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> there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. I think you misun

> there needs to be a long period of existing as a proto-science where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. I think you misunderstand science. > before darwin And this strengthens my confidence. There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. There were great contributions to astronomy long before Kepler. There were many experiments that influenced the whole field. There was a lot of important chemistry that happened long before Lavoisier (conservation of mass) and Dalton (atomic model). The proto-sciences are nothing to scoff at. They aren't useless and they weren't ill-founded. They were just... noisy (and science is naturally a noisy process, so I mean *NOISY*). There's nothing inheriently wrong with that. The only thing wrong is not recognizing the noise and placing unfounded confidence in results. That famous conversation between Dyson and Fermi discussing von Neumann's elephant wasn't saying that Dyson didn't do hard work or that the work he did had no utility, it was that you can't place confidence in a model derived from empirical results without a strong underlying theory. You'd never get to that if you only observed because you'd only end up making the same error Dyson did. Science, in its nature, is not about answers, it is about confidence in a model that approximates answers. These two things look identical but truth is unobtainable, there is always an epsilon bound. So it is about that epsilon! Your confidence! So experiments that don't yield high confidence results aren't useless, but they are rather just the beginning. They give direction to explore. Because hey, if I'm looking for elephants I'd rather start looking where someone says they saw a big crazy monster than randomly pick a point on the globe. But I'm also not going to claim elephants exist just because I heard someone talking about something vaguely matching the description. And this is naturally how it works. We're exploring into the unknown. You gotta follow hunches and rumors, because it is better than nothing. But you won't get anywhere from observation alone. Not to mention that it is incredibly easy to be deceived by your observations. You will find this story ring true countless times in the history of science. But better models always prevail because we challenge the status quo and we take risks. But the nature of it is that it is risky (noisy). There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to admit it.

elmomle 2y ago
> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. Isn't this OP's point, though? People saw results, and even worked with what they saw, but underlying theories were all over the place and it wasn't until the time of Mendel that we started to have even the most rudimentary sense of rigor or scientific method when it came to the field that we now know as genetics. And the contention is that what came before Darwin and Mendel wouldn't stand up as rigorous science in our eyes, but was nevertheless the crucial foundation for what became the field of genetics.
- godelski 2y ago
  In a way yes, but I'm saying their proposal of how to handle the situation is too strong: don't do experiments >>> there needs to be a long period ... where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. I strongly disagree with this because observation isn't enough. You have to experiment. Yes, it's fuzzy. But embrace the fuzziness. Acknowledge it. The truth is that observation isn't enough. You can NEVER discover truth from observation alone. Science doesn't work without interaction. There's three classes of casual structure: correlation, intervention, and counterfactual. We know the memes about the first, but the other two require participation. You'll get lucky and have some "natural experiments" but this is extremely limited. What I'm saying is that we can work with these issues without tying our hands behind our backs and shooting ourselves in the foot. Stuff being hard is no reason to handicap ourselves. I'm arguing that only makes it more difficult lol I think one of the major issues is that we (scientists) fear that my openly discussing limitations and admitting that we don't have high (statistical) confidence will result in people not taking us seriously. And in many ways this is a reasonable response. I'm sure many scientists, myself included, have annoyingly found that an honest limitations section ends up just being ammunition for reviewers to reject the work. A criticism my advisor has given me is that I'm "too honest". Maybe he's right, but idk, I think that thinking is wrong. Because science is about ruling things out, not proving results (you can effectively achieve the latter by doing the former but you can't directly do the latter). And the younger the field is (e.g. my field of ML is VERY young), the noisier the results are. Personally, I'd rather live in a world where we're overly open about limitations than not. We're adults and can recognize that's the reality, right? Because papers are communication from one expert to others? (And not to the general public, though they can see) Because as I see it, the openness is just letting others know what areas should be explored. Don't fear the noise, embrace it. It's always there, you can't get rid of it, so trying to hide it only makes more.

elmomle 2y ago

> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. Isn't this OP's point, though? People saw results, and even worked with what they saw, but underlying theories were all over the place and it wasn't until the time of Mendel that we started to have even the most rudimentary sense of rigor or scientific method when it came to the field that we now know as genetics. And the contention is that what came before Darwin and Mendel wouldn't stand up as rigorous science in our eyes, but was nevertheless the crucial foundation for what became the field of genetics.

godelski 2y ago
In a way yes, but I'm saying their proposal of how to handle the situation is too strong: don't do experiments >>> there needs to be a long period ... where people aren't doing experiments and are just observing and describing. I strongly disagree with this because observation isn't enough. You have to experiment. Yes, it's fuzzy. But embrace the fuzziness. Acknowledge it. The truth is that observation isn't enough. You can NEVER discover truth from observation alone. Science doesn't work without interaction. There's three classes of casual structure: correlation, intervention, and counterfactual. We know the memes about the first, but the other two require participation. You'll get lucky and have some "natural experiments" but this is extremely limited. What I'm saying is that we can work with these issues without tying our hands behind our backs and shooting ourselves in the foot. Stuff being hard is no reason to handicap ourselves. I'm arguing that only makes it more difficult lol I think one of the major issues is that we (scientists) fear that my openly discussing limitations and admitting that we don't have high (statistical) confidence will result in people not taking us seriously. And in many ways this is a reasonable response. I'm sure many scientists, myself included, have annoyingly found that an honest limitations section ends up just being ammunition for reviewers to reject the work. A criticism my advisor has given me is that I'm "too honest". Maybe he's right, but idk, I think that thinking is wrong. Because science is about ruling things out, not proving results (you can effectively achieve the latter by doing the former but you can't directly do the latter). And the younger the field is (e.g. my field of ML is VERY young), the noisier the results are. Personally, I'd rather live in a world where we're overly open about limitations than not. We're adults and can recognize that's the reality, right? Because papers are communication from one expert to others? (And not to the general public, though they can see) Because as I see it, the openness is just letting others know what areas should be explored. Don't fear the noise, embrace it. It's always there, you can't get rid of it, so trying to hide it only makes more.