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.
I assume by “he” you mean LeCun
yep
thanks to melon tusk, i don’t have to
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).
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).
I’ve seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.
okay so there are requirements besides getting accepted for publication
Were they peer reviewed?
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 can’t have a social activity without the social component.
Again, fact-finding is not the same as science.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s how things work in the AI community. Publications all go through various conferences and journals that are free to submit to. In many of these avenues, if you submit something, the cost is to get a certain number of papers reviewed (not necessarily doing it yourself, but you have to find someone capable of doing it). The publications are then made freely available for anyone to read. Everything is organized by the research community for the benefit of that same community.
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.
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.
ArXiv, bioRxiv and cyberleninka.
EDIT: Today I Learned that cyberleninka now has English version of it at cyberleninka.org
never mind expensive to publish.
Academic world is very not happy about it either. Academic world hates journals publishing corporations.
See lawsuits against ResearchGate, lawsuits against Sci-Hub and lawsuits against many students and academics that shared scientific papers.
Science is a specific social activity that humans engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or reasoning. It’s a particular method of peer review that generates shared public knowledge.
Again, “science” is something humans do together. Experimenting, investigating, puzzling, hypothesizing, intuiting, discovering, and knowing are all things you can do alone.
Everyone is always a fan of going over to a dictionary and making only one definition of a word “the true one” because it falls in line with their particular argument of the moment.
We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you please, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use that word. That’s why we have multiple words for similar phenomena, and if you ignore the definitions then you can’t make yourself understood.
Science is a particular method of peer review…?
This thread prompted me to revisit what I think “science” means, and I’ve been through a number of different Wikipedia pages, dictionary definitions, etc. but that inquiry just reinforced that this “science == participation in the institutions/communities of science” idea just doesn’t seem to hold up.
Where does this idea come from? I keep seeing this “science is this very particular thing, it’s not just forming falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them,” but then when I look it up, the sources I find say exactly the opposite.
EDIT: To respond, backwards, to the edit below, I guess…? That’s not really a gotcha, and not really what I was saying, lol. Please read the whole thread.
See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.
For example, here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Science is a complex epistemic and social practice that is organized in a large number of disciplines, employs a dazzling variety of methods, relies on heterogeneous conceptual and ontological resources, and pursues diverse goals of equally diverse research communities.”
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science” is misguided. If everything is “science” then nothing is “science.”
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science”
Well that’s a reach. I had to buy a new laptop charger and find facts about what voltage, etc. I needed… I certainly don’t consider that fact-finding exercise to be science, and I don’t think I said anything to suggest that.
But okay, I don’t have a textbook handy, but let’s see what we can find out about the Philosophy of Science:
Philosophy of Science - Wikipedia
Seems to pretty clearly indicate “lots of interesting and useful ideas, no consensus.” Peer review mentioned 0 times. The “Defining Science” section links to a page for the demarcation problem, so let’s go look at that.
Demarcation Problem - Wikipedia
“The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields.”
And the article basically continues to that effect, IMO: Demarcation is difficult, unclear, and there is no consensus. Peer review mentioned 0 times.
Maybe it’s just Wikipedia that has this misconception. Let’s check some other sources.
The Philosophy of Science - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
“Despite this diversity of opinion, philosophers of science can largely agree on one thing: there is no single, simple way to define science!”
Re: Demarcation problem:
“Modern philosophers of science largely agree that there is no single, simple criterion that can be used to demarcate the boundaries of science.”
Starting to sound familiar. Lots of opinions from Aristotle to Cartwright, none of whom highlight peer review or acceptance by the institutions as criteria. The page does talk about empiricism, parsimony, falsification, etc. though, consistent with other sources.
Glossary - “science” - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
This one is simple:
Our knowledge of the natural world and the process through which that knowledge is built. The process of science relies on the testing of ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world. Science as a whole cannot be precisely defined but can be broadly described by a set of key characteristics. To learn more, visit A science checklist.
