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An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professi

An article by an electrical engineer, published in a political journal, about climate change... I had low hopes, which were met. IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. Engineers use what is known and understood to construct systems that can be validated. Scientists investigate unknown systems to try to construct knowledge and understanding. The worst thing, professionally, for an engineer is to not know or understand your work. The worst thing, for a scientist, is to spend too much time on things that are already known and understood. Engineers love to point out how scientists don't know, and can't prove, whether their climate models are accurate. Scientists know that that is the whole point of building such models. Working without knowing whether you're correct is not epistemological conflict. It's the fundamental condition of being a scientist. Yes, it would be better if we knew everything and only consulted systems that are provably correct. But we don't. And the only way to expand what we know is to spend a ton of time doing things that we don't know. We haven't found any other way to do it. Writing hand-wringing articles about the state of science from the sidelines does not advance human knowledge. You can't expand the map by standing inside the border and complaining about how hard it is to see past it.

pdonis 6y ago
> Working without knowing whether you're correct is not epistemological conflict. It's the fundamental condition of being a scientist. This is true, but it's also true that, when making public policy, we should be thinking like engineers, not scientists. Public policy is not about constructing new knowledge. It's about working out conflicts between different values and priorities based on our best current knowledge. To the extent the article is talking about public policy, I think it makes a valid point that the limitations of our knowledge in areas highly relevant to public policy are very often not recognized or taken into account when making public policy.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  There are no sidelines in public policy. There's nowhere to wait to see how things turn out before making a decision. So, there are no neutral decisions. "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now. That can be a valid choice, and something to debate, but it's fundamentally different from the feined neutrality of the concept of waiting to see. To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet. This is actually well-understood in public policy when it comes to other areas like economics or defense; leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them. "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite time in the future.” ― General Patton Engineering, as a discipline, cannot cover all of life. It largely constrains itself to situations that are understood, and can do so because there are other complementary disciplines that create the knowledge it uses. But in public policy there's not a complementary Earth or society that we can wait for.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now. No, it's an affirmative choice to not impose a public policy on everyone based on what we think we know right now. And often that is the right choice. > To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet. You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong. It needs to demonstrate that it's right with a sufficient level of confidence before it even gets considered at all. "Not good enough yet" just means "you haven't shown your claims to be right with enough confidence to make them worth considering in this public policy debate". > leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them. "Leaders" aren't the only ones who act to address needs in real time and make decisions. Everybody does that. Often the best thing for "leaders" to do is to not make any decisions at all as "leaders", but to simply let individual people, who have far more accurate information about their individual situations than any "leader" can possibly have, make their own decisions. For a "leader" to make a decision and dictate a public policy, the policy needs to be based on knowledge that is strong enough to justify overriding the billions of individual decisions that people are making all the time about their individual lives, with a top-down dictated decision that everybody must follow. That's a much, much stricter requirement than most people appear to think.
guscost 6y ago
If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.
  - pjkundert 6y ago
    Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best. Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good. The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently. Good luck with all that!
  - guscost 6y ago
    Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.
    - whywhywhynot 6y ago
      What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc
      - guscost 6y ago
        I don’t think you understand. The “people” in my statement are not politicians, they are charlatans, whining whenever their uncertain theories are not used by politicians to dictate how everyone must behave, which according to some mental gymnastics ought to happen because their theories are dressed up in an outdated notion of “science”. It is pernicious fascist bullshit, but thankfully it will fail.
pjkundert 6y ago
A primary problem with using so-called "scientific consensus" to form public policy, is that while (perhaps) the scientists that produced the research might (emphasis on might) understand that their research is falsifiable -- the rest of the body politic does not, and proceeds on the assumption that it is "settled science". They get to reap the wind of publicly funded largesse, ... and we get to reap the whirlwind. Both Engineers and Scientists must satisfy the Scientific Method; if your proposed hypothesis is refuted (ya, even just once, a little bit!), it must be abandoned. Unfortunately, there appear to be a large body of both Scientists and Engineers that do not feel their research/results should be subjected to analysis and discarded when refuted -- and this insanity (ie. rejecting the Scientific Method =~= Insanity) is supported, stridently, by the political elites and public at large.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
> Engineers love to point out how scientists don't know, and can't prove, whether their climate models are accurate. Scientists know that that is the whole point of building such models. I disagree, strongly. A big part of the point of building such models is to get models that are more accurate than the currently-existing models.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  We agree.
pacala 6y ago
Corollary: Climate science models should be built by engineers, not by scientists. Task people who 'use what is known and understood to construct systems that can be validated'. Perhaps the whole scientist-as-faux-priest meme should be toned down a notch.
- pzone 6y ago
  This notion seems to incorrectly represent what climate science models are and how they are developed. If there were some way to "validate" them that everyone could generally agree upon, it would be possible to move this work to the domain of engineering. But each climate model varies quite a lot in its structure, dynamical equations, what simplifications it makes for numerical tractability, use of datasets and how to map them to model parameters. The role of climate scientists is to hash out which models are more sensible than others and to push the boundaries of accuracy and certainty with new methodologies. This is why the best we can do from a policy perspective at the moment is model aggregation: that is taking tens of models computed by various research teams and combining them into policy recommendations along with uncertainty brackets. Distilling the state of current research into a policy digest is the role of the International Panel on Climate Change, which is currently in their sixth iteration of this process. You can keep up to date and read previous reports here. https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/
