Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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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 All unpublished papers are not reproducible.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.
I feel like I'm missing something here so I'll be the devil's advocate, why can't unpublished papers be reproducible? Multiple teams could independently be verifying hypotheses and results under the same organisation, adhere to the same standard but never publish, that would still be science no? Not doing humanity any favours, but science nonetheless.
Because science is about objective, provable fact following a known and public method. An organization can say their findings are reproducible, but reproducibility is more than just getting the same results every time the same lab runs the same PCR on the same machine. To be truly reproducible your results need to be able to be replicated by anyone with appropriate materials and equipment.
What you are describing is research, not science. It’s not that research is bad, but that science is a philosophical adherence to a method as much as it is that method itself.
The tobacco companies conducted research when they realized smoking caused cancer and hid those findings from others. That’s not science even if their internal researchers were consistent with each other.
Seems like the only difference is that if it's public or not ie published. I think it becomes a matter of opinion then, because independent teams within the same organisation can absolutely peer review eachother, use completely different methodology to prove the same hypothesis and publish papers internally so it can be reproduced internally.
Science should be made public, but just because it's not doesn't mean it's not science. When the organisation starts making public claims they should have to back that up along the official route, but they could just as well keep their findings a secret, use that secret to improve their working formula and make bank while doing that. Not calling their internal peer reviewed studies science just seems pretentious.
No, they can’t. Peer review is not the peers you determine - it’s the peers of your community. Science that is not public is not science, because it cannot be independently verified and reproduced. It is not a small point, it’s one of the foundations of the disciplines of science.
An organisation with fully independent teams tackling the same problems can absolutely be defined as peer review. Not in the traditional sense, but reviewing, confirming and replicating nonetheless. Following the scientific method is what makes something scientific, not the act of publishing.
You can argue of the merits of those papers, an organisation can never make public statements about private research. But saying that what their doing is not science, then you're just needlessly gatekeeping.
No it literally cannot be so defined. The last part of the scientific method is “report conclusions.” That means public scrutiny free of bias. Internal groups are not public.
This is akin to saying that a corporation doesn’t need to use the courts because it has internal judges. They might have trials, but by definition they are not doing justice.
Reporting your conclusions doesn't require being public. It means the larger group of people you release it to, the less bias you'll have. Meaning in a closed organisation you have added biases of companies and marginally less people to prove you wrong, decreasing the overal quality of the conducted science. But still science, which by definition isn't black and white.
I mean, Yann LeCunn disagrees with you but sure. Go on.
He's clearly taking the "but it's better for human kind" stand, which I support with all I can. But academics can be guilty of gatekeeping and being pretentious, which I've seen by many lmao
Gatekeeping on following the scientific method is pretty good gatekeeping if you ask me. Again, what you are arguing is anathema to centuries of scientific endeavors. You’re applying your own interpretation to something that has literally hundreds of years of meaning already, in a way that is just not right. It’s not gatekeeping any more than “a court of law” gatekeeps the concept of justice.
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.
Why can’t it be both?
They are logically different. Harry Potter is published, but it's not science, for example, so it is not true that if it is published it is science
Many argue that a lot of cosmology is not science, despite it being published and peer reviewed as it has no falsifiable predictions
Why do people down vote honest questions? Not everyone gets an education in philosophy
I can live with downvotes. It’s the internet and not everyone knows me. And to be fair, I’ve made some “friends” along the way.
But to your point, in the Venn Diagram of life, I admittedly was basing my question on the smaller subset of actual papers that are scientific in nature, and certainly not fantasy novels. You do raise a good point about published and peer reviewed pseudoscience, like cosmology. I would hope that , as pointed out by Yann LaCun, those publications need to be reviewed and vetted by people too and that’s where their claims hopefully fall apart.
I digress. I see now how my questions holds a lot of assumptions; which by its very nature is unscientific. It was an earnest question, so I thank you for pointing out its flaws.
While I believe they answered well, the short being it being published doesn’t mean it is automatically science, there are plenty of shitty publications that care more about number of articles than ensuring good practices, and good peer review.
The point of what he was saying was that you need to publish it for it to be science tho, as science is there to build knowledge and increase our understanding, and not publishing does not allow that and thus is not science, even if the methods were good and the logic was sound.