Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
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.
The point of arguing with morons online is not to convince the morons. It’s to convince the spectators.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Does it require independent peer review though? How do you achieve that with without 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
