty big deal in the scientific method. Principle of verifiability and all that.
True a lot of science is done in industry and the corporate world and not published to keep it a trade secret. It is still science but not shared.
There’s no such thing as a scientific method
He probably means the idealized scientific method you learn at school is not what really happens in reality, in particular “soft” science fields may not be able to follow it strictly and still do good science.
Doesn’t this difference make the scientific method not real?
Edit: I don’t talk about bad science.
The scientific method varies from field to field. In medicine you usually need to proof it by taking a significant amount people. Then create a control group and a testing group. Then test your medicine on the group and give the other placebos.
When you can measure health improvement for one group over the other there is a reasonable amount of proof that the medicine works.
The scientific method has one major goal. Reduce human made errors in science. Humans do not work objectively. Humans always have an bias. Things like reproduceable tests and peer review try to reduce the bias.
Take 10 labs and you’ll get 10 definitions of the scientific method. It’s just a tradition that yields some results.
peer review try to reduce the bias.
Sounds like you haven’t been peer reviewed enough
Btw his bio is:
- Professor at NYU
- Chief AI Scientist at Meta
- ACM Turing Award Laurete
Yeah he’s a legend in CS… Muskrat just further rides himself into being the fool of centuries
Yeah who is Elon? I’ve never heard of him or SpaceX or Tesla. I guess this Musk guy will die in obscurity. Too bad he didn’t publish a paper.
Ideally he can go down in history as the 21st century version of Thomas Eddison.
The guy that bought Lodygin’s patents? Yep.
Academic Journals frantically spinning up botnets to retweet this
If you science in a lab and no one is around to review it did you make a science?
well it still goes back to the original arguement that it has to be published and reproducible.
else it would be forgotten and re-discovered again at a later stage.
some scientific discoveries of the mordern era were actually discovered by earlier ancient people before mordern science started recording such discoveries.
Does it have to be a new discovery to qualify as “science”?
No
The difference between science and fucking around is writing it down - Adam Savage
The second, implied part, is that writing it down is for OTHER people to learn from.
So, although I hate the eletist gatekeeping language… I think I agree more with the professional scientist than I do the professional clown.
Corollary: If it can’t be reproduced you’ve failed to write down something critical.
That is to say: it’s fucking around and, if you’re good at it, finding out.
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There are differences between “experimenting”, “research”, “analysis” and “science”. You can do the first three at your home, scribbling some notes that no one will ever read or know about, but science, in its hard definition, is a methodology that requires the specific dynamics that are expected of the scientific community, where plenty of people check each other’s work for faults, blind spots, biases, lazy interpretations and so on.
This is fundamental because everyone, including universally recognized geniuses, do sometimes fuck up. Have you heard of Einstein’s famous phrase “God does not play dice with the universe”? This refers to his conviction that the laws of physics were fundamentally deterministic, which was put in question by the early experiments that were opening the way for quantum physics. Einstein found himself at odds with a new generation of physicists that weren’t as inflexible as he was on this issue, and whenever there were indications that extremely small particles may behave in a non-deterministic way, Einstein would argue and push for the most hostile interpretation possible, which did lead other physicists to put his interpretations to the test, which did ironically further prove the non-deterministic pillars of quantum physics.
Science is necessarily a social endeavor because it is meant to help us overcome the fact that each individual human is doomed to be, sooner or later, at one specific issue of many, an inflexible idiot.
Your last sentence is pure poetry.
If we’re talking about gatekeeping what is and isn’t capital-S Science, I’d really like to know where these “hard definitions” are coming from.
Wikipedia’s page for the Scientific Method seems to get it wrong when it describes it as “a general set of principles,” the core of which is forming falsifiable hypotheses and testing them… and the details vary from field to field and across different time periods. Sounds like you can do that at home.
The page for Science appears to also contradict the “hard definition” when it describes science as spanning most of human history, long before the modern institutions of formal publication and peer review, and doesn’t describe them as mandatory at all. Definitely doable at home, as far as I can tell.
That’s not to say that scientific collaboration isn’t valuable, btw… I just can’t find any basis to support the idea that if it’s not published in a formal academic journal, then it’s definitely not science, and that science CAN’T happen without the involvement of the institutions.
So like… Where does this “hard definition” that people keep talking about come from, and why doesn’t Wikipedia seem to know about it?
It comes from literature I did read over a decade ago, which titles I no longer have, which argued (in a very summarised sense), that science as we know it today is only possible due to the development of social institutions and methodology that have been refined over centuries (and arguably, are currently in an evolving process), in ways that make it fundamentally different (in its workings, its results, how it is envisioned and how well it procures reliable knowledge) from what the natural philosophers of antiquity did, ultimately requiring an ample social system for it to even be viable. You will notice that the majority of attempts to schematize the scientific method include either reporting or publishing, or delegate the task of replicating experiments to third parties.
The page for Science appears to also contradict the “hard definition” when it describes science as spanning most of human history, long before the modern institutions of formal publication and peer review, and doesn’t describe them as mandatory at all. Definitely doable at home, as far as I can tell.
Sure, you can see sketches of what we currently consider science in the historical development of astronomy across Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere (lacking the modern core methodology), or in Newton’s writings about alchemy (lacking communication), but most of it was intertwined with mysticism and esotericism. You can use a more lax definition if you want, but I think that in doing so, you’re making the concept lose meaning.
That’s not to say that scientific collaboration isn’t valuable, btw… I just can’t find any basis to support the idea that if it’s not published in a formal academic journal, then it’s definitely not science, and that science CAN’T happen without the involvement of the institutions.
150 years ago, the contemporary institutions of formal publication and peer review didn’t exist, but equivalent processes were already starting to take form. These contemporary institutions aren’t as important as it is that the tasks they fulfill do get done in one way or another.
This refers to his conviction that the laws of physics were fundamentally deterministic
What was the bit about quantum mechanics yesterday? “Embrace the chaos and you start to see a pattern.”
I’ve seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.
okay so there are requirements besides getting accepted for publication
Were they peer reviewed?
Sounds like we need to define “peer”. What happens when ChatGPT starts peer reviewing ChatGPT papers?
Fuck, I really hate to agree with Elon on anything, but that is a ridiculous argument. LeCun must also really believe that trees only fall in the woods when someone is around to see it happen.
Science is strictly a social activity. You can’t have a social activity without the social component.
Again, fact-finding is not the same as science.
Yeah, they’re both pretty wildly off base. Publishing papers that are vetted and used as a foundation for other work is science. Also, sorry, but developing advancements behind closed doors is still science. Oppenheimer’s secret research for the government is pretty fucking foundational. Thomas Edison wasn’t interested in sharing his ideas, but rather in selling them. Everyone remembers him.
This argument reads like two people having an ego trip past each other.
You were correct in the first, but the things you’re describing are product research and development.
All super important, but not exactly what I call science as a socially beneficial activity humans do specifically to learn the truths of the universe.
Science is just the process of testing things in the world in a reproducible way.
LeCun’s argument is good career advice (you only get credit for what others know you did), but it’s not factual correct.
Also how transparently published and reproduced was Pfizer’s vaccine trials, considering a judge had to force the contents released, yet it was science right away. You can’t have cake and eat too.
Couldn’t science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then…
There are open access platform that is more reputable than git, like arxiv or hal.
Plus most conferences, at least in my field, support open access. But unfortunately for some of them, you do need to pay a fee in order to get the article to be open-access.
The prestige of the conference/journal is still the best way to get your article known, so that others can review and built upon your work, as of now.
Science devolved into politics. :-(
I find it especially amusing that in my Lemmy feed the post right before this one is a quote from a book by a Nobel laureate talking about the importance of self-marketing, politicking and ladder climbing in academia. You know, all the stuff that isn’t science that plays a part in what Yann LeCun considers to play a vital role in what counts as science.
ladder climbing in academia is not fun, but I feel like communicating (or marketing) science is a essential part of scientific process, as we are often the only person able to describe our work in great technical detail.
A famous professor once told me “we are all entertainers”, which seems absurd from an outside prospective, but is a notion that I and many of my colleagues have now found peace with.
Scrambled and unreadable mathematics should seldom be valued in modern scientific community, IMO; not everyone is Ramanujan after all. Even among geniuses, from Poincaré to Hilbert to Godel to Grothendick and to Tao, most genius are able to communicate their research quite well, and thrive in academia.
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Although I have no doubt that, like every other field, academia is filled with politics; and publishing process probably helps enforce such politics.
However, I would argue that modern academic publishing is absolutely necessary to produce “useful” science. In order for people to build upon others’ result, they will need strong guarantee of correctness, which necessitates the review process ; and top conferences can also save researchers a lot of time to find impactful new research, especially new ideas.
That being said, I am absolutely not suggesting the publishing system is not without its problems; but I kind of agree with LeCun here, publishing is a important part of the process, and it is will probably out-last both Tesla and Elon.
Hm, for a good peer-review process you would still need a way to anonymously distribute to experts in the same field and orchestrate the whole review/editing process. You could obviously try to come up with a better review process but I don’t know how you would do it on a git-platform. How would you prevent trolling or other forms of destructive comments for example? How would you ensure that other people in the field can comment without having to fear repercussions for an honest and negative review.
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Seems like a very elitist and gatekeeping perspective, specially considering how closed off the academic world is for the rest of society in some places, never mind expensive to publish. It’s also basically saying that if you, say, come up with a groundbreaking hypothesis, that that’s not science until you get a research paper out, and that might require mastery that goes beyond the hypothesis.
Sure, this might stop most of the looney theories from being called Science, but it also prevents public access in favor of those with the means and capacity to sustain an ever more complex geocentric model of the fashion of the times, from which any divergent theories must generally part from or involve renown in.
You think the person who made that hypothesis will die bitter and forgotten? Is that the general view of people who are not Scientists by Scientists? They might know what’s up, and might not want the gatekeeper to take all the credit, as is often the case in academic circles, and might just feel satisfaction in seeing their hypothesis gratified. They might place more importance in exploring and understanding reality than compensating for personal insecurities. Perhaps it is science itself that might stagnate by stalling until it itself is able to discover these hypothesis under the properly accepted emeritus when they are eventually able to get to it.
Mostly it’s just looney theories, but given Musk is involved, I imagine this discussion involves proprietary patents that do have a lot of research involved and under peer review of teams under non-disclosure agreements. Then again, it’s Musk, could be mostly looney theories too. But the fact that it involves Musk, the man living off of Nikola Tesla’s fame, a man whose demise could have been described to have occurred under the circumstances of a bitter and forgotten end, makes the gatekeeping particularly ironic.
It doesn’t need to be published in a scientific journal. Publication in journals is the most streamlined way to go through the process, but you could publish your hypothesis and methodology to a blog and potentially get the same benefits.
Even patents need to be published. Publication is how discoveries are shared and verified.
I often fantasize about guerilla science done by serious people outside of official channels. While there are plenty of crackpots who desire this for political reasons, I would really like to see an open-source “journal” by and for those scientists who are in it purely for science and have become disenchanted with the current model which is compromised in some ways that prevents progress on certain concepts.
That’s how things work in the AI community. Publications all go through various conferences and journals that are free to submit to. In many of these avenues, if you submit something, the cost is to get a certain number of papers reviewed (not necessarily doing it yourself, but you have to find someone capable of doing it). The publications are then made freely available for anyone to read. Everything is organized by the research community for the benefit of that same community.
To be fair, it would probably be full of crackpot theories, which would make anything released on it a crackpot theory by association. Unless it involves a heavy but fair dose of educated moderation, and it’s already hard enough to simply get moderators that don’t simply want to reenact the Stanford prison experiment.
Not necessarily. Just because my theoretical journal wouldn’t be subject to the existing academic establishment it does not mean it would accept everything. This journal would be more rigorous because it would be composed exclusively by fidelity to the scientific process. I am not anti-academia, only acknowledging that the existing structures are so large and composed of so many egos that there is necessarily over-focus on some areas and under-focus on other areas as a consequence of the structure. My pretend journal wouldn’t be for everyone rejected from those institutions for explicit reasons of incompetence, it would be for those scientists who want to pool resources to do work that would not be easy to support on the current academic model.
How to you vet papers that are being submitted?
