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Ok. So AI is magic and we, as a society don't understand it, and it is used in science. Is there anything else in the article? Cause I don't see it. Science is

Ok. So AI is magic and we, as a society don't understand it, and it is used in science. Is there anything else in the article? Cause I don't see it. Science is the process by which we reject verifiably incorrect ideas of the world. There are a lot of USEFUL tools on this planet which do not fall under that umbrella, and there have always been. AI is just the latest one we have. Are we going to say that any sort of spiritual practice (which can be seen as form of unscientific therapy that can provide value to people) is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that a thousand year old medicine which did not understand placebo effects is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that when people meditate to understand how they feel, and then they can't accurately explain the biochemical processes is "post-theory science"? Just because we can come up with very big functions which can approximate complex data (AI) means nothing about how we use them to understand the world. The world has always had non-scientific tools to complement science. And always will have. Science always took longer to catch up. Over time some have become obsolete, because science figured out how to explain what they did. Some have not. Gimmeh a break, there's nothing new here, science ends when we prove things are unknowable. Not when magicians, AIs and humans think other tools perform better.

xg15 5y ago
> Are we going to say that any sort of spiritual practice (which can be seen as form of unscientific therapy that can provide value to people) is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that a thousand year old medicine which did not understand placebo effects is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that when people meditate to understand how they feel, and then they can't accurately explain the biochemical processes is "post-theory science"? I mean, we kinda do - in the sense that, yes, there is a lot of knowledge about actually effective medicine in those, but a lot less why particular remedies work and why others don't work. This can easily lead to "cargo cult" like behaviour, where all you can do is blindly repeat certain rituals and hope they work, but you cannot really refine your methods or develop new methods. (Actually, that's not quite correct. A lot of pre-modern science absolutely tried to develop theories and models behind their observation - as even the original "cargo cult" did - but those were wrong and didn't allow predictions)
- laserbeam 5y ago
  > This can easily lead to "cargo cult" like behaviour, where all you can do is blindly repeat certain rituals and hope they work, but you cannot really refine your methods or develop new methods. An important note. I an not in favor of those practices. All I claim is they can live alongside science, despite all their flaws. So can AI. Science is not becoming post-theory. It always lived alongside non-theory stuff.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> So AI is magic No, this is absolutely the wrong takeaway from the article. NN's are not magic, they are completely understandable in terms of how they work and what they do. However, they do not (easily, if at all) allow the construction of an explanation of why, given input X, they produce output Y. You cannot (easily, if at all) construct a theory of how they generate outputs. So you end up settling for (fairly, or even remarkably suprisingly) accurate predictions, but without the sense that you understand how they are generated, even though you are 100% clear on the mechanism. That's not magic. > There are a lot of USEFUL tools on this planet which do not fall under that umbrella, and there have always been. AI is just the latest one we have. The point of the article, at its heart, is precisely to ask whether these NN-based approaches are in fact science or not. It's not insisting that they are, but pointing out that they are create a gray zone that is qualitatively different from the 3 examples you offer as other non-scientific approaches to understanding. Why? Because they operate in a domain still legitimately filled with much of the language of science, but not much of the technique. That's not true for spiritual practice, traditional medicine or meditation.

xg15 5y ago

> Are we going to say that any sort of spiritual practice (which can be seen as form of unscientific therapy that can provide value to people) is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that a thousand year old medicine which did not understand placebo effects is "post-theory science"? Are we going to say that when people meditate to understand how they feel, and then they can't accurately explain the biochemical processes is "post-theory science"? I mean, we kinda do - in the sense that, yes, there is a lot of knowledge about actually effective medicine in those, but a lot less why particular remedies work and why others don't work. This can easily lead to "cargo cult" like behaviour, where all you can do is blindly repeat certain rituals and hope they work, but you cannot really refine your methods or develop new methods. (Actually, that's not quite correct. A lot of pre-modern science absolutely tried to develop theories and models behind their observation - as even the original "cargo cult" did - but those were wrong and didn't allow predictions)

laserbeam 5y ago
> This can easily lead to "cargo cult" like behaviour, where all you can do is blindly repeat certain rituals and hope they work, but you cannot really refine your methods or develop new methods. An important note. I an not in favor of those practices. All I claim is they can live alongside science, despite all their flaws. So can AI. Science is not becoming post-theory. It always lived alongside non-theory stuff.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> So AI is magic No, this is absolutely the wrong takeaway from the article. NN's are not magic, they are completely understandable in terms of how they work and what they do. However, they do not (easily, if at all) allow the construction of an explanation of why, given input X, they produce output Y. You cannot (easily, if at all) construct a theory of how they generate outputs. So you end up settling for (fairly, or even remarkably suprisingly) accurate predictions, but without the sense that you understand how they are generated, even though you are 100% clear on the mechanism. That's not magic. > There are a lot of USEFUL tools on this planet which do not fall under that umbrella, and there have always been. AI is just the latest one we have. The point of the article, at its heart, is precisely to ask whether these NN-based approaches are in fact science or not. It's not insisting that they are, but pointing out that they are create a gray zone that is qualitatively different from the 3 examples you offer as other non-scientific approaches to understanding. Why? Because they operate in a domain still legitimately filled with much of the language of science, but not much of the technique. That's not true for spiritual practice, traditional medicine or meditation.