3 ms·

"What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?" The above quote is fro

by btown 10y ago

"What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?" The above quote is from Ted Chiang's short story "The Evolution of Human Science," originally published in Nature as "Catching crumbs from the table" [0]. It's a brilliant depiction of this very problem: when new developments contribute to an increasing gap between those who can make new developments, and those attempting to understand the state of the art, the entire process of scientific inquiry becomes less efficient. In fact, the scenario depicted is one where the majority of researchers become "distillers," to use the language of the original post. While Chiang posits a science-fiction reason for the divide, "normal" research/technical debt is insidious as well. Without incentives to reduce debt, the knowledge gap widens until only a handful of experts can make significant contributions. It's a problem that needs to be tackled head-on in both research and engineering. I'd love to see more initiatives like Distill. [0] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a... - a highly recommended companion piece to the original post.

cs702 10y ago
There's another subtle aspect to this: the same or very similar ideas, methods, and tools show up or are reinvented again and again, under different guises, in different disciplines and subfields that have their own jargon, unnecessarily making human comprehension even harder. Tibshirani's "glossary" of ML and Statistics terms is a canonical example: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. -- Denis Diderot, 1755 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 (The History of Information is an absolute treasure of a website, BTW.)
  - btown 10y ago
    "If the government participates in such an opus, it will not get done. It should use its influence only to favor its execution. With a single word, a monarch can make a palace arise from the grass; but a society of men of letters is not like a herd of manual laborers. An encyclopedia cannot be ordered up. It is a labor that must be doggedly pursued rather than launched energetically... The more abstract the topic, the more we must strive to make it accessible to all readers... Such are the principal thoughts that came to my mind with regard to the project of a universal and analytical dictionary of human knowledge; its possibility, its purpose, its materials, the general and particular ordering of those materials, the style, method, references, nomenclature, the manuscript, the authors, the censors, the editors, and the typographer." The translated full text [0] of that Diderot quote is pretty incredible. Two centuries prior to Wikipedia, he predicted many of the benefits and challenges of such an endeavor. I can only imagine his reaction if he were to see Wikipedia today; I imagine it would be something like [1]. [0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=text;rgn=main;idno=did2222.0000.004 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=tex... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Thanks for that. I'd only run across the fragment from which I'd quoted above, and even that is tremendously informed,sightful, and illuminating. I've been digging into the history of information and communication (and only just scratched the surface of THoI website), including the explosion and dynamics of information as it spread across Europe. There's a paper which looks into the total number of books (volumes in total, not simply titles), from about 600 AD through 1800. That grows from perhaps 30,000 volumes -- about 1 per million inhabitants -- to nearly 1 billion in 1800. The 15th century, with the invention of Gutenberg's press is an absolute watershed, and the consequences, social, religious, political, scientific, are immense. I'm starting to wonder just what the hell it is we're unleashing with the Internet and in particular the Internet in your Pocket, across the world. Not all the previous developments have been postive.
specialist 10y ago
Same applies to large code bases, programming stacks, law, service manuals, etc. Expansion while a problem space is explored, drunken sailor style. Contraction and consolidation as best fit solutions are identified and adopted. Technical debt due to entropy, obsolescence, communication lag (diffusion of innovation), pride, etc. --- Oh. This reminds me. TODO: read up on facilities management, see how they deal with this. Stuff like scheduling capex and funding maintenance.

by btown 10y ago

cs702 10y ago

There's another subtle aspect to this: the same or very similar ideas, methods, and tools show up or are reinvented again and again, under different guises, in different disciplines and subfields that have their own jargon, unnecessarily making human comprehension even harder. Tibshirani's "glossary" of ML and Statistics terms is a canonical example: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf

dredmorbius 10y ago
If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. -- Denis Diderot, 1755 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ayavb8clhm61natfm5lfca http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2877 (The History of Information is an absolute treasure of a website, BTW.)
- btown 10y ago
  "If the government participates in such an opus, it will not get done. It should use its influence only to favor its execution. With a single word, a monarch can make a palace arise from the grass; but a society of men of letters is not like a herd of manual laborers. An encyclopedia cannot be ordered up. It is a labor that must be doggedly pursued rather than launched energetically... The more abstract the topic, the more we must strive to make it accessible to all readers... Such are the principal thoughts that came to my mind with regard to the project of a universal and analytical dictionary of human knowledge; its possibility, its purpose, its materials, the general and particular ordering of those materials, the style, method, references, nomenclature, the manuscript, the authors, the censors, the editors, and the typographer." The translated full text [0] of that Diderot quote is pretty incredible. Two centuries prior to Wikipedia, he predicted many of the benefits and challenges of such an endeavor. I can only imagine his reaction if he were to see Wikipedia today; I imagine it would be something like [1]. [0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=text;rgn=main;idno=did2222.0000.004 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=tex... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Thanks for that. I'd only run across the fragment from which I'd quoted above, and even that is tremendously informed,sightful, and illuminating. I've been digging into the history of information and communication (and only just scratched the surface of THoI website), including the explosion and dynamics of information as it spread across Europe. There's a paper which looks into the total number of books (volumes in total, not simply titles), from about 600 AD through 1800. That grows from perhaps 30,000 volumes -- about 1 per million inhabitants -- to nearly 1 billion in 1800. The 15th century, with the invention of Gutenberg's press is an absolute watershed, and the consequences, social, religious, political, scientific, are immense. I'm starting to wonder just what the hell it is we're unleashing with the Internet and in particular the Internet in your Pocket, across the world. Not all the previous developments have been postive.

specialist 10y ago

Same applies to large code bases, programming stacks, law, service manuals, etc. Expansion while a problem space is explored, drunken sailor style. Contraction and consolidation as best fit solutions are identified and adopted. Technical debt due to entropy, obsolescence, communication lag (diffusion of innovation), pride, etc. --- Oh. This reminds me. TODO: read up on facilities management, see how they deal with this. Stuff like scheduling capex and funding maintenance.