Submitted âšâš6â© âšmonthsâ© agoâ© by âšfossilesque@mander.xyzâ© to âšscience_memes@mander.xyzâ©
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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 isnât 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 youâre 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 canât have one without the other. If you arenât trying to have your paper reviewed by your peers, thatâs fine, but that isnât science.
To address the gatekeeping, I get it. We shouldnât be using the word to demean people who do valuable research but donât strictly engage in the scientific process. Thatâs 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. Thatâs all research, not science, and we call them separate things for a reason.
I think the word youâre looking for is merit, publication which are cited and peer reviewed hold much more merit than those who donât.
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.
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 ârealâ science due to the reproducibility crisis?
Counterpoint: the scientific method is much simpler than you described.
The rest are details of the above or elitism.
Yup, that poor guy that proved that vaccines cause autism gets unfairly maligned for his efforts; obviously his methodology was unethical but you canât argue the findings.
Imo both in the twitter are stupid. Like, no way engaging with musk could go well.
I am a bit worried the response to this here is not a unified everyoneâs 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.
Itâs worth saying that ml is in a very different position to most of academic publishing.
All of the serious journals are free to punish 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.
Weâre still drowning in too many papers and 95% of everything is shit, but thatâs every field really. Talking to musk on twitter is the not right place for a nuanced discussion about publication.
âNuanceâ and âdiscussionâ did not appear to be part of either participantâs intent.
at least theyâre partially right instead of completely wrong like elon
Partially right versus Elon is not something I would count as a win either.
Sheâs wrong though, everything following the scientific method is science. The fact that you didnât pay out of your ass to publicize your research doesnât matter. Of course it reaches less people, but thatâs a separate issue.
Yann LeCun is a dude
With all these âsheâ talk in this comment section, I was like when did LeCun change gender?
I donât even do anything remotely related to AI, but I know LeCun is a dude.
The scientific method includes peer reviewing.
You donât 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 with publication? The predatory publication system is a different point.
Wouldnât this imply that science didnât exist before academic publication existed? Was zero science conducted before the ~1600s then?
Thereâs 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 âsoftâ 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.
everything following the scientific method is science
Iâm fairly certain âreport conclusionsâ is a pretty big deal in the scientific method.
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.
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 âsecret groupsâ, 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.
Heck, I can think of a half dozen other examples of things that arenât published and/or canât be reproduced but would be considered science.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it âisnât scienceâ?
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesnât have any reproducible experiments?
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isnât worthy of publication not science?
I like dunking on Elon as much as the next guy, but like, âonly things that are published get the title of âscienceââ seems like a pretty indefensible take to meâŠ
i agree because what I usually mean when i talk of science is scientific work even if this work doesnât 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.
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 todayâs PC or phone
Iâd say itâs just research. Science is a group activity by necessity, even if the scientific method is not.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it âisnât scienceâ?
I would say it isnât science yet. Iâd say once you published it and other people confirmed he was right, then it would be science. Until then itâs 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
The Manhattan Project, being a project with no end game but genocide, really shouldnât fucking be considered science; not unless youâre 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 doesnât care about morality. Maybe youâre thinking about religion?
Itâs fair to say that the Manhattan Project wasnât a âscience firstâ project, but to deny that science was happening isâŠmisguided, letâs say.
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. Itâs also basically saying that if you, say, come up with a groundbreaking hypothesis, that thatâs 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 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 whatâs up, and might not want the gatekeeper to take all the credit, as is often the case in academic circles. 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 itâs 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, itâs Musk, could be mostly looney theories too.
It doesnât need to be published in a scientific journal. Publication in journals is the most streamlined way to go through the process, ur you could publish your hypothesis and methodology to a blog and 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 âjournalâ 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.
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 isnât 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 donât need to be a full comprehensive research pieces, they just have to be enough to define and identify particular intellectual property.
Science is a social activity that human beings engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or being creative, or reasoning. Itâs a very specific social method of peer review that serves to generate shared public knowledge.
These are technical terms we have refined over hundreds of years.
Science is a particular method of peer review�
This thread prompted me to revisit what I think âscienceâ means, and Iâve been through a number of different Wikipedia pages, dictionary definitions, etc. but that inquiry just reinforced that this âscience == participation in the institutions/communities of scienceâ idea just doesnât seem to hold up.
Where does this idea come from? I keep seeing this âscience is this very particular thing, itâs not just forming falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them,â but then when I look it up, the sources I find say exactly the opposite.
Everyone is always a fan of going over to a dictionary and making only one definition of a word âthe true oneâ because it falls in line with their particular argument of the moment.
Itâs free to publish.
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 heâs 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.
never mind expensive to publish.
Academic world is very not happy about it either. Academic world hates publishing corporations.
See lawsuits against ResearchGate, lawsuits against Sci-Hub and lawsuits against many students and academics that shared scientific papers.
Btw his bio is:
Yeah heâs a legend in CS⊠Muskrat just further rides himself into being the fool of centuries
Yeah who is Elon? Iâve never heard of him or SpaceX or Tesla. I guess this Musk guy will die in obscurity. Too bad he didnât publish a paper.
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 canât have a social activity without the social component.
Trees falling in forests is a natural phenomenon. Itâs very different.