If it is outside of your specific experience, how do you get someone else who is specialised to vet the paper?Fortunately I don’t need to have all the answers in my imaginary journal. I imagine it more as a cooperative enterprise among scientists who have become disenchanted with established academic paradigms and are looking to do the research and experimentation in that zone which is of interest to scientists themselves but not necessarily supported by the need to publish in the areas most emphasized by the academic establishment. This is not anything against what exists and what is being produced which I personally consider to be important, only to provide additional avenues to serve science in ways it’s not currently being served.
You’re right that credentials in this model are fuzzy. At least at the beginning it would be composed exclusively of scientists already working in their field who would want something like this. It could be possible that these scientists answering only to their immediate guerilla journal peers may see fit to support the research of an individual with no doctorate but who has demonstrated their self-education has made them capable of designing an experiment which can be quantified, criticized, and re-produced. Whether this standard would be agreed upon by the greater community would certainly be controversial with plenty of politics involved, but that reality it outside of the scope of my daydream.
As for the sustainability, it’s as in question as any open source project. It lives and dies based on peoples’ desire to do it only because they want to do it and others want to support them doing it. This couldn’t be a career alternative to academia because making it into a business or non-profit would defeat the purpose as it would attain the same vulnerabilities to a much more severe degree than the much larger and stable existing model.
How the Linux kernel “made it” and is still free and open source is - imo - one of the pinnacles of humanity.
It’s inspired so much other software to adopt the same philosophy, and modern humanity/science/society stands on those shoulders.I think science has missed that boat.
Or that pinnacle was before the tools to support such an open source atmosphere/community were around… So not missed the boat, but swam before the boat was built
You would still need to be recognized before someone more recognizable takes it and sticks their name on it the moment they see any validity in it. Plagiarism isn’t a myth, and good luck getting recognition even just for a hypothesis without a master and just as a hobbyist.
Academics want a well prepared research paper without evidencing crude freshman mistakes, and by its nature yours might be far cruder than academic standards. Even if you do end up releasing it and if it does by some miracle get acknowledged, it will by its nature take longer and run more risks from a lack of peer review that might discard it due to simple but correctable mistakes while running the risk of getting it plagiarized by someone capable of fixing it up, and no one is going to take a random blog as the proof of a preexisting theory over a research paper with a name with some masters to it that claims the idea was entirely theirs shortly thereafter. And if all you care about is the study of reality and science, why risk the heartbreak of getting personally involved?
Patents don’t need to be a full comprehensive research pieces, they just have to be enough to define and identify particular intellectual property.
It’s free to publish.
never mind expensive to publish.
Academic world is very not happy about it either. Academic world hates journals publishing corporations.
See lawsuits against ResearchGate, lawsuits against Sci-Hub and lawsuits against many students and academics that shared scientific papers.
This is why the machine learning community will go through ArXiv for pretty much everything. We value open and honest communication and abhor knowledge being locked down. This is why he views things this way. Because he’s involved in a community that values real science.
ArXiv is free and all modern science should be open. There were reasons for publications in the past, since knowledge dissemination was hard, and they facilitated it. Now the publications just gatekeep.
ArXiv, bioRxiv and cyberleninka.
EDIT: Today I Learned that cyberleninka now has English version of it at cyberleninka.org
Science is a specific social activity that humans engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or reasoning. It’s a particular method of peer review that generates shared public knowledge.
Again, “science” is something humans do together. Experimenting, investigating, puzzling, hypothesizing, intuiting, discovering, and knowing are all things you can do alone.
Science is a particular method of peer review…?
This thread prompted me to revisit what I think “science” means, and I’ve been through a number of different Wikipedia pages, dictionary definitions, etc. but that inquiry just reinforced that this “science == participation in the institutions/communities of science” idea just doesn’t seem to hold up.
Where does this idea come from? I keep seeing this “science is this very particular thing, it’s not just forming falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them,” but then when I look it up, the sources I find say exactly the opposite.
EDIT: To respond, backwards, to the edit below, I guess…? That’s not really a gotcha, and not really what I was saying, lol. Please read the whole thread.
I think this theory of science is so prevalent in this thread because you have to adhere to it in order to dunk on Elon Musk.
I doubt most of these ardents would have taken this position in a random thread about sea cucumbers or something.
I like dunking on Musk as much as the next guy, but the amount of double-think people are willing to commit to to do it is always pretty off-putting to me.
It’s like every ArsTechnica article on SpaceX has people come out of the woodwork to say that their accomplishments are trash and not even worth reporting because of Elon, which, like, you have to be delusional if you don’t think SpaceX is absolutely killing it.
Lol I think you’re onto something. Maybe better off sticking to sea cucumber posts.
It did make me learn some things, though. The person who I was responding to told me to “See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science,” so I did, and I learned about the Demarcation Problem, Logical Positivism, and some new Karl Popper ideas. So, it has not led to a collaborative discussion, but it was pretty interesting, and I’m much more confident now about what’s reasonable to say about what “counts as Science.” Time well spent, IMO.
(In case you were wondering: Any activity performed while wearing safety goggles or glasses is technically science.)
See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.
For example, here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Science is a complex epistemic and social practice that is organized in a large number of disciplines, employs a dazzling variety of methods, relies on heterogeneous conceptual and ontological resources, and pursues diverse goals of equally diverse research communities.”
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science” is misguided. If everything is “science” then nothing is “science.”
Oh thanks for editing in an example-- that wasn’t there when I wrote my reply, but what did you think of the other Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy links I provided?
That article that you linked (Scientific Pluralism) is an interesting read, but it’s more about the importance of diversity in the scientific community… it doesn’t really address the Demarcation Problem, and it doesn’t discuss peer review or anything as far as I could tell.
Mentioning in passing that “science is social” (which is IMO uncontroversially true in a non-demarcation way, btw) is a few shades away from “any textbook will tell you that science is a particular process of peer review.” I think the Science and Pseudo-Science entry that I linked is more germane.
I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” throughout history, such as Newton, actually considered themselves natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’t make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isn’t — need counter examples). The Royal Academy of Sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon had pointed out that “science requires an intellectual community” (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — standing on the shoulders of giants and all that).
Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’m guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.
Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’t science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.
Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results,“ which is what Elon Musk seems to think.
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science”
Well that’s a reach. I had to buy a new laptop charger and find facts about what voltage, etc. I needed… I certainly don’t consider that fact-finding exercise to be science, and I don’t think I said anything to suggest that.
But okay, I don’t have a textbook handy, but let’s see what we can find out about the Philosophy of Science:
Philosophy of Science - Wikipedia
Seems to pretty clearly indicate “lots of interesting and useful ideas, no consensus.” Peer review mentioned 0 times. The “Defining Science” section links to a page for the demarcation problem, so let’s go look at that.
Demarcation Problem - Wikipedia
“The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields.”
And the article basically continues to that effect, IMO: Demarcation is difficult, unclear, and there is no consensus. Peer review mentioned 0 times.
Maybe it’s just Wikipedia that has this misconception. Let’s check some other sources.
The Philosophy of Science - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
“Despite this diversity of opinion, philosophers of science can largely agree on one thing: there is no single, simple way to define science!”
Re: Demarcation problem:
“Modern philosophers of science largely agree that there is no single, simple criterion that can be used to demarcate the boundaries of science.”
Starting to sound familiar. Lots of opinions from Aristotle to Cartwright, none of whom highlight peer review or acceptance by the institutions as criteria. The page does talk about empiricism, parsimony, falsification, etc. though, consistent with other sources.
Glossary - “science” - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
This one is simple:
Our knowledge of the natural world and the process through which that knowledge is built. The process of science relies on the testing of ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world. Science as a whole cannot be precisely defined but can be broadly described by a set of key characteristics. To learn more, visit A science checklist.
Let’s look at the checklist.
Science is embedded in the scientific community - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
The page heading sounds pretty prescriptive, and that’s about the closest I can find that claims “if it’s not peer reviewed, it’s not science.” The body (IMO rightfully) describes the importance of community involvement in science, but doesn’t say anything like “it’s not science unless it involves the community.”
Take this excerpt about Gregor Mendel:
However, even in such cases [as Gregor Mendel’s], research must ultimately involve the scientific community if that work is to have any impact on the progress of science.
So yes, sharing his findings with the world was why it was able to have an impact, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret that he wasn’t doing science while he was working in isolation, or that it only became science retroactively after it was a) shared, and b) accepted.
Let’s take a look at another textbook and see what it says:
1.6: Science and Non-Science - Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science
This chapter suggests that you can take two approaches to demarcation:
- What makes a theory scientific or non-scientific?