  - pacala 6y ago
    If they are anywhere nearly as sensitive to 'bayesian priors', aka parameters made up of full cloth, as the covid19 models, then I take a hard pass. Edit: Perhaps that was a bit too much of an 'in jest' reply. I'm frustrated at the whole mathematical rituals schtick, when in reality the whole thing is at best an unfalsifiable qualitative guess. The parameter space is immense, and we only have 1 measurable trajectory through it for validation.
    - a9h74j 6y ago
      > The parameter space is immense This. This. This. I've seen claims that the number of parameters in the Imperial College agent-based model was c.a. 400. Perhaps it was 40. Compare to a quadratic or quartic fit to some log-lin data. If you have to represent your ratio of poorly-constrained model parameters (40 or 400) to apparently necessary parameters (say 4) _using Big-O notation_, then science has arguably left the premises.
paganel 6y ago
> But we don't. And the only way to expand what we know is to spend a ton of time doing things that we don't know. That can sound great, at least from a scientist's point of view, the issue is that many times those "things the scientists don't know about" are taken as a given (i.e. closer to the "truth" compared to the things that non-scientists reason about) and they come back to bite us non-scientists, meaning the general public. This virus has proven just that, with scientists in many countries believing lots of different things (they still do, even after ~4 months since the whole thing has reached a new level), about which things it was obvious "they didn't know that much about", but it didn't matter, because most of the time their voices were heard louder compared to everyone else's and as such the powers that be decided to follow those scientists' lead/advices. In other words, it's ok that scientists don't know everything, but they should also be aware of that and they should let their "superiors" (government officials, people having the power to influence the lives of millions of other people) know about them not knowing everything. Going back to this virus, I've personally never heard an "expert" say out loud in the media something like: "we just don't know how this virus really works and we really don't know how best to fight it, we're really navigating in the dark here, we're asking you to stay locked-down in your houses because we think it's the right thing to do but we can't say exactly for how long because we really don't know".
- pjkundert 6y ago
  That's a great example; and, the instant we got 1 (one!) report that gave evidence of a significant percentage of the population having experienced the virus with few symptoms -- thus lowering the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) for that segment of the population to something near a low multiple of the normal Flu -- the "lockdown" hypothesis should have been discarded, violently, for that segment of the population! But, it wasn't; because these "falsifying" signals were ignored (or worse yet, stridently denied), and were certainly not actually tested -- we have yet to see even a single case of a country aggressively testing a random sampling of their entire population for immunity! This one example is an astonishing repudiation of the global response to Coronavirus. Its insane! Wholesale self-destruction of the global supply-chain and division of labor, because the political, medical and scientific elites just don't want to be shown to be wrong.
btrettel 6y ago
You claim that engineers apply known science, and consequently have a hard time understanding and doing quality science themselves. This is a common view in some groups, but it isn't true in my experience. Fact is that engineers receive training in science that is similar that of scientists as far as I can tell. (I'd argue that it's superior in some aspects!) Don't focus too much on the titles. Look at the content of the curriculum. Full disclosure: I haven't read the linked article and am not defending or endorsing it here, just trying to correct a misconception about engineers. I have a BS and MS in engineering, and am almost done a PhD in engineering, where I have basically conducted applied scientific research. I am friends with quite a few physicists and have heard variations of your argument from them many times. When they ask why I didn't get a degree in physics, my answer is easy: "Physics" is more accurately "modern physics". Consequently, fluid dynamics (my area) is rarely studied in physics departments. Typically one gets a degree in aerospace or mechanical engineering to become a fluid "physicist". Also, I haven't seen any clear data showing that engineers are more prone to unqualified statements that than non-engineers. I think there is something to this but I would attribute it to engineers (by title) seeming more conservative and religious than scientists, and they are willing to challenge the status-quo here. The problem in my view is not engineers being less qualified to do and understand science.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  I want to be clear that I'm not intending to make a value judgment, like scientists are better than engineers or vice versa. And I agree that it's not about degrees; people with engineering degrees work in science and vice versa.
  - btrettel 6y ago
    Well, the following seems fairly harsh to me, and I would recommend rephrasing it: > IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. The wording "few categories" in particular seems hyperbolic. I think many non-STEM folks would have a much harder time understanding science than engineers.
scottishcow 6y ago
You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time. Whatever opinion you may have about the article, as far as I can tell the author is certainly not on "the sidelines" and more than qualified to write about the state of science.
- war1025 6y ago
  > some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. > An EE professor at a well-regarded research university Oddly enough, I'd trust the experience of an engineer over that of a professor basically every time.
viburnum 6y ago
So many prominent creationists are engineers. It’s weird.
rrmm 6y ago
This comment x 1000. (Some) Engineers think they have it all figured out. And they do...because someone figured it out all for them, and they get to work with the benefit of that knowledge. This is a polemical statement, I'm closer to an engineer than a scientists and I really like having a solid model to work from. It took me a long time to understand how useful approximations are to solving hard problems. Because I didn't want to know the approximations, I wanted a perfect model. (Oddly, I came to understand the power of approximations in terms of electronics. Electronics are filled with rules of thumb that help you figure out how your circuit works and help to elucidate the behaviors that are important to you. But it took me awhile to get over myself and use them. It was honestly a huge road block to progress in learning.) My own take-aways: getting knowledge (de novo, ex nihilo) and applying knowledge are two very important things, but are separate skills. Ideally you'd like to have both. Secondly science is difficult because you are trying to figure out true things in the face of glaring uncertainties.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  My biggest pet peeve is the use of term computer science as something you get knowledge of from coding. The latest Gödel Prize award for computer science was awarded for "their constructive proof of the Lovász Local Lemma". How many of the self proclaimed computer scientist would be able to read the math formulas Cynthia Dwork (latest Knuth Prize winner) wrote in her paper The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy? That's what you get from a Computer Science degree. How many of those theorems became understandable to someone just from coding? You have to hit the books, the CS-books. It's like someone saying they know law because they know english, and english is what is used in the end. Sorry for the rant.