Yeah, theyâre 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. Oppenheimerâs secret research for the government is pretty fucking foundational. Thomas Edison wasnât 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 youâre 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.
Also how transparently published and reproduced was Pfizerâs vaccine trials, considering a judge had to force the contents released, yet it was science right away. You canât have cake and eat too.
Science is just the process of testing things in the world in a reproducible way.
LeCunâs argument is good career advice (you only get credit for what others know you did), but itâs not factual correct.
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 âre-discoveredâ 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 âscienceâ?
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 canât be reproduced youâve failed to write down something critical.
That is to say, itâs fucking around and, if youâre good at it, finding out.
There are differences between âexperimentingâ, âresearchâ, âanalysisâ and âscienceâ. 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 otherâs 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 Einsteinâs famous phrase âGod does not play dice with the universeâ? 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 werenât 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.
Iâve seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.
Couldnât science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review?
Shit take, everyone sucks here
Real science is trying random stuff until you get slightly better performance out of your model and then creating contrived explanations for why you think it worked
Thereâs private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those arenât academic science with itâs peer review and publication.
how about you figure out how to make a gas pedal that doesnât try to kill people before you talk shit?
tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if itâs science if the methods are transparent and you have access to data, as well as critiques from unbiased parties.
This thread seems to have formed two sides:
I would say that âclosedâ/unpublished science may be science, but since peer review and replication of results are the only way we can tell if something is legitimate science, the problem is that we simply canât know until a third party (or preferably, many third parties) have reviewed it.
There are a lot of forms that review can take. The most thorough is to release it to the world and let anyone read and review it, and so the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, and do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.
If âclosedâ science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever is party to that critique can know itâs science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure if itâs science.
The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this. Iâll use Oppenheimer as an example: in the 40s, no one outside the Manhattan project knew how nuclear bombs were made. Sure, they exploded, but no one outside that small group knew if the reasoning behind why they exploded was correct. Now, through released records, we know what the supporting theory was, and how it was tested. We also know that subsequent work based on that theory (H-bomb development, etc.) and replication (countries other than the US figuring out how to make nukes, in some cases without access to US documents on how it was originally done) was successful and supported the original explanations of why it worked. So now we all know that it was science.
This person seems like an ass. Science is only when you publish peer reviewed papers. Ok so youâre telling me Archimedes and Eratosthenes and al-Kwharzimi and Newton and everyone who figured shit out before the modern system of academia wasnât doing science? This is not a defense of melon-musk, to be clear. He should have his wealth confiscated and his companies nationalized at the minimum.
They both come across as pompous asses in this one.
If you develop a product in secret, take it to market, and make a fortune off it, far more people will know your name than almost any scientist.
Yann LeCun is not a good person, but at least heâs significantly smarter than Elon
Iâve read plenty of times about bullshit published papers that disprove it must be correct and reproducable to get published.
Is the Tweet still up or did it not sit right with Elmo so he took it down?
What the fuck is LeCum thinking about? I work in academia and I couldnât give a shit about being remembered
The part 1 when musk was like âthatâs nothingâ to 40 publications per year. Lmao what a fucking dumbass.
Well somebody is about to find his Twitter account closed for a spurious reason.
I'd say someone should get Musk some burn cream, but he can afford to get it himself.
Never thought Iâd say this but Iâm on Elonâs side this time. If youâre seeking new information about the world and generally following the scientific method youâre doing science.
Is it good science? Thatâs a different question.
Now gather round chillun, sometimes, I say sometimes, you know, sometimes ⊠one should shut up and be rich.
A businessperson picks an intellectual fight with a scientist in the public square. We humbly suggest for due consideration, to âtake under advisementâ, or ârun through the handlersâ, that perhaps, possibly, although we could be wrong, or locked onto the wrong VOR while navigating this latest PR disaster, but just maybe, the global reputational maximum (donât even need gradient descent for this one brah), is to be quiet with ones insecurities, rather than ham-fistedly operate the mouth, removing all doubt, and thus broadcasting the spectacle to the internet (a series of tubes), which will still hold said incident in its memory banks longer than any wetware.
Plus, as an added insult + injury bonus, AI models will slurp this incident into their learning like a line of Bon Ami snorted off a 3-day old third-pan of âtemaleesâ in a gas station âbuffetâ (please avoid the sushi) on the way to nowhere.
All nibbles and bytes are immortal now and forever more!
DWord to your motherboard.
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isnât right when it comes to science
refalo@programming.dev âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
honestly he should know better than to argue with a crazy person.
it doesnât matter how right he is, musk will turn everything around and have fun while doing it.
Klear@sh.itjust.works âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
Yep. All heâs achieving is by this is helping Twitter keep some of its legitimacy.
Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
The point of arguing with morons online is not to convince the morons. Itâs to convince the spectators.
AVincentInSpace@pawb.social âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
I assume by âheâ you mean LeCun
gregorum@lemm.ee âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
thanks to melon tusk, i donât have to
OpenStars@discuss.online âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
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. âSurvival of the fittestâ - 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 âfitterâ 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.
Brekky@lemmy.world âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
Who he?
realbadat@programming.dev âš6â© âšmonthsâ© ago
Neural networks, OCR, called one of the âgodfathers of deep learningâ, etc, etc.
Heâs a brilliant, well known scientist.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun