> The core problem is people conflating science with Science™.
You fell into the same trap by criticizing scientific institutions and the human spirit in an attempt to criticize the scientific method.
> What exactly is the scientific method?
What a ridiculous argument. What exactly is a hamburger? Just ask around and you will find that nobody agrees if a veggie burger should be considered a hamburger, or if you can replace the bun with lettuce and still call it a hamburger. And even if you get people to agree what a hamburger is, nobody is checking that the recipe is followed to the letter. Therefore, real hamburgers do not exist, and nobody can claim in good faith that they are making a hamburger. In fact, why don't we sue McDonalds for their fraud hamburgers?
> Science isn't self correcting.
The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true. You are going to need to sharpen your rethorical devices if you want to argue against hundreds of years of scientific progress, including for example everything that enabled us to argue about this in front of our devices while barely 150 years ago people had to use candles to see each other after dinner. Mind you, not all of this was developed by industrial research labs, in fact the origins of very many modern technologies lie in academic research labs pursuing ideas that are too risky for a commercial entity to bet on. And of course there are plenty of examples of industrial fraud happening despite "managerial intervention" (lol).
Reality is more complex. Not many things, if at all, exist in this world under their platonic ideal form. That does not make them any less real. Yes, we all know that humans are not perfect, sometimes are selfish and chase money and power, not only in academia but also in business, politics, and so on. Wherever humans are involved this sometimes happens. But saying that nothing good ever happens because of this goes against everything one can see when looking out of the window. Scientific progress is real, and needs both industrial and academic labs.
We ought to be able to trust the public with complex realities and contradictions. The scientific method and dogged researchers have brought us many wonderful things, but at the same time fraud happens and the layman might reasonably question to what extent the academy attracts fraudsters and to what extent it creates them.
If we can get over the absolutes then we can discuss policy changes.
Graduate student collective bargaining is one experiment; how can anyone blow a whistle on malfeasance with such an extraordinary and widening power imbalance?
Totally agree with this framing: trust in public institutions (scientific, governmental, etc.) is a common good that needs to be promoted and safeguarded.
Identifying and punishing fraud is a part of it, whistleblower protection another, modernizing the system so that graduate students are not so dependent on individual advisors yet another idea. More and more personal contact between the public and scientists could be useful too, for example via science fairs, meet & greets and so on.
Are you living in the same reality as the rest of us?
Now, if he'd laid out the financial incentives of all of it and said "everyone is only in it for the money" I'd say that's a a little too cynical. But he stopped short of doing that.
> The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true
That's not merely enough, you need a clear trend that the rate of fraud discovery is greater than the rate of fraud production, not just that "some cases are found out". Good luck with that, since it's by definition not measurable.
Science is very simply a commitment towards objectivity. That's it. You see data, you conclude x,y, or z. and thats it. No external subjective influences changes the conclusions. If the data trends towards "vaccines saves millions of lives", thats it.
You're right that we don't need a universal definition of hamburger. That's because the government stays out of it, so private individuals can use things like Google Maps reviews to police a common sense definition of hamburger along with quality and other nuance.
If governments were forcing everyone to buy anything advertised as a hamburger no questions asked, then the definition of hamburger would matter a lot.
The devices on my desk are 99.9% the product of the private sector and owe nearly nothing to academia.
If people can't define it, then that seems to me like a valid criticism of the scientific method. You can't have institutions that claim to be doing science if they don't use the same definition of science as other people do.
They said "nearly nothing". As a fraction of total effort I'd say that the contribution of academia is relatively low. If you're going to say something dumb like overweighting foundationality, I can counter by reminding you that all of modern statistics and thus academic science is literally downstream of industrial beermaking (and gambling) and not academia
Yup, that is also how it works with scientific research: Once an article is published, anybody is free to read it, criticize it, reproduce it. That's because the government stays out of it: private individuals can use things like Google Scholar and Google Search to find other people's reviews and follow-up studies to better understand the quality and nuances of the original research. Consensus is an important part of science just as it is for reviews on Google Maps. Is consensus sometimes wrong? Yes, no doubt. Is it useless? Nope.
> If people can't define it, then that seems to me like a valid criticism of the scientific method.
As we all know, oeer review is not a very reliable signal about the veridicity of the claims, it is merely an approximate quality gate indicating that a study was done following appropriate standards. There needs to be more awareness of this. Nonetheless, in some fields peer review have been public for a long time, and more and more journals are making peer reviews publicly visible. This is a good trend that we should all encourage.