pdonis 6y ago

> Working without knowing whether you're correct is not epistemological conflict. It's the fundamental condition of being a scientist. This is true, but it's also true that, when making public policy, we should be thinking like engineers, not scientists. Public policy is not about constructing new knowledge. It's about working out conflicts between different values and priorities based on our best current knowledge. To the extent the article is talking about public policy, I think it makes a valid point that the limitations of our knowledge in areas highly relevant to public policy are very often not recognized or taken into account when making public policy.

snowwrestler 6y ago
There are no sidelines in public policy. There's nowhere to wait to see how things turn out before making a decision. So, there are no neutral decisions. "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now. That can be a valid choice, and something to debate, but it's fundamentally different from the feined neutrality of the concept of waiting to see. To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet. This is actually well-understood in public policy when it comes to other areas like economics or defense; leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them. "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite time in the future.” ― General Patton Engineering, as a discipline, cannot cover all of life. It largely constrains itself to situations that are understood, and can do so because there are other complementary disciplines that create the knowledge it uses. But in public policy there's not a complementary Earth or society that we can wait for.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > "Waiting until we're more sure about something" is not actually waiting, it is an affirmative decision to disregard what we think we know right now. No, it's an affirmative choice to not impose a public policy on everyone based on what we think we know right now. And often that is the right choice. > To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet. You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong. It needs to demonstrate that it's right with a sufficient level of confidence before it even gets considered at all. "Not good enough yet" just means "you haven't shown your claims to be right with enough confidence to make them worth considering in this public policy debate". > leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them. "Leaders" aren't the only ones who act to address needs in real time and make decisions. Everybody does that. Often the best thing for "leaders" to do is to not make any decisions at all as "leaders", but to simply let individual people, who have far more accurate information about their individual situations than any "leader" can possibly have, make their own decisions. For a "leader" to make a decision and dictate a public policy, the policy needs to be based on knowledge that is strong enough to justify overriding the billions of individual decisions that people are making all the time about their individual lives, with a top-down dictated decision that everybody must follow. That's a much, much stricter requirement than most people appear to think.

