4 ms·

Impressive how timeless this is. I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating all of the knowledge there is. It's time scientists stopped

by breck 7y ago

Impressive how timeless this is. I would say the great problem of science right now is integrating all of the knowledge there is. It's time scientists stopped publishing dumb weakly connected PDFs, and start switching to a GitHub like pull request model. We could build a single strongly typed peer-reviewed repo of all of the world's scientific information, complete with definitions, experiment protocols and data, and make it universally downloadable and usable by all.

yiyus 7y ago
Having such a repo would be great, but IMO we'd still need those dumb PDFs.
- breck 7y ago
  Okay okay you can still have your PDFs, but only after you submit your pull requests.
hyperbovine 7y ago
Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-has-all-the-answers trope.
- breck 7y ago
  Sometimes things do.
- ibeckermayer 7y ago
  Who claimed software engineering has all the answers? OP is proposing a tool that could be used to help integrate scientific knowledge better than the disintegrated system of PDF’s that exists, what’s wrong with that?
at_a_remove 7y ago
I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of the pull requests received by, say, the physics department. Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required. You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  >You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math." You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone else to work out the math." For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn’t back up the idea with mathematics, his colleagues ignored it. It took 18 years for Maxwell to come along and prove it. This sentiment about math is so cringe, because it is the same type of prejudice of social class that Faraday himself fought against his whole life being the son of a poor smith. Not to mention physicists such as Carl Sagen, generally held in high esteem within the physics community, always preached of an eventual point in physics that transcends math (i.e. something more fundamental and basic) to describe the universe.
  - at_a_remove 7y ago
    It isn't prejudice, or classism, or any -ism, it pure numbers. We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas. Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. And woe betide those who want to say "by the way, your idea leads to perpetual motion/faster-than-light travel, so I will not bother." I personally have experienced soul-crushing numbers of philosophers who happen to think they've disproven special relativity who are also under the impression that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed precisely once and everyone just sort of ... ran with it, never looking back. Who has time to weed through this sort of thing? It isn't ideas that physicists lack for, not in the least.
    - throwaway_tech 7y ago
      >We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas. Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why there are so many more people with ideas of how the world works and such a small number that can validate/disprove them speaks directly to classism. Being able to prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to require a significant investment in education from early childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of investment across the board. In other words until the ideas are disproven you shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they don't have the math chops to prove their own theories. >Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point of this website is to support a similar model where YC is bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.
walleeee 7y ago
I think you're describing something like a hybrid social network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and asynchronous peer review. One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection: how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge under a single type system? Different fields of inquiry make use of extremely diverse conceptual models. I suppose mathematics are in a way a unifying language, but there's hardly a single homogeneous mathematical discipline. The present "weakly" connected network has almost zero technical barriers to entry. It uses well-established technology within a well-established workflow, and it offloads the hard, fuzzy work (e.g., all the model-binding that would presumably take place in the proposed system) to the most flexible computing device we know of: the brain. Everything is already freely downloadable/usable, for the most part (lots of research is open access, and what isn't can often be obtained from the investigators by request). That said, maybe the sort of thing you describe could be translated into a research question. One could try to compare the shape of various data under different encodings, for instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify similar structure? I think category theory has been used to unify previously disparate regions of mathematics. There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation. Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the materials-and-data-sharing.
- breck 7y ago
  > I think you're describing something like a hybrid social network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and asynchronous peer review. Great breakdown, thanks. > One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection: how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge under a single type system? I think you can do it through market forces and forking. Similar to Linux distributions you could have "science" distributions. As for the type system and unifying language, I think you can do a thing that can start from just a dot and no dot and build up characters and numbers and words and types etc, with no extra parts. So perhaps if you had something like that, where simplicity could be rigorously defined, you could get consensus on base level types. If people had strong differences, you could go off and fork a new distribution. I'd imagine you'd have a few distros emerge with decent gravity. Pull request could be really neat. I can imagine you'd have the speed of light defined somewhere in a science distro, and there would be data from reproducible experiments that people have done. Perhaps someone comes up with an ingenuous at home experiment that is just a few steps and sends a pull request that would add that, and perhaps prune some more complex experiment. > offloads the hard, fuzzy work to the...brain Yes, exactly. I'd love it if it was computable (of course, this isn't an original idea--Wolfram Alpha is trying to pull it off). If I could "go to definition" of any scientific conclusion (not only to definitions, but to real data, and simple, repeatable experiments). If you kept "going to definition" all roads eventually would lead back to 0 and 1. > One could try to compare the shape of various data under different encodings, for instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify similar structure? I'm giving it a go with Trees. I think it will work, but still might be a few years before I know for sure. > There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation. Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the materials-and-data-sharing. I like those, especially OSF. Definitely a lot of activity in the space (I invested in some new ones as well). I haven't seen one yet that does the "science monorepo" thing, but hoping someone takes the lead there (and I'll do my best to support it with hopefully useful underlying tech and research).
cs02rm0 7y ago
Wikipedia?
- breck 7y ago
  Yes, but strongly typed.

