A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
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.
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.
Never thought I’d say this but I’m on Elon’s side this time. If you’re seeking new information about the world and generally following the scientific method you’re doing science.
Is it good science? That’s a different question.
By that logic you’d say that dianetics counts as science? Lmao
And you’d say that some brilliant student project isn’t. Publication is not the definition of science. Does the work have to be correct to be science? No. Most science is eventually shown to be incorrect in some way. It’s the search for answers that defines science not some journal that openly exploits the people who are searching.
Science is pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Science is only science if it propagates, otherwise it's just someone's discovery. Science has to be built upon, even if it's disproven, that means it was documented well enough to be built upon. That's not to say everything that's disproven is science, because crackpot theories don't often push the bounds of human knowledge.
I hope the brilliant students get their knowledge out there. (But that is unfortunately hard in academia. Despite us living in what should be a post knowledge scarcity society, we clearly aren't.)
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.
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.
It's free to publish.
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.
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.
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.
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
There are probably more obstacles to my daydream than I'm aware of. That being said there is nothing static about science. Comparing what we're doing now to what we were doing a century ago, two centuries ago, and three centuries ago we might as well be comparing completely separate enterprises based on almost completely different fundamentals. Academia has never been as organized and wide-reaching as it is today so it may seem like a monolith, but it's a new monolith which I'm not sure will remain exactly as it is for long (relatively). I think there's some room for experimentation.