There Is No Distinctly Scientific Method | Hacker News Reader

There Is No Distinctly Scientific Method

nytimes.com

35 pointssonabinu69 comments

My impulse is to jump in and critique, but after reading this twice, I'm actually not sure I understand what he's saying. Is it a good point?

He doesn't really make any reference to the commonly understood definition of the scientific method, which AFAIK, is: hypothesize, test, repeat. And the real takeaway is: TEST. The point of the scientific method is to validate assumptions, plain and simple, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...

> "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking."

I feel like this is the crux - the scientific method is not about quantified precision as a goal, right? Measurement is a means to an end - we measure are part of testing to actually complete the process of validating the hypothesis. If that's what "highly quantified variables" means, then maybe there's an interesting point here. But measurement was never the goal, testing is the goal. It's not really about superior thinking either. The superior thinking, in fact, is in not thinking about it, but proving it instead. It's more reliable for one simple reason: hypotheses are not accepted until tested.

There's more to it than just testing. If there weren't, then I'd be inclined to agree with the author. What many people fail to realize is that the full form of the scientific method (when applied properly) is:

* make an observation

* form a hypothesis that explains the observation

* design a test to disprove the hypothesis

* carry out the test and collect data

* analyze the results and either reject the hypothesis or formulate a new test

It is the necessity of a hypothesis to be falsifiable, and the intent of the scientist to disprove (not prove) their hypothesis that sets science apart.

Why then the seeming reluctance (as posted here recently) of journals to publish "failure to replicate" papers?

Emotion. It's not as exciting (or profitable) to publish a paper that basically says "We tried a lot of things, but none of them worked." That makes everyone feel like they're wasting time.

Hopefully that will change soon and labs can keep their funding (from govt and corporate sources) even if they publish reams of negative results.

sigh...Do you want the short answer or the long version?

The short answer is: peer pressure.

The longer version requires a look back at the history of scientific publishing and how it's been perverted in more recent times.

Originally, scientists (or natural philosophers as they were known then) would carry out experiments and record their findings in their personal papers. The problem with this is the question of priority: who discovered what first. If you leave this question up to individuals recording their own results, then there's nothing to stop those individuals from backdating their own writings in a false attempt to claim priority.

So a tradition grew of communicating results via letters. When you discover something, don't just write it down, send it in a letter to a fellow natural philosopher. That gives you a (presumably) independent means of verifying priority. Of course, this does nothing to prevent two friends from colluding to falsely claim the mantel of priority.

Eventually the tradition morphed. Instead of just writing a letter to a colleague, you would write the letter and the colleague would read it to a gathering of natural philosophers (or, if you had the means of travel, you could read your findings, or in some cases demonstrate them, to the gathering in person). This gives you a much more robust means of claiming priority. Eventually, these societies organized themselves, one of the earliest being the Royal Society.

It didn't take long before these groups decided that all the letters being read should be recorded in some format. Thus, you have the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society", the first scientific journal...

...in 1665. Since then the enterprise of scientific publishing has changed very little. Why is this bit of history important? Because the point of the original journals was not to be a full record of the experiments being performed, but rather just of discoveries so that their priority could be established. The scientists of the time still communicated their efforts, both successful and not, with each other in myriad ways. Perhaps more importantly, positions at universities were often based on these personal communications (and recommendations from peers).

Fast forward 400 or so years and scientific output (and indeed the number of scientists and universities producing this output) undergoes exponential growth. Suddenly, hiring professors based purely on personal communications becomes impractical. Ah, but what's this? There's also an exponential growth in scientific journals, and some candidates for these positions have their name on more by-lines than other candidates. Surely they must excel at science, no?

In other words, scientific journals, which were originally just one part of a scientists work, were perverted to become a stand-in for all of a scientists work. Yet, owing to their history as a means of establishing priority for discovery, the papers published continued to be propelled by tradition to emphasize positive results.

If a practice that has remained unchanged for 4 and a half centuries isn't ripe for disruption, I don't know what is!

Published papers became the University's hire metric. So now work is focused on publishing.

The "hire metric" problem seems to have poisoned all jobs, science work not exempt.

Right, but this wouldn't be as big of a problem for science if it weren't for the fact that the tradition of scientific journals was already focused on publishing positive results.

There are efforts underway that may eventually change this (Open Data, Open Publishing, pre-print servers, etc.), but it's a big ship to turn.

Because falsifiability is not part of how most science is done. Most scientists design experiments to verify hypotheses, not to falsify/refute them.

The relationship between Karl Popper's idealized scientific method, and science as it is actually practiced, is rather tenuous. Many people who study the scientific method reject Popper's views, although many of the commenters here seem to think that Popper had the final word on the subject.

The reality is that science is done by people, and human culture and prejudice, including ego and groupthink, are common in science. This is why some scientists don't like to consider submissions of articles that fail to replicate previous experiments. It's a problem for peer review more broadly.

