4 ms·

Why criticize? People spend their time and money on pointless pursuits all the time.

dekhn 3y ago
My goal in criticism is to guide interested players towards more fruitful pursuits. I don't want to see invalid science sucking up all the attention and crowding out legitimate but boring science.
- bacon_waffle 3y ago
  Negative experimental results are valid science, aren't they? If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those people spending time on any number of other pursuits that are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire industries and institutions that are focused on taking attention away from fruitful pursuits.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Negative experimental results are valid science (provided the experiment was run in a way that negative experimental results truly mean a high confidence that you demonstrated something isn't possible, which is actually quite challenging). I focus my criticism around science because I am an ex-scientist and my training had a fair amount of attention paid to not wasting your own time, or others time, with things that are almost certainly wrong. scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers. After all, the grad students still got together, got drunk, and partied- when they could have been in the lab. Not particularly fruitful, but I wouldn't criticize it.
    - bacon_waffle 3y ago
      > scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers. Yes, I agree. Scientist time is valuable for at least a couple reasons; science funding is a scarce resource, and trained scientists are scarce. I'd argue that those are related, and both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness toward science in the general public. If we were to sort people in to two beakers, "trained scientist" and "general public", I think the people who were excited about LK-99 and making "shitty examples" of it, would mostly go in the second one. (also, I 100% agree that "can't you just..." is one of the most irritating phrases in English)
      - dekhn 3y ago
        I have a different perspective on your statement "trained scientists are scarce .... both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness"... When I was a kid I read about DNA and genetic modification of organisms (this was back in the 80's when it was still fairly new) and decided to become a scientist to genetically modify humans using gene therapy as an alternative to standard pharmaceuticals. The articles I read suggested that if we just sequenced the human genome, and did a bit more research and applied computing, that gene therapy would be a viable solution. Biotech was undergoing a revolution at the time. Fast forward- I've finished grad school, postdoc, and am now a principal investigator at a national lab. I was a beneficiary of a massive growth in science funding during the Clinton era that ended right about the time I was looking for a faculty position. There are almost no faculty positions available, compared to the supply. Guess what? Real science doesn't look anything like what I thought. The majority of the time is spent writing grants and papers, your competitors are super-hardcore, it's really not a fun job and it gets in the way of work-life balance. And the entire area I wanted to work in, gene therapy, was almost entirely stopped for 20+ years due to the death of a single patient in a single trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger). The risks of gene therapy had been greatly understated, and even today, the few gene therapies that do exist aren't great, and cost $$$. We hear constantly that human genome sequencing is going to revolutionize drug discovery- it didn't. So, I am not so sure that breathless articles about technologies that could reasonably have been anticipated not to work (like LK-99) to excite more people to sign up for science is really a good idea.

My goal in criticism is to guide interested players towards more fruitful pursuits. I don't want to see invalid science sucking up all the attention and crowding out legitimate but boring science.

bacon_waffle 3y ago
Negative experimental results are valid science, aren't they? If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those people spending time on any number of other pursuits that are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire industries and institutions that are focused on taking attention away from fruitful pursuits.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Negative experimental results are valid science (provided the experiment was run in a way that negative experimental results truly mean a high confidence that you demonstrated something isn't possible, which is actually quite challenging). I focus my criticism around science because I am an ex-scientist and my training had a fair amount of attention paid to not wasting your own time, or others time, with things that are almost certainly wrong. scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers. After all, the grad students still got together, got drunk, and partied- when they could have been in the lab. Not particularly fruitful, but I wouldn't criticize it.
  - bacon_waffle 3y ago
    > scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers. Yes, I agree. Scientist time is valuable for at least a couple reasons; science funding is a scarce resource, and trained scientists are scarce. I'd argue that those are related, and both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness toward science in the general public. If we were to sort people in to two beakers, "trained scientist" and "general public", I think the people who were excited about LK-99 and making "shitty examples" of it, would mostly go in the second one. (also, I 100% agree that "can't you just..." is one of the most irritating phrases in English)
    - dekhn 3y ago
      I have a different perspective on your statement "trained scientists are scarce .... both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness"... When I was a kid I read about DNA and genetic modification of organisms (this was back in the 80's when it was still fairly new) and decided to become a scientist to genetically modify humans using gene therapy as an alternative to standard pharmaceuticals. The articles I read suggested that if we just sequenced the human genome, and did a bit more research and applied computing, that gene therapy would be a viable solution. Biotech was undergoing a revolution at the time. Fast forward- I've finished grad school, postdoc, and am now a principal investigator at a national lab. I was a beneficiary of a massive growth in science funding during the Clinton era that ended right about the time I was looking for a faculty position. There are almost no faculty positions available, compared to the supply. Guess what? Real science doesn't look anything like what I thought. The majority of the time is spent writing grants and papers, your competitors are super-hardcore, it's really not a fun job and it gets in the way of work-life balance. And the entire area I wanted to work in, gene therapy, was almost entirely stopped for 20+ years due to the death of a single patient in a single trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger). The risks of gene therapy had been greatly understated, and even today, the few gene therapies that do exist aren't great, and cost $$$. We hear constantly that human genome sequencing is going to revolutionize drug discovery- it didn't. So, I am not so sure that breathless articles about technologies that could reasonably have been anticipated not to work (like LK-99) to excite more people to sign up for science is really a good idea.