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There's nothing scientific about this. People are just holding a black box and saying "if I jiggle it like this, I can get better results". Approximating better

There's nothing scientific about this. People are just holding a black box and saying "if I jiggle it like this, I can get better results". Approximating better results in simple contrived puzzles is hardly evidence that recycling the output makes it better in any absolute sense. Besides, translation being open ended and heavily context dependent will likely suffer from such recycling.

jiggawatts 3y ago
They're taking objective measurements of experimental outcomes while varying aspects of the setup. How is that not scientific!? "If I jiggle this is behaves differently" is like... half of all science! At the end of the day, better is better, and I don't think that can be hand-waved away. That's like saying someone is not smarter because they just "studied harder" and that doesn't count somehow.
- namaria 3y ago
  None of the papers are offering falsifiable premises and testing them. This is not doing science, this is merely assembling metadata. I find shameful that serious academics and institutions are indulging in this kind of number games. "Let's publish a bunch of measurements we took" might be rigorous and look like what advancing science would look like if you squint. But this is just gaming the publishing game.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    A decent chunk of biology was simply collecting bugs and pinning them on a board. A lot of science is just taking down measurements and recording the result. It's not always a giant leap, some grand insight, or a world-changing theorem.
    - namaria 3y ago
      No, a large chunk of biology was figuring out species evolve and were not created as they are right now. Or that every living thing is made of cells that share the same basic chemistry and structure, not special kinds of tissue. The busywork in between might have looked like science and occupied a lot of time and space. Relativity and quantum mechanics generated a lot of falsifiable claims that were eventually tested. Yet we have been building larger and larger colliders to "collect and publish data" and the best outcome so far has been a job program for engineers (useful and good) and the Web (useful and good). But we shouldn't confuse collecting data and engineering with advancing science.

jiggawatts 3y ago

They're taking objective measurements of experimental outcomes while varying aspects of the setup. How is that not scientific!? "If I jiggle this is behaves differently" is like... half of all science! At the end of the day, better is better, and I don't think that can be hand-waved away. That's like saying someone is not smarter because they just "studied harder" and that doesn't count somehow.

namaria 3y ago
None of the papers are offering falsifiable premises and testing them. This is not doing science, this is merely assembling metadata. I find shameful that serious academics and institutions are indulging in this kind of number games. "Let's publish a bunch of measurements we took" might be rigorous and look like what advancing science would look like if you squint. But this is just gaming the publishing game.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  A decent chunk of biology was simply collecting bugs and pinning them on a board. A lot of science is just taking down measurements and recording the result. It's not always a giant leap, some grand insight, or a world-changing theorem.
  - namaria 3y ago
    No, a large chunk of biology was figuring out species evolve and were not created as they are right now. Or that every living thing is made of cells that share the same basic chemistry and structure, not special kinds of tissue. The busywork in between might have looked like science and occupied a lot of time and space. Relativity and quantum mechanics generated a lot of falsifiable claims that were eventually tested. Yet we have been building larger and larger colliders to "collect and publish data" and the best outcome so far has been a job program for engineers (useful and good) and the Web (useful and good). But we shouldn't confuse collecting data and engineering with advancing science.