What many people fail to realize is that the full form of the scientific method

Now, wait for someone to reply to you with "Actually the true scientific method is..." and then someone to reply to them with a correction, and then people arguing about verification versus falsification, and then people arguing about the problem of induction...

And then maybe you realize that it's not an easy question to answer.

I disagree. It is a very easy question to answer so long as you realize that "science" is a subset of "knowledge". It has been accepted for quite some time now that falsifiability is the key factor distinguishing science from everything that's not science. However there are other forms of knowledge (math, for example) that are not science.

Consequently, this is why you'll hear many physicists claim that string theory is not science. It certainly looks like science, and some day it might become science, but currently as the bulk of string theory is not falsifiable, it is not, strictly speaking, science.

Math is falsifiable. You can derive innumerable self-contradictory mathematical systems and we discard them because they are demonstrably useless. The demonstrability of uselessness is falsifiability.

Non-euclidean geometries were useless for some time :)

The were very useful for modeling the structures they were used to model, and for educating on the flexibility of alternative geometries, as well as discussing the veracity of existing assumptions. So no, they were never useless. The people who discovered them and studied them knew they weren't useless, which is why they were so willing to go down that road. They just didn't make anyone any money or solve any immediate broadly applicable problems in society.

So basically a thing is not useless if you know it's not. I can accept that :)

> Math is falsifiable.

Not in the sense that propositions of science are, where falsifiability refers to empirical falsification, not logical contradiction. What you are doing is called "equivocation".

> You can derive innumerable self-contradictory mathematical systems and we discard them because they are demonstrably useless.

No, we reject any set that includes self-contradictions; we may choose which self-consistent set to use in a particular domain because of empirical utility, but, to the extent there is falsification involved their, its not of the math or set of axioms, per se, but of its applicability to the problem domain.

I disagree. You've described a very good way of actually conducting science, which would probably be more reliable than the way we've been doing it. You italicised "disprove" in your earlier post because you know that when people do science, they don't try and disprove their own view. At best, they come up with experiments designed to disprove someone else's view. In reality scientists are searching for data that can be comfortably explained in terms of their view but which cannot be so comfortably explained in terms of competing views.

But the thing about science is, that even though people are doing it wrong, it still works. Science is somehow robust even to such fundamental mistakes, that it ceases to be science.

Then again, we might have spent the last century or so building a completely false model of the universe because our technique is wrong, because we haven't actually been conducting science according to the sort of definition you give. It's worth considering, but I doubt it's true.

> You italicised "disprove" in your earlier post because you know that when people do science, they don't try and disprove their own view. At best, they come up with experiments designed to disprove someone else's view.

Which is fine. The scientific method does not rely on the same actor performing each of the steps. In fact, a major part of the point of the scientific method is to avoid such a dependency.

This!

The parent article does not contain "fals*". So it's clearly bullshit, in that it doesn't address what the scientific method is.

Also, the point about modification based on contrary evidence is actually a weakness of the scientific method.

> design a test to disprove the hypothesis

That's not what scientists normally do. Popper argued that they should do it, not that they actually do it. Many experiments are designed to verify hypotheses, not to falsify them.

But there also were non-Euclidean geometries that were discovered without any observation. It was not possible to test them until much later (and mostly because we knew where to look). Yet they turned out to better describe the world.

I think what he is saying is that the choice of the hypothesis is not only governed by our observations, it's also governed by our brain that prefers hypotheses with specific properties. Not just "simple", more like "complete", "elegant" or "solid", without unseemly ad-hoc patches.

For example, the original geocentric system with epicycles was actually much better in describing planet motions than the naive heliocentric idea of Copernicus, because Copernicus thought that planet orbits were circles and they travel with a constant speed. Yet it was accepted and worked upon (contrary to the facts!) because it was more elegant.

It is true, everything that scientists do is an extension and refinement of ways of getting at the truth found in ordinary living and various other fields of expert study. The main difference is that modern science systematically excludes supernatural explanations. Much of modern philosophy of science affirms this, such as Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

People want to dispute this basically because they are implicitly subscribing to the philosophical belief that what we ordinarily experience is simply mistaken, and the really real is radically different. This belief is common to metaphysical idealism (such as Platonism) and absolute mysticism, and also materialism, cartesian dualism, and classic analytic philosophy. Other philosophies, such as phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein, ground our knowledge of reality in our ordinary experience, instead of trying to escape into a radically different realm.

A key issue at stake here is finitude. In the realm of ordinary experience, we experience we are limited in many ways, and this means we cannot escape suffering. The various anti-experiential philosophies generally believe that their alleged really real realms are such that we can escape such suffering.

I am in guarded agreement with the article. The most distinctive thing I can come up with about science is the habit of rigorously asking "what do you know and how do you know it" -- but that is (a) not all that distinct from what rational non-scientists do, and (b) not a particular method.

And yet -- I get queasy when I hear philosphers talking about (for example) Aristotle's "science". The idea being seeminlgy that anything he said about plants or falling bodies or other such subject matter is science.