by breck 7y ago

yiyus 7y ago

Having such a repo would be great, but IMO we'd still need those dumb PDFs.

breck 7y ago
Okay okay you can still have your PDFs, but only after you submit your pull requests.

hyperbovine 7y ago

Ah yes, the old everything-is-broken-and-software-engineering-has-all-the-answers trope.

breck 7y ago
Sometimes things do.
ibeckermayer 7y ago
Who claimed software engineering has all the answers? OP is proposing a tool that could be used to help integrate scientific knowledge better than the disintegrated system of PDF’s that exists, what’s wrong with that?

at_a_remove 7y ago

I am attempting to imagine the horror of wading through all of the pull requests received by, say, the physics department. Requests were awful enough when postage stamps were required. You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math."

throwaway_tech 7y ago
>You underestimate the number of cranks who have "great ideas" and "just need someone else to work out the math." You're not wrong, but, it is important to note there also isn't a shortage of great physicist who "just need someone else to work out the math." For example in 1846, Faraday proposed that visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. But because he couldn’t back up the idea with mathematics, his colleagues ignored it. It took 18 years for Maxwell to come along and prove it. This sentiment about math is so cringe, because it is the same type of prejudice of social class that Faraday himself fought against his whole life being the son of a poor smith. Not to mention physicists such as Carl Sagen, generally held in high esteem within the physics community, always preached of an eventual point in physics that transcends math (i.e. something more fundamental and basic) to describe the universe.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  It isn't prejudice, or classism, or any -ism, it pure numbers. We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas. Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. And woe betide those who want to say "by the way, your idea leads to perpetual motion/faster-than-light travel, so I will not bother." I personally have experienced soul-crushing numbers of philosophers who happen to think they've disproven special relativity who are also under the impression that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed precisely once and everyone just sort of ... ran with it, never looking back. Who has time to weed through this sort of thing? It isn't ideas that physicists lack for, not in the least.
  - throwaway_tech 7y ago
    >We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas. Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why there are so many more people with ideas of how the world works and such a small number that can validate/disprove them speaks directly to classism. Being able to prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to require a significant investment in education from early childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of investment across the board. In other words until the ideas are disproven you shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they don't have the math chops to prove their own theories. >Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments. Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point of this website is to support a similar model where YC is bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.

walleeee 7y ago

I think you're describing something like a hybrid social network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and asynchronous peer review. One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection: how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge under a single type system? Different fields of inquiry make use of extremely diverse conceptual models. I suppose mathematics are in a way a unifying language, but there's hardly a single homogeneous mathematical discipline. The present "weakly" connected network has almost zero technical barriers to entry. It uses well-established technology within a well-established workflow, and it offloads the hard, fuzzy work (e.g., all the model-binding that would presumably take place in the proposed system) to the most flexible computing device we know of: the brain. Everything is already freely downloadable/usable, for the most part (lots of research is open access, and what isn't can often be obtained from the investigators by request). That said, maybe the sort of thing you describe could be translated into a research question. One could try to compare the shape of various data under different encodings, for instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify similar structure? I think category theory has been used to unify previously disparate regions of mathematics. There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation. Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the materials-and-data-sharing.

breck 7y ago
> I think you're describing something like a hybrid social network/semantic web with versioning, knowledge provenance, and asynchronous peer review. Great breakdown, thanks. > One serious problem for any such system is ontology selection: how is one to represent the entire body of scientific knowledge under a single type system? I think you can do it through market forces and forking. Similar to Linux distributions you could have "science" distributions. As for the type system and unifying language, I think you can do a thing that can start from just a dot and no dot and build up characters and numbers and words and types etc, with no extra parts. So perhaps if you had something like that, where simplicity could be rigorously defined, you could get consensus on base level types. If people had strong differences, you could go off and fork a new distribution. I'd imagine you'd have a few distros emerge with decent gravity. Pull request could be really neat. I can imagine you'd have the speed of light defined somewhere in a science distro, and there would be data from reproducible experiments that people have done. Perhaps someone comes up with an ingenuous at home experiment that is just a few steps and sends a pull request that would add that, and perhaps prune some more complex experiment. > offloads the hard, fuzzy work to the...brain Yes, exactly. I'd love it if it was computable (of course, this isn't an original idea--Wolfram Alpha is trying to pull it off). If I could "go to definition" of any scientific conclusion (not only to definitions, but to real data, and simple, repeatable experiments). If you kept "going to definition" all roads eventually would lead back to 0 and 1. > One could try to compare the shape of various data under different encodings, for instance (some sort of topological analysis?) to identify similar structure? I'm giving it a go with Trees. I think it will work, but still might be a few years before I know for sure. > There are already a few entries in the social network/resource-sharing platform space. Have a look at Open Science Foundation. Academia and ResearchGate are similar, but without the materials-and-data-sharing. I like those, especially OSF. Definitely a lot of activity in the space (I invested in some new ones as well). I haven't seen one yet that does the "science monorepo" thing, but hoping someone takes the lead there (and I'll do my best to support it with hopefully useful underlying tech and research).

cs02rm0 7y ago

Wikipedia?

breck 7y ago
Yes, but strongly typed.