Let’s look at the checklist.
Science is embedded in the scientific community - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
The page heading sounds pretty prescriptive, and that’s about the closest I can find that claims “if it’s not peer reviewed, it’s not science.” The body (IMO rightfully) describes the importance of community involvement in science, but doesn’t say anything like “it’s not science unless it involves the community.”
Take this excerpt about Gregor Mendel:
However, even in such cases [as Gregor Mendel’s], research must ultimately involve the scientific community if that work is to have any impact on the progress of science.
So yes, sharing his findings with the world was why it was able to have an impact, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret that he wasn’t doing science while he was working in isolation, or that it only became science retroactively after it was a) shared, and b) accepted.
Let’s take a look at another textbook and see what it says:
1.6: Science and Non-Science - Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science
This chapter suggests that you can take two approaches to demarcation:
- What makes a theory scientific or non-scientific?
- What makes a “change in a scientific mosaic” scientific?
For theories - They’re clear that there are no clear universal demarcation criteria, but offer these suggestions:
- Suggestion 1: An empirical theory is scientific if it is based on experience.
- Suggestion 2: An empirical theory is considered scientific if it explains all the known facts of its domain.
- Suggestion 3: An empirical theory is scientific if it explains, by and large, the known facts of its domain.
For changes - This pertains specifically to whether a change to “a scientific mosaic” is scientific or not, which necessarily pertains to a scientific community. But I’d argue that this analysis seems pretty clearly downstream of a priori participation in a scientific community, not attempting to define science as such.
Didn’t read the whole textbook, so I might still be missing something, but the focus in the chapter is still definitely on the properties of the inquiry, not on the scientific institutions surrounding it.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Also looked at the entries for Scientific Method and Pseudo-science, which seem to be consistent with the other sources
TL;DR/Conclusion
So I’m still getting a really strong signal that:
- Science/non-science doesn’t have a clear demarcation line, and that problem is called the Demarcation Problem. It has a special name because it’s still a big deal.
- Ideas about what is science vs. non-science focus mostly on the properties of the inquiry: Is it a testable, falsifiable hypothesis that can be investigated with empirical observations?
- Scientific communities are still super important, and you can make statements about how scientific activity should interact with communities, but community involvement is not usually a factor in demarcation
- Peer review is useful and stuff, but has little interaction with the science/non-science demarcation question… I don’t think it came up in any of the sources I looked at
So… Do I still seem misguided? Are Wikipedia and UC Berkeley and this textbook called “Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science” and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy all also misguided? Or am I just interpreting them wrong?
Like I started this investigation feeling 100% ready to learn that my concept of “what Science is” was misguided… But idk, I did a bunch of reading based on your suggestion, and I gotta say I feel pretty guided right now.
If you wanna throw something else to read my way though, I’ll happily have a look at it.
I did follow your link to UC Berkeley (the first one I clicked), and wouldn’t you know it, as I expected, they claim the following:
Huh, look at that. Apparently involving “the scientific community” is part of science.
Again, this is from your link, which you didn’t read, I assume because your patron saint, Dunning-Kruger, frowns on reading.
That’s not like a big gotcha, lol… I actually said “Let’s go look at that checklist,” and had a link to it (in a quote). Those checklist items correspond directly to section headings, and I quoted and responded to the even-more-strongly-worded section heading directly.
In fact, I included it as the best evidence I found for your point: That if I read any textbook on the philosopy of science, it will spell out how “science” is “a particular method of peer review.” Well… I found some evidence that kind of points that way, and a whole boatload that suggests that that isn’t really thought of as part of the Demarcation Problem. I wasn’t going in trying to “be right,” that’s just what I found.
Like I put quite a bit of work in good faith to try to understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t feel like you’re trying to meet me half way.
Look, here’s my point more concisely: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any. Given that science is ostensibly just the activity that scientists engage in, and all of them do peer review, that’s probably important, right?
