[HN Gopher] Escaping Science's Paradox
___________________________________________________________________
Escaping Science's Paradox
Author : stuart_buck
Score : 37 points
Date : 2020-10-21 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worksinprogress.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (worksinprogress.co)
| mountainboy wrote:
| In my view science is failing because most of today's scientists
| are unwilling to accept evidence that contradicts things they
| were taught in school as "fact" that are little more than dogma.
| The result is paradigms that are near impossible to overturn no
| matter how much falsifying evidence there is or positive evidence
| for an alternative theory.
|
| A good scientist questions and examines EVERYTHING, especially
| assumptions and basic principles. If something doesn't make
| sense, that should be a big flashing warning light, not something
| to memorize and regurgitate and repeat the party line.
|
| Fundamental scientific advancements are slowing because we are
| building on some wrong foundations.
|
| A few examples of areas we've gone wrong and need to consider
| alternatives:
|
| * germ theory
|
| * relativity
|
| * cosmology (expansion, black holes, big bang, dark everything)
|
| * plate tectonics/fixed size earth
|
| * cause of modern chronic diseases
| taylodl wrote:
| This so much reminds me of my company's approach to innovation.
| First, let's create an "innovation group" whose job it is to
| innovate. They'll have their own budget. See investors? We're
| innovating!
|
| Make sure the innovation group isn't comprised of anyone with any
| experience or expertise in the industry vertical, or any other
| vertical for that matter. After all, we don't want them tainted
| with experience! That may interfere with their innovation! They
| can't be constrained by existing knowledge!
|
| Create a plan for how the innovation group is going to innovate
| because, you know, we need to show the investors what's being
| bought with their money. So, let's look at the set of problems
| that have been bedeviling us and everyone else in our industry
| for years and lay them out on a roadmap! We're going to solve all
| these problems!
|
| What you end up with is a group comprised mostly of recent
| college grads having next to no experience and a group of older
| grifters who've decided to make a career out of "innovation."
| Those poor college grads have no clue they're being conned and
| that the grifters are blowing smoke up everyone's ass until 3-4
| years later when little to nothing has been "innovated" they're
| all let go. The grifters know when to bail, those poor college
| grads don't. The grifters move on to con somebody else, the
| college grads meanwhile struggle to find another job.
|
| I've seen this play out several times at several different
| companies. You'd think people would catch on and it would stop
| but no one wants to admit they made a mistake. So the grifters
| con on.
|
| This is all to say you can't _plan_ innovation, just like you can
| 't _plan_ inspiration. You need to have a company culture where
| people can scratch their own itch and have time and resources
| with which to innovate if they so desire. It 's the same with
| science - you can't _plan_ discoveries and breakthroughs. You don
| 't know _a priori_ where all the blind alleys are. Failure is
| useful - it communicates to others where not to look, but no one
| wants to admit the failures so they don 't tend to get published.
| Therefore we only want to put our money on what we're reasonably
| sure will succeed, which is risk-averse and here we are. More and
| more money going in and fewer results coming out.
|
| I feel like the 21st century is all about going through the
| motions and not caring about the actual results.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Being a red team member would be my absolute dream job.
| learnstats2 wrote:
| When I was working in research, we had a journal group which each
| week critiqued the statistics done in scientific journals - most
| often contemporary articles from Science or Nature.
|
| As I recall, every single one of the articles we looked at would
| have failed our "Red Team" standards.
|
| I don't (only) mean that they failed by making trivial errors of
| statistics - I mean a small team of researchers could find
| fundamental errors that potentially or likely undermined or
| contradicted the whole article. It's not surprising that
| something like 50% of the conclusions are not reproducible.
| lliamander wrote:
| If the problem of scientific innovation is merely one of policy
| and incentives (rather than more fundamental limitations) should
| we not be able to point to specific policies that were changed or
| added that resulted in the slowdown of innovation?
|
| If so, then I would think simply reverting back to a previous set
| of policies would be sufficient.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Reproducibility seems like a social problem of people publishing
| shitty science for citations. As for the rate of innovation,
| discovery is certainly an NP-Hard problem. How can we guarantee
| any sort of expected rate of innovation?
| stuart_buck wrote:
| On reproducibility and innovation in science.
| yokaze wrote:
| Personally, I am not a fan of an adversary approach.
|
| I think, reproducing (or failing to reproduce) scientific results
| simply should be given more value/money without incentives for
| disproving the result.
|
| The ability to reproduce a result drives also research as
| currently often the authors are not motivated to make it easy.
| And you don't get payed for simply redoing what was already
| published.
| learnstats2 wrote:
| I don't think this has to be adversary.
|
| Journals choose to set a standard for publication, which is
| generally peer-review.
|
| If journals instead set a standard which was that the work must
| be reproducible (in other words: there must be instruction
| enough for an independent team to reasonably be able to follow
| and repeat what you did), then that sets a higher standard for
| science.
|
| Note that the peers in peer review are likely to mutually
| ignore that type of requirement - rather than face that
| requirement themselves.
| zby wrote:
| "I do not think there's a contradiction between reproducibility
| and innovation. Contrary to common belief, we can improve both at
| once - by incentivizing failed results, and by funding "Red
| Teams" that would aim to refute existing dogma or would be
| entirely outside it."
|
| I don't know - the mechanism that creates the problem with
| reproducibility is that all teams are "Red Teams". What is
| published is what is unexpected, what deviates from a common
| understanding, but nothing confirming what we would expect. Most
| of what seems new and exciting comes out to be just random
| accidents - that is natural, but it is a problem only when we put
| too much weight to them.
| feralimal wrote:
| This is interesting.
|
| I have a couple of points. It says:
|
| "To be sure, the problem seems much less acute in harder sciences
| - e.g., physics, chemistry, cosmology - that have an established
| tradition of skepticism, replication, or even blinding
| researchers to their own conclusions."
|
| Of is this because there are very few people who are trying to
| replicate the studies? The equipment is a barrier. Its not
| clear...
|
| My second point regards innovation, is that surely replicability
| is essential. If studies aren't reliably replicated, what exactly
| can the innovation be? So I see replication as a core issue.
|
| Replicability is also only one of the problems science faces. The
| other issue that isn't well discussed, is that funding comes from
| 3 sources by and large - the government, the military and
| corporations. We, as individuals, cannot assume that this method
| of funding will serve our interests. Why would studies on 'good
| food' receive funding over a new type of medication. When the
| funding is tied to profit, or vested interests, there is only so
| much inclination to 'rock the boat'.
|
| But in general, I'm certainly glad this very major issue is being
| discussed. I'm not holding my breath for any solutions. And I
| only wish there was greater awareness of how much trust, or
| faith, goes into un-skeptical acceptance of scientific
| pronouncements.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Of is this because there are very few people who are trying
| to replicate the studies?
|
| Getting funding to replicate an experiment, which necessarily
| expanded to spend all of the available funding for the initial
| experiment so as to minimize the problemspace, is problematic
| with inflation alone. Imagine how human organizations work.
| Decisioning about spending relies more on past data than
| unknown data. If an experiment is in question, that's an
| unknown. If a finding exists that's a known, so why bother
| spending to reduce value? This is typical CYA thinking.
| feralimal wrote:
| Yes. I think we're agreeing... The costs are prohibitive, so
| why do check? And if you know you aren't likely to get
| checked and you're running a study that would be very nice to
| have a particular outcome, well, wouldn't it be nice to get
| that outcome? Only, that's not how science is meant to work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-10-21 23:00 UTC)