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You make some great points that I largely agree with. I'm wondering whether I'm misrepresenting you though, because I'm not arriving at the same "everything loo

by jegp 7d ago

You make some great points that I largely agree with. I'm wondering whether I'm misrepresenting you though, because I'm not arriving at the same "everything looks like a nail" conclusion. One thing I'd like to surface is the distinction you're making between software and physics. You point out that social and medical sciences are only now becoming approachable with scientific methodology. We can now, to a higher degree than before at least, model and predict what'll happen in social and medical scenarios. Isn't that an excellent example of how subject matters can be virtualized? I can't find good arguments for why this would stop there; why wouldn't our scientific models improve to such a degree that we can predict and "interfacte" with more and more of reality. Put plainly: why can't experiments be done in code one day? Particularly if we imagine having better robotics. Do you see my point about closing the gap between the theorizing and experimenting? Or are they fundamentally different things? The "reasonably skilled person" seems like an excellent heuristic > 2 years ago that's rapidly being replaced by automated thinking machines.

analog31 7d ago
It's certainly possible to automate experiments. In fact my job is developing equipment for this purpose, and all of my own experiments are controlled by code. Most measurement instruments have run on code for decades. You don't manually turn the knob on a Wheatstone bridge to measure a voltage any more. A yellow handheld device with a LCD measures it with greater accuracy, or a probe that plugs into a computer. The code living in an experiment like the Large Hadron Collider is extreme. The distinction between theory and experiment is somewhat arbitrary. Historically, scientists were better at one than the other, with a few rare people being known for both. To make an analogy, there's also no immovable boundary between hardware and software, since most hardware runs on code, but these tend to be different jobs and even departments. What tends to happen in science is that when a subject is virtualized, e.g., when it can be modeled by a satisfactory theory, scientists move on to new frontiers. Many of the most interesting areas of work are where both theory and experiment can challenge one another. I've had managers and even engineers ask me in all sincerity why we still need to make measurements when we can just model the data.

by jegp 7d ago

analog31 7d ago

It's certainly possible to automate experiments. In fact my job is developing equipment for this purpose, and all of my own experiments are controlled by code. Most measurement instruments have run on code for decades. You don't manually turn the knob on a Wheatstone bridge to measure a voltage any more. A yellow handheld device with a LCD measures it with greater accuracy, or a probe that plugs into a computer. The code living in an experiment like the Large Hadron Collider is extreme. The distinction between theory and experiment is somewhat arbitrary. Historically, scientists were better at one than the other, with a few rare people being known for both. To make an analogy, there's also no immovable boundary between hardware and software, since most hardware runs on code, but these tend to be different jobs and even departments. What tends to happen in science is that when a subject is virtualized, e.g., when it can be modeled by a satisfactory theory, scientists move on to new frontiers. Many of the most interesting areas of work are where both theory and experiment can challenge one another. I've had managers and even engineers ask me in all sincerity why we still need to make measurements when we can just model the data.