When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from other, similar activities. The fact that my efforts encounter a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation” or “fact finding”. If science could be captured with such broad strokes, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!
Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth, apparently without reproducibility or peer review. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.
What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review seems to be an indispensable feature of science. Do you have your own definition or suggestions?
P.S. just for future discussions, please don’t use Wikipedia for philosophy or mathematics. It’s a good resource of dates and names but that’s about it. For philosophy you can use textbooks or the Stanford Encyclopedia.
Oh thanks for editing in an example-- that wasn’t there when I wrote my reply, but what did you think of the other Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy links I provided?
That article that you linked (Scientific Pluralism) is an interesting read, but it’s more about the importance of diversity in the scientific community… it doesn’t really address the Demarcation Problem, and it doesn’t discuss peer review or anything as far as I could tell.
Mentioning in passing that “science is social” (which is IMO uncontroversially true in a non-demarcation way, btw) is a few shades away from “any textbook will tell you that science is a particular process of peer review.” I think the Science and Pseudo-Science entry that I linked is more germane.
I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” throughout history, such as Newton, actually considered themselves natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’t make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isn’t — need counter examples). The Royal Academy of Sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon had pointed out that “science requires an intellectual community” (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — standing on the shoulders of giants and all that).
Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’m guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.
Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’t science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.
Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results,“ which is what Elon Musk seems to think.
tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if it’s 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:
- unless it’s published, peer reviewed and replicated it’s not science, and
- LeCun is being elitist, science doesn’t have to be published. This point of view often is accompanied by something about academic publishing being inaccessible or about corporate/private/closed science still being science.
I would say that “closed”/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 can’t 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 it and the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.
If “closed” science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever has access to the work and critique can know it’s science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure.
The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this; I’ll 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.
If we put Elon Musk in a box along with a detector calibrated to detect the emission of a radio active particle, with a device that will cause Elon Musk to do science if it detects the particle and make up bullshit if it doesn’t, does Elon Musk remain an arrogant asshole no matter what the particle does?
Trick question – Elon Musk being anything but an arrogant asshole is impossible under the Standard Model.
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.
Spot on
Sure, but then you aren’t considered a scientist nor your work science.
I think most people outside the scientific community would consider that science.
Couldn’t science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then…
Hm, for a good peer-review process you would still need a way to anonymously distribute to experts in the same field and orchestrate the whole review/editing process. You could obviously try to come up with a better review process but I don’t know how you would do it on a git-platform. How would you prevent trolling or other forms of destructive comments for example? How would you ensure that other people in the field can comment without having to fear repercussions for an honest and negative review.
I’ve read plenty of times about bullshit published papers that disprove it must be correct and reproducable to get published.
Edit: Where did I claim it was or wasn’t science? I’m pointing out the statement that “to be published it must be checked for correctness” simply isn’t true.
Some published papers are not reproducible. All unpublished papers are not reproducible. You’re creating a dangerously wrong equivalence.
They never claimed that all published papers are science. They said if it’s not published, it’s definitely not science.
Then goes on to say that to qualify as science, here are some things it needs to have done. They don’t say that it has to be current and reproducible to be published, they say that if it’s not published then it’s not correct and reproducible. Those are different claims.
If it’s not published it’s not science. The Contrapositive is if it is science, then it is published.
Not if it is published it is science.
I’m too lazy to edit it, but you get the idea:
I’d say someone should get Musk some burn cream, but he can afford to get it himself.
The best emoji for defending your fragile self esteem: 🤣
For depicting your interlocutor as the soyjak and yourself as the chad, it’s almost as good as 🤡
What the fuck is LeCum thinking about? I work in academia and I couldn’t give a shit about being remembered, I just want to live to fight another day like the next guy.
This feels like billionaire banter.
Well somebody is about to find his Twitter account closed for a spurious reason.
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.