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>That is not part of the scientific process What? OpenAI is absolutely conducting science amongst themselves. They are certainly engaging in the hypothesis ->

>That is not part of the scientific process What? OpenAI is absolutely conducting science amongst themselves. They are certainly engaging in the hypothesis -> test -> result scientific method, which is science in its purest form. Sharing the secret sauce is what is done or expected in academia, but that doesn’t mean that OpenAI isn’t conducting science behind their own walls. You’re conflating institutional academia with the scientific method. If I go home and test the boiling point of water in my garage and record the result privately without publishing a paper, am I not conducting science? What nonsense.

z3c0 3y ago
"Science" is not solely the scientific method - it's the democratization of your methodology to enable the replication of the results, towards the goal of determining their soundness.
- Invictus0 3y ago
  So if the government does science research that is classified, that doesn't count as science because it's not publicly shared?
  - z3c0 3y ago
    Yes, that is exactly the point. "Research" and "Scientific Research" are not inextricably linked - I work in an R&D department, and not all research we do is scientific. We do have scientific research, but it's handled very differently from the PoC type of work that occurs more broadly. We are forced to choose between handing out trade secrets in exchange for gaining more soundness in our theories, or keeping them sheltered and hoping our observations hold up. That doesn't mean our research can't inform our decisions towards profitability, only that it's not scientific. Edit: I mean, c'mon - the final step to the scientific method is "communicate your results". I'm surprised this requires explaining.
    - rcpt 3y ago
      Sounds like a lot of pedantry tbqh
      - z3c0 3y ago
        If you think so, then you may not be suited for scientific work. It's pedantry for pedantry's sake, by design.
  - kome 3y ago
    Exactly. They are applying the scientific method, but they aren't contributing to science. it will be science when it's open and people can integrate the new knowledge in a broader set of knowledge. Science is knowledge. The etymology of science is to split stuff and understand how it work. But from late 14c in the more specific sense of "collective human knowledge". "Private" science is not science. It's some esoteric stuff.
    - rcpt 3y ago
      What about scientists that don't publish all their data and code? Are they also not contributing to science? OpenAI, even without saying how the model works, has been hugely influential in science.
      - steve_adams_86 3y ago
        Similar to simply seeing animals and insects fly, humans intuited that they too could fly somehow. Seeing what's possible can open someone's mind in an instant. Would humans be capable of flight if other animals didn't fly already? If science happens behind closed doors but we witness what it makes possible, that influence alone can inspire a lot more effort and discovery with or without the data that lead to the accomplishment. I think that moment has been profoundly influential due to ChatGPT alone. Whether or not it's a good thing that it's largely private is very difficult to say. I don't feel great about it, but I also don't think I know enough to have strong opinions yet.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      I don't buy the argument that "public" science is the only real science. You can define it that way, but I don't see any reason to. "Public" science is just a special case of "restricted" science, such that the set of people the knowledge is restricted to is equal to the set of all humans.
      - kome 3y ago
