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Every few days I read that science is broken or losing credibility. And yet somehow the torrent of new technology, medicine and understanding of the world just
by robotresearcher 10y ago
Every few days I read that science is broken or losing credibility. And yet somehow the torrent of new technology, medicine and understanding of the world just keeps coming, and often makes my life better. So maybe not completely broken.
CRISPR, Higgs' boson, gravity waves, deep networks, self-driving cars. Not broken.
- praptak 10y agoIt's not about technology. Bullshit science affects policies. Also you don't see what did not get discovered/invented because of people having wasted time trying to build on bad theories. Also, nobody's saying it's completely broken.
- return0 10y agoThose are major advances that happen very very rarely. The bulk of science is small incremental steps in science. It is extremely frustrating not being able to trust the results published even in high impact journals. This is a particularly glaring problem for theoreticists/modelers. Each theory/model must rely on potentially hundreds of studies, and it's really hard to assign a confidence level to each of them.
- T-A 10y agoCRISPR is a genuinely novel scientific advance. The other items in your list are not. The Higgs mechanism was concocted half a century ago; gravity waves are even older (general relativity is more than a century old). Their experimental confirmations were engineering feats. Neural networks are from the 50s. Add fast computers and you get deep ones. Put them in cars and they learn to drive themselves.