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No, science is indeed testing random ideas. Limiting what is tested to an arbitrary plausibility score is something funders and sponsors do, not scientists. Wh
by simplify 3y ago
No, science is indeed testing random ideas. Limiting what is tested to an arbitrary plausibility score is something funders and sponsors do, not scientists.
What you're talking about is ethics, which is important too.
- Retric 3y agoRandom ideas include things like: The speed of sound suddenly doubles between 627.500847 to 627.500848 atmospheres. I’ve said it, now try and find someone willing to test it. That’s hard because Scientists want stuff that’s worth spending their limited time on earth looking into.
- simplify 3y agoI assure you, there are many scientists that would love to test that, given the resources to do so. Of course no one would fund that, meaning it's the funders deciding on what they think is plausible.
- Retric 3y agoI know plenty of scientists that might approach it as a joke. But they are far too busy to regularly spend significant time on such a things.
- criddell 3y agoAn AI would probably flag that idea as unlikely and not worth pursuing. I don’t think we are that far off from having AIs that can read and incorporate the concepts from every paper ever published and start generating random ideas that fit into an internal framework it develops. I think that within the lifetime of some readers here, an AI will spit out a hypothesis (like a method for producing a room temperature super conductor) that turns out to be true and we will have no idea where it came from. The AI’s knowledge of physics, chemistry, etc… will exceed ours and it trying to explain to us how it works would be like you explaining a singular value decomposition to your dog.
- Retric 3y agoThat suggestion is more feasible, but far from what was being proposed.