I also think that it sounds like a good idea to hold scientists accountable for the quality of their research, but moving away from fraud (which should unquestionably be punished) towards merely "low quality" is a very slippery slope. Who determines when the quality is good enough and under which criteria? Citations and follow-up research already are an approximate signal, why is that not enough? Proving a study false does not automatically make it low quality. How much money and resources would these additional measures cost? Would the savings from fewer "bad quality studies" offset these costs? How many fewer "good quality studies" would be prevented by redirecting these resources.
Everything is a linear model... Including ANOVA. I find it much easier to condense everything under this framing instead of remembering tens of tests and ad hoc rules. Frequentist statistics always felt to me like an uncohesive bag of tricks anyways.
This was abundantly clear when people, even on HN, were upset about the bureau of labor statistics revising their numbers tendentially downwards, probably confusing the notion of statistical bias for that of political bias.
If the figures are biased, just estimate the bias and correct for that, what is the big deal they said, as if the bias variance tradeoff was not a thing.
> Participants drew on a range of risk discourses in framing their abstention or moderate drinking along the lines of health, wellness, wisdom and productivity. They reiterated social constructions of heavy or regular alcohol use as irresponsible, threatening and potentially addictive.
The Atlantic. Excellent writers, excellent editing. But as a European I find the US slant is a problem. I do miss The Economist's international coverage.
After reading some of that article and the one from Current Affairs in the other comment, I decided I don't have much of a taste for that genre. They may have some decent points, but it's such toxic bickering.
I explicitly chose a criticism from someone with a wildly different political ideology than my own, just to show that this is not a partisan take. I disagree with almost every opinion expressed in that link, yet agree completely with the validity of the examples given. The Atlantic routinely makes statements contrary to fact, and seemingly has no qualms about lying or exaggerating to make an attention-grabbing point. It’s coverage during Covid was particularly atrocious.
That's true, but excel '98 would still cover probably 80% of users use cases.
A lot, and I mean a lot, of software work is trying to justify existence by constantly playing and toying with a product that worked for for everyone in version 1.0, whether it be to justify a job or justify charging customers $$ per month to "keep current".
A large portion of which are using it in a feature phone capacity. Many only use smartphones because it’s what their carrier gave them after their old candybar dumbphone either broke or became unable to connect to cell towers.
The other groups are those who use it identically to how they would iOS (and don’t root or sideload), those that use it as computer replacement, and those who just like to tinker. Those last two groups are a tiny, tiny sliver relative to the others.
Especially once you start counting car entertainment systems, POTS terminals, digital signage, and hundreds of other classes of devices that are not genera-purpose toys.
> what kind of neural-net architecture and training would allow a model to handle numbers lengths it hasn't been trained on
A recurrent neural network implementing binary addition with carry could do this, and one can derive the correct weights with pen and paper without too much effort.
Whether gradient descent will find them too is another matter entirely
> The core problem is people conflating science with Science™.
You fell into the same trap by criticizing scientific institutions and the human spirit in an attempt to criticize the scientific method.
> What exactly is the scientific method?
What a ridiculous argument. What exactly is a hamburger? Just ask around and you will find that nobody agrees if a veggie burger should be considered a hamburger, or if you can replace the bun with lettuce and still call it a hamburger. And even if you get people to agree what a hamburger is, nobody is checking that the recipe is followed to the letter. Therefore, real hamburgers do not exist, and nobody can claim in good faith that they are making a hamburger. In fact, why don't we sue McDonalds for their fraud hamburgers?
> Science isn't self correcting.
The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true. You are going to need to sharpen your rethorical devices if you want to argue against hundreds of years of scientific progress, including for example everything that enabled us to argue about this in front of our devices while barely 150 years ago people had to use candles to see each other after dinner. Mind you, not all of this was developed by industrial research labs, in fact the origins of very many modern technologies lie in academic research labs pursuing ideas that are too risky for a commercial entity to bet on. And of course there are plenty of examples of industrial fraud happening despite "managerial intervention" (lol).
Reality is more complex. Not many things, if at all, exist in this world under their platonic ideal form. That does not make them any less real. Yes, we all know that humans are not perfect, sometimes are selfish and chase money and power, not only in academia but also in business, politics, and so on. Wherever humans are involved this sometimes happens. But saying that nothing good ever happens because of this goes against everything one can see when looking out of the window. Scientific progress is real, and needs both industrial and academic labs.