        I think this might get philosophical quickly, but to really understand where you're at, you need to access all knowledge. Everybody is standing on the shoulder of giants. It's a collective effort that happens through socialization and long-standing institutions like universities. An essential part of doing science is sharing results and waiting for others to challenge, expand, or falsify them. If you skip this step, you're not truly contributing to knowledge, although you may still create new knowledge in other ways... but not all new knowledge is necessarily scientific, it can be private, esoteric, commercial knowledge. Take the example of Ida, a 47-million-year-old lemur fossil known as Darwinius masillae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius it was "discovered" and hailed as a transitional species bridging primates and mammals. Really a huge contribution to "science". But here's the catch - Ida was actually found in 1983 and held by a private collector for 25 years, who didn't realize its significance. So we had no idea of this "discovery". It wasn't science, it was a good on a market. OpenAI is the same. We might enjoy to toy with the technology. But I don't find it contributed to science, yet
  - photochemsyn 3y ago
    Alchemists were doing research 600 years ago but they never shared their results with others and used arcane syntax to record those results which nobody else could understand. This didn't lead to much progress in the field of chemical knowledge, because it was just continual reinvention of the wheel. The scientific (and then, industrial) revolution didn't begin until researchers started sharing their results in open literature form, or at conferences, or within bodies like Britain's Royal Institution. Dissemination of knowledge is absolutely part of science. Similarly, a fundamental necessity in science is independent replication of results, and that's definitely not possible with closed secretive research done in the alchemical mode.
    - Invictus0 3y ago
      What if the science is disseminated within a closed group? For instance, suppose the classified research is shared with other people with a security clearance. That still wouldn't be science? Or suppose scientists at universities shared their research with scientists at other universities, but not the general public: that wouldn't be science either?
      - z3c0 3y ago
        That's an echo-chamber, especially if the closed group is consistently aligned in their goals so that they're predisposed to want the same things from the research. The entities would have to be arranged so that they're asserting checks-and-balances on one another.
      - photochemsyn 3y ago
        What happens when you have an authoritarian system in place controlling distribution of results, is that everyone in that system quickly learns that if they question the reliability or wisdom of the research, their career is over. So they go along and don't subject the results to the kind of scrutiny science relies on, because making the boss look bad or embarrassing the institution isn't an option in that situation. There are many examples, such as the secretive public-private DOE FutureGen program aimed at "zero-emission coal-to-hydrogen plants" which wasted about ten billion dollars over twenty years with nothing to show for it (and whose data is still not available), the Trofim Lysenko plant breeding program in the Soviet Union which wrecked Soviet agriculture for decades (and falls into your latter category) and so on. Another example could be the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, although that's more an engineering failure than a science failure, but it had similar underlying causes, i.e. managers pushing engineers to go along with a flawed protocol.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    Yes.
bo1024 3y ago
By the "scientific process", I mean the way scientific knowledge as a whole progresses over time, i.e. the main undertaking of the target audience of the paper. You're right that "OpenAI is not doing science" was hyperbolic, but I tried to clarify the aspect of science that I'm referring to.
- revelio 3y ago
  Although this is a reasonable definition, it would mean many people who are referred to as scientists in practice would have to be considered non-scientists. Refusing to publish data and code is widespread in many academic fields, even in cases where academics sign documents promising to provide these things on demand. For example, at minimum psychology, epidemiology and climatology have this problem. In climatology attempts to get the source code of models and data underlying papers has led to some of the biggest dramas in the field e.g. the Climategate hacker appears to have been motivated by the closedness of the field (similar to the llama leaker). Given that society is clearly not ready to reclassify large parts of academic work as non-scientific, it seems like this definition cannot work even on its own terms.
belter 3y ago
They are more R&D engineers than R&D scientists...