guscost 6y ago

If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.
- pjkundert 6y ago
  Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best. Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good. The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently. Good luck with all that!
- guscost 6y ago
  Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.
  - whywhywhynot 6y ago
    What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc
    - guscost 6y ago
      I don’t think you understand. The “people” in my statement are not politicians, they are charlatans, whining whenever their uncertain theories are not used by politicians to dictate how everyone must behave, which according to some mental gymnastics ought to happen because their theories are dressed up in an outdated notion of “science”. It is pernicious fascist bullshit, but thankfully it will fail.

pjkundert 6y ago

A primary problem with using so-called "scientific consensus" to form public policy, is that while (perhaps) the scientists that produced the research might (emphasis on might) understand that their research is falsifiable -- the rest of the body politic does not, and proceeds on the assumption that it is "settled science". They get to reap the wind of publicly funded largesse, ... and we get to reap the whirlwind. Both Engineers and Scientists must satisfy the Scientific Method; if your proposed hypothesis is refuted (ya, even just once, a little bit!), it must be abandoned. Unfortunately, there appear to be a large body of both Scientists and Engineers that do not feel their research/results should be subjected to analysis and discarded when refuted -- and this insanity (ie. rejecting the Scientific Method =~= Insanity) is supported, stridently, by the political elites and public at large.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

> Engineers love to point out how scientists don't know, and can't prove, whether their climate models are accurate. Scientists know that that is the whole point of building such models. I disagree, strongly. A big part of the point of building such models is to get models that are more accurate than the currently-existing models.

snowwrestler 6y ago
We agree.

pacala 6y ago

Corollary: Climate science models should be built by engineers, not by scientists. Task people who 'use what is known and understood to construct systems that can be validated'. Perhaps the whole scientist-as-faux-priest meme should be toned down a notch.

pzone 6y ago
This notion seems to incorrectly represent what climate science models are and how they are developed. If there were some way to "validate" them that everyone could generally agree upon, it would be possible to move this work to the domain of engineering. But each climate model varies quite a lot in its structure, dynamical equations, what simplifications it makes for numerical tractability, use of datasets and how to map them to model parameters. The role of climate scientists is to hash out which models are more sensible than others and to push the boundaries of accuracy and certainty with new methodologies. This is why the best we can do from a policy perspective at the moment is model aggregation: that is taking tens of models computed by various research teams and combining them into policy recommendations along with uncertainty brackets. Distilling the state of current research into a policy digest is the role of the International Panel on Climate Change, which is currently in their sixth iteration of this process. You can keep up to date and read previous reports here. https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/
- pacala 6y ago
  If they are anywhere nearly as sensitive to 'bayesian priors', aka parameters made up of full cloth, as the covid19 models, then I take a hard pass. Edit: Perhaps that was a bit too much of an 'in jest' reply. I'm frustrated at the whole mathematical rituals schtick, when in reality the whole thing is at best an unfalsifiable qualitative guess. The parameter space is immense, and we only have 1 measurable trajectory through it for validation.
  - a9h74j 6y ago
    > The parameter space is immense This. This. This. I've seen claims that the number of parameters in the Imperial College agent-based model was c.a. 400. Perhaps it was 40. Compare to a quadratic or quartic fit to some log-lin data. If you have to represent your ratio of poorly-constrained model parameters (40 or 400) to apparently necessary parameters (say 4) _using Big-O notation_, then science has arguably left the premises.

paganel 6y ago

> But we don't. And the only way to expand what we know is to spend a ton of time doing things that we don't know. That can sound great, at least from a scientist's point of view, the issue is that many times those "things the scientists don't know about" are taken as a given (i.e. closer to the "truth" compared to the things that non-scientists reason about) and they come back to bite us non-scientists, meaning the general public. This virus has proven just that, with scientists in many countries believing lots of different things (they still do, even after ~4 months since the whole thing has reached a new level), about which things it was obvious "they didn't know that much about", but it didn't matter, because most of the time their voices were heard louder compared to everyone else's and as such the powers that be decided to follow those scientists' lead/advices. In other words, it's ok that scientists don't know everything, but they should also be aware of that and they should let their "superiors" (government officials, people having the power to influence the lives of millions of other people) know about them not knowing everything. Going back to this virus, I've personally never heard an "expert" say out loud in the media something like: "we just don't know how this virus really works and we really don't know how best to fight it, we're really navigating in the dark here, we're asking you to stay locked-down in your houses because we think it's the right thing to do but we can't say exactly for how long because we really don't know".

