Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isn’t right when it comes to science

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).

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.

She's wrong though, everything following the scientific method is science. The fact that you didn't pay out of your ass to publicize your research doesn't matter. Of course it reaches less people, but that's a separate issue.

I am a bit worried the response to this here is not a unified everyone's 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.

Btw his bio is:

• Professor at NYU
• Chief AI Scientist at Meta
• ACM Turing Award Laurete

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?

There are differences between "experimenting", "research", "analysis" and "science". 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 other's 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 Einstein's famous phrase "God does not play dice with the universe"? 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 weren't 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.

I've seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.

Couldn't science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then...

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.

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.

There's private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those aren't academic science with it's peer review and publication.

how about you figure out how to make a gas pedal that doesn't try to kill people before you talk shit?

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.

Is the Tweet still up or did it not sit right with Elmo so he took it down?

Yann LeCun is not a good person, but at least he's significantly smarter than Elon

I'm too lazy to edit it, but you get the idea: