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This is also why the "computer science" label (until now) never really made sense for traditional programming; you start from an intention to reach a goal, and
by cxr 2y ago
This is also why the "computer science" label (until now) never really made sense for traditional programming; you start from an intention to reach a goal, and contrive a system that can achieve it, generally understanding the means by which it is accomplished from end to end—or at least you have the option of zooming in from a given level of abstraction to a lower one to work out how the pieces fit together there and play their part in getting us where we're aiming at the highest level. Science isn't that. Science is what humanity has to resort to when a thing is not knowable by other means—the preferred from for modification is not at hand. Generally, when someone is doing something akin to science where traditional software development is concerned, it's regarded as sloppy—that you need to stop goofing around and actually do the work of understanding and reasoning about what you're dealing with instead of poking at it and making observations and inferences.
This is different now with black box systems like LLMs and other neural networks (transformer-based or not) that we don't understand because they were never actually designed from a blueprint that lends itself to an understanding by others that approaches the understanding of the originator(s).
There's an argument to be made that our avoidance of systems that call for actual science and our attraction to focusing on the smaller subset consisting of grokkable systems, out of a larger set of possible ones, is an indication of immaturity. It's parochial and blinkered. We are big fish in a small pond.
- threatofrain 2y ago> Science isn't that. Science is what humanity has to resort to when a thing is not knowable by other means—the preferred from for modification is not at hand. Science is description and explanation on top of empiricism. It is the first means by which people understand things, not the last, as formal methods came way late. This drive to properly name things also gets into the somewhat similar debate of whether math is discovered or invented. And somewhere someone is trying to determine whether it's appropriate to call math as science, art, or engineering.
- saghm 2y ago> Science is description and explanation on top of empiricism. It is the first means by which people understand things, not the last, as formal methods came way late. I don't think that's at odds with what the parent comment said; the reason we use empiricism and description for analyzing reality is because we didn't create it and we don't know the rules beforehand. When designing a software system, you _choose_ the rules of which things interact and which things don't, and how those interactions occur; there's no need for empiricism in order to discover these interactions. We don't necessarily need to use science to understand our software systems because we rule over them by fiat and can choose to design them in ways that make it easier for us to understand them.
- azinman2 2y agoScience is a method designed to get closer to truth. That’s all.
- threatofrain 2y agoScience is distinguished from religion, pure metaphysics, and other approaches to truth through a focus on empiricism and a formalization of explanatory methods.
- teleforce 2y agoAnything that calls itself a Science, probably isn’t… [1] https://duncan.hull.name/2011/07/01/but-is-it-science/ https://duncan.hull.name/2011/07/01/but-is-it-science/