pjkundert 6y ago
That's a great example; and, the instant we got 1 (one!) report that gave evidence of a significant percentage of the population having experienced the virus with few symptoms -- thus lowering the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) for that segment of the population to something near a low multiple of the normal Flu -- the "lockdown" hypothesis should have been discarded, violently, for that segment of the population! But, it wasn't; because these "falsifying" signals were ignored (or worse yet, stridently denied), and were certainly not actually tested -- we have yet to see even a single case of a country aggressively testing a random sampling of their entire population for immunity! This one example is an astonishing repudiation of the global response to Coronavirus. Its insane! Wholesale self-destruction of the global supply-chain and division of labor, because the political, medical and scientific elites just don't want to be shown to be wrong.

btrettel 6y ago

You claim that engineers apply known science, and consequently have a hard time understanding and doing quality science themselves. This is a common view in some groups, but it isn't true in my experience. Fact is that engineers receive training in science that is similar that of scientists as far as I can tell. (I'd argue that it's superior in some aspects!) Don't focus too much on the titles. Look at the content of the curriculum. Full disclosure: I haven't read the linked article and am not defending or endorsing it here, just trying to correct a misconception about engineers. I have a BS and MS in engineering, and am almost done a PhD in engineering, where I have basically conducted applied scientific research. I am friends with quite a few physicists and have heard variations of your argument from them many times. When they ask why I didn't get a degree in physics, my answer is easy: "Physics" is more accurately "modern physics". Consequently, fluid dynamics (my area) is rarely studied in physics departments. Typically one gets a degree in aerospace or mechanical engineering to become a fluid "physicist". Also, I haven't seen any clear data showing that engineers are more prone to unqualified statements that than non-engineers. I think there is something to this but I would attribute it to engineers (by title) seeming more conservative and religious than scientists, and they are willing to challenge the status-quo here. The problem in my view is not engineers being less qualified to do and understand science.

snowwrestler 6y ago
I want to be clear that I'm not intending to make a value judgment, like scientists are better than engineers or vice versa. And I agree that it's not about degrees; people with engineering degrees work in science and vice versa.
- btrettel 6y ago
  Well, the following seems fairly harsh to me, and I would recommend rephrasing it: > IMO few categories of professions have a harder time understanding cutting-edge science than engineers. That is because they think they know science because they use similar mathematical and technical tools, when in fact the professions do the exact opposite of one another. The wording "few categories" in particular seems hyperbolic. I think many non-STEM folks would have a much harder time understanding science than engineers.

scottishcow 6y ago

You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time. Whatever opinion you may have about the article, as far as I can tell the author is certainly not on "the sidelines" and more than qualified to write about the state of science.

war1025 6y ago
> some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple. > An EE professor at a well-regarded research university Oddly enough, I'd trust the experience of an engineer over that of a professor basically every time.

viburnum 6y ago

So many prominent creationists are engineers. It’s weird.

rrmm 6y ago

This comment x 1000. (Some) Engineers think they have it all figured out. And they do...because someone figured it out all for them, and they get to work with the benefit of that knowledge. This is a polemical statement, I'm closer to an engineer than a scientists and I really like having a solid model to work from. It took me a long time to understand how useful approximations are to solving hard problems. Because I didn't want to know the approximations, I wanted a perfect model. (Oddly, I came to understand the power of approximations in terms of electronics. Electronics are filled with rules of thumb that help you figure out how your circuit works and help to elucidate the behaviors that are important to you. But it took me awhile to get over myself and use them. It was honestly a huge road block to progress in learning.) My own take-aways: getting knowledge (de novo, ex nihilo) and applying knowledge are two very important things, but are separate skills. Ideally you'd like to have both. Secondly science is difficult because you are trying to figure out true things in the face of glaring uncertainties.

danielscrubs 6y ago
My biggest pet peeve is the use of term computer science as something you get knowledge of from coding. The latest Gödel Prize award for computer science was awarded for "their constructive proof of the Lovász Local Lemma". How many of the self proclaimed computer scientist would be able to read the math formulas Cynthia Dwork (latest Knuth Prize winner) wrote in her paper The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy? That's what you get from a Computer Science degree. How many of those theorems became understandable to someone just from coding? You have to hit the books, the CS-books. It's like someone saying they know law because they know english, and english is what is used in the end. Sorry for the rant.