- What makes a “change in a scientific mosaic” scientific?
For theories - They’re clear that there are no clear universal demarcation criteria, but offer these suggestions:
- Suggestion 1: An empirical theory is scientific if it is based on experience.
- Suggestion 2: An empirical theory is considered scientific if it explains all the known facts of its domain.
- Suggestion 3: An empirical theory is scientific if it explains, by and large, the known facts of its domain.
For changes - This pertains specifically to whether a change to “a scientific mosaic” is scientific or not, which necessarily pertains to a scientific community. But I’d argue that this analysis seems pretty clearly downstream of a priori participation in a scientific community, not attempting to define science as such.
Didn’t read the whole textbook, so I might still be missing something, but the focus in the chapter is still definitely on the properties of the inquiry, not on the scientific institutions surrounding it.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Also looked at the entries for Scientific Method and Pseudo-science, which seem to be consistent with the other sources
TL;DR/Conclusion
So I’m still getting a really strong signal that:
- Science/non-science doesn’t have a clear demarcation line, and that problem is called the Demarcation Problem. It has a special name because it’s still a big deal.
- Ideas about what is science vs. non-science focus mostly on the properties of the inquiry: Is it a testable, falsifiable hypothesis that can be investigated with empirical observations?
- Scientific communities are still super important, and you can make statements about how scientific activity should interact with communities, but community involvement is not usually a factor in demarcation
- Peer review is useful and stuff, but has little interaction with the science/non-science demarcation question… I don’t think it came up in any of the sources I looked at
So… Do I still seem misguided? Are Wikipedia and UC Berkeley and this textbook called “Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science” and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy all also misguided? Or am I just interpreting them wrong?
Like I started this investigation feeling 100% ready to learn that my concept of “what Science is” was misguided… But idk, I did a bunch of reading based on your suggestion, and I gotta say I feel pretty guided right now.
If you wanna throw something else to read my way though, I’ll happily have a look at it.
I did follow your link to UC Berkeley (the first one I clicked), and wouldn’t you know it, as I expected, they claim the following:
Huh, look at that. Apparently involving “the scientific community” is part of science.
Again, this is from your link, which you didn’t read, I assume because your patron saint, Dunning-Kruger, frowns on reading.
That’s not like a big gotcha, lol… I actually said “Let’s go look at that checklist,” and had a link to it (in a quote). Those checklist items correspond directly to section headings, and I quoted and responded to the even-more-strongly-worded section heading directly.
In fact, I included it as the best evidence I found for your point: That if I read any textbook on the philosopy of science, it will spell out how “science” is “a particular method of peer review.” Well… I found some evidence that kind of points that way, and a whole boatload that suggests that that isn’t really thought of as part of the Demarcation Problem. I wasn’t going in trying to “be right,” that’s just what I found.
Like I put quite a bit of work in good faith to try to understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t feel like you’re trying to meet me half way.
Look, here’s my point more concisely: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any. Given that science is ostensibly just the activity that scientists engage in, and all of them do peer review, that’s probably important, right?
When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from other, similar activities. The fact that my efforts encounter a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation” or “fact finding”. If science could be captured with such broad strokes, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!
Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth, apparently without reproducibility or peer review. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.
What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review seems to be an indispensable feature of science. Do you have your own definition or suggestions?
P.S. just for future discussions, please don’t use Wikipedia for philosophy or mathematics. It’s a good resource of dates and names but that’s about it. For philosophy you can use textbooks or the Stanford Encyclopedia.
Everyone is always a fan of going over to a dictionary and making only one definition of a word “the true one” because it falls in line with their particular argument of the moment.
We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you please, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use that word. That’s why we have multiple words for similar phenomena, and if you ignore the definitions then you can’t make yourself understood.
There’s private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those aren’t academic science with it’s peer review and publication.
I agree that for it to be science it needs to be reproducible, but obviously publication could happen internally. It just ends up as science that no one else can benefit from, which is contrary to what most scientists actually want.
Musk is just an ass who doesn’t want to share his toys.
how about you figure out how to make a gas pedal that doesn’t try to kill people before you talk shit?
They’ll have to publish the science to a public board, which doesn’t make him money.