z3c0 3y ago

"Science" is not solely the scientific method - it's the democratization of your methodology to enable the replication of the results, towards the goal of determining their soundness.

Invictus0 3y ago
So if the government does science research that is classified, that doesn't count as science because it's not publicly shared?
- z3c0 3y ago
  Yes, that is exactly the point. "Research" and "Scientific Research" are not inextricably linked - I work in an R&D department, and not all research we do is scientific. We do have scientific research, but it's handled very differently from the PoC type of work that occurs more broadly. We are forced to choose between handing out trade secrets in exchange for gaining more soundness in our theories, or keeping them sheltered and hoping our observations hold up. That doesn't mean our research can't inform our decisions towards profitability, only that it's not scientific. Edit: I mean, c'mon - the final step to the scientific method is "communicate your results". I'm surprised this requires explaining.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    Sounds like a lot of pedantry tbqh
    - z3c0 3y ago
      If you think so, then you may not be suited for scientific work. It's pedantry for pedantry's sake, by design.
- kome 3y ago
  Exactly. They are applying the scientific method, but they aren't contributing to science. it will be science when it's open and people can integrate the new knowledge in a broader set of knowledge. Science is knowledge. The etymology of science is to split stuff and understand how it work. But from late 14c in the more specific sense of "collective human knowledge". "Private" science is not science. It's some esoteric stuff.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    What about scientists that don't publish all their data and code? Are they also not contributing to science? OpenAI, even without saying how the model works, has been hugely influential in science.
    - steve_adams_86 3y ago
      Similar to simply seeing animals and insects fly, humans intuited that they too could fly somehow. Seeing what's possible can open someone's mind in an instant. Would humans be capable of flight if other animals didn't fly already? If science happens behind closed doors but we witness what it makes possible, that influence alone can inspire a lot more effort and discovery with or without the data that lead to the accomplishment. I think that moment has been profoundly influential due to ChatGPT alone. Whether or not it's a good thing that it's largely private is very difficult to say. I don't feel great about it, but I also don't think I know enough to have strong opinions yet.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    I don't buy the argument that "public" science is the only real science. You can define it that way, but I don't see any reason to. "Public" science is just a special case of "restricted" science, such that the set of people the knowledge is restricted to is equal to the set of all humans.
    - kome 3y ago
      I think this might get philosophical quickly, but to really understand where you're at, you need to access all knowledge. Everybody is standing on the shoulder of giants. It's a collective effort that happens through socialization and long-standing institutions like universities. An essential part of doing science is sharing results and waiting for others to challenge, expand, or falsify them. If you skip this step, you're not truly contributing to knowledge, although you may still create new knowledge in other ways... but not all new knowledge is necessarily scientific, it can be private, esoteric, commercial knowledge. Take the example of Ida, a 47-million-year-old lemur fossil known as Darwinius masillae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius it was "discovered" and hailed as a transitional species bridging primates and mammals. Really a huge contribution to "science". But here's the catch - Ida was actually found in 1983 and held by a private collector for 25 years, who didn't realize its significance. So we had no idea of this "discovery". It wasn't science, it was a good on a market. OpenAI is the same. We might enjoy to toy with the technology. But I don't find it contributed to science, yet
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Alchemists were doing research 600 years ago but they never shared their results with others and used arcane syntax to record those results which nobody else could understand. This didn't lead to much progress in the field of chemical knowledge, because it was just continual reinvention of the wheel. The scientific (and then, industrial) revolution didn't begin until researchers started sharing their results in open literature form, or at conferences, or within bodies like Britain's Royal Institution. Dissemination of knowledge is absolutely part of science. Similarly, a fundamental necessity in science is independent replication of results, and that's definitely not possible with closed secretive research done in the alchemical mode.
  - Invictus0 3y ago
    What if the science is disseminated within a closed group? For instance, suppose the classified research is shared with other people with a security clearance. That still wouldn't be science? Or suppose scientists at universities shared their research with scientists at other universities, but not the general public: that wouldn't be science either?
    - z3c0 3y ago
      That's an echo-chamber, especially if the closed group is consistently aligned in their goals so that they're predisposed to want the same things from the research. The entities would have to be arranged so that they're asserting checks-and-balances on one another.
    - photochemsyn 3y ago
      What happens when you have an authoritarian system in place controlling distribution of results, is that everyone in that system quickly learns that if they question the reliability or wisdom of the research, their career is over. So they go along and don't subject the results to the kind of scrutiny science relies on, because making the boss look bad or embarrassing the institution isn't an option in that situation. There are many examples, such as the secretive public-private DOE FutureGen program aimed at "zero-emission coal-to-hydrogen plants" which wasted about ten billion dollars over twenty years with nothing to show for it (and whose data is still not available), the Trofim Lysenko plant breeding program in the Soviet Union which wrecked Soviet agriculture for decades (and falls into your latter category) and so on. Another example could be the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, although that's more an engineering failure than a science failure, but it had similar underlying causes, i.e. managers pushing engineers to go along with a flawed protocol.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Yes.

bo1024 3y ago

By the "scientific process", I mean the way scientific knowledge as a whole progresses over time, i.e. the main undertaking of the target audience of the paper. You're right that "OpenAI is not doing science" was hyperbolic, but I tried to clarify the aspect of science that I'm referring to.

revelio 3y ago
Although this is a reasonable definition, it would mean many people who are referred to as scientists in practice would have to be considered non-scientists. Refusing to publish data and code is widespread in many academic fields, even in cases where academics sign documents promising to provide these things on demand. For example, at minimum psychology, epidemiology and climatology have this problem. In climatology attempts to get the source code of models and data underlying papers has led to some of the biggest dramas in the field e.g. the Climategate hacker appears to have been motivated by the closedness of the field (similar to the llama leaker). Given that society is clearly not ready to reclassify large parts of academic work as non-scientific, it seems like this definition cannot work even on its own terms.

belter 3y ago

They are more R&D engineers than R&D scientists...