Now Aristotle was an observant, rational fellow -- and yet his results in these fields don't feel all that scientific to me. I don't know what I missing.

The distinctive thing about science is rather that you must answer the question "what do you know and how do you know it" with evidence, derived from repeatable experiments.

Other modes of thinking do not have this requirement, and often rely upon nothing more than "it seems to me..." to answer those questions.

Right, but that applies to other fields as well. You might not be able to do repeatable experiments as a historian, but if you don't back your argument with factual evidence from a variety of sources, you will get laughed out of the room.

Repeatable? Sorry in advance for quibbling, but -- suppose that a star goes nova, and you weren't expecting it, but you happen to have telescopes gathering interesting data from this once-in-a-stellar-lifetime event. If you learn interesting things from it, is that science? I'd say yes, but this isn't repeatable. It's also not really an experiment. It's wonderful evidence, though, really priceless stuff that you couldn't get any other way.

What is the essence of science? I'm not convinced that it involves repeatability or experimentation in any really fundamental way.

It's science, but not scientific method. The two are related but different. It's an observation that is rigorously recorded, but not an experiment. Science is full of this stuff - look at the field of taxonomy, for example.

The idea that only those concepts which have been experimentally tested against the null hypothesis can be labelled 'science' goes against both reason and the spirit of the term.

Yeah I've opined about this a couple times here. But yeah I don't like "experiments" either. I like data, I like observation; experiments are just a way to control the rate we gather those observations, gather that data, instead of (and I did astronomy as an undergrad so I am particularly sympathetic to this field of examples) hoping a star explodes while you're looking at it. Gamma Ray Bursts are a great example of things we spent decades pretty much just hoping we'd be looking at when they happened.

And there's weird one offs that we're basically just guessing on.

But we build better instruments and make better observations and gather more data.

Yes, repeatable. The specific event of that nova will not be repeated, of course, but the interesting observations, when compared with existing theory, will suggest repeatable experiments.

And that's where the science really gets done. Not in the initial observation, but in the controlled experiments that follow, in which individual hypotheses can be tested.

Experiments do not need to be run in a lab, BTW. As long as the variables are accounted for, natural observations are just as valid as those that are synthesized in a lab. One of the most famous "experiments" in physics history was the observation of gravity-deflected star images during an eclipse, which helped support Einstein's general theory of relativity.

> derived from repeatable experiments.

And this is why astronomy, geology, and paleontology are not sciences, and it's not looking too good for climatology or oceanography or meteorology.

Aristotle's biology and political science were quite empirical, and are the foundations of the more modern versions. His cosmology was off track because he didn't have the instruments, like the telescope, needed to collect the needed data. His physics was sound for the particular phenomena he was trying to explain, as this article explains: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057v2.pdf

James Blachowicz, professor emeritus of philosophy with a focus on the philosophy of science according to his Loyola page wrote "Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry". I found 51 references to Popper searching the book on Amazon. I'm not a philosophy expert, but based on this article and wikipedia information about Popper and falsifiability, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this guy actually knows what he's talking about and perhaps some of the commenters here aren't up to date on the science of philosophy issues he is addressing.

It's amazing how many people here think that philosophy of science ended with Karl Popper.

Karl Popper or Carl Sagan? I actually don't know the latter's views very well, but I very much get the impression that he popularised a Popperian view of science in a way that Saganites simply can't get past.

A lot of people who think themself scientific and modern independent thinkers simply regurgitate what they learnt from scientific and modern independent thinkers.

The tl;dr as far as I can tell is: scientific reasoning is a subset of reasoning, and not necessarily superior to other forms of reasoning.

I can agree with that. There is a need for philosophy and purely theoretical pursuits, we can't predict what will come out of them. But at the same time, the world of science is where I want to make my bed. As the probability of a scientific "endgame" for a particular philosophical idea decreases, so does the probability of it's usefulness, or something like that. Philosophy can be one engine of creativity, but science will best determine what ideas should survive.

There is the Occam's razor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

He 's talking about scientific reasoning, not the scientific method. Empiricism is distinctly scientific.

For myself, I think a good way to think of science is to consider the universe as a program, and that scientists are doing black box reverse engineering.

We attempt to reverse engineer the mathematical logic of the universe based on observations, and once we think we have the mathematical "source code", we do experiments which compare the outputs of the source code (our mathematical models) with the outputs of the universe given the same set of inputs.

There is even the analog of refactoring where a better overall "architecture" can dramatically simplify the "source code". An example would be the move from Ptolemy and epicycles to the heliocentric view of Copernicus and Kepler that greatly simplifies the "code" for planetary motions.

In addition, just like when you test a function, extreme inputs can reveal bugs. Relativity and quantum mechanics came about in this manner. We had the Newtonion "source code" and it seemed to work very well in that the output of our source code matched the output of the universe for all values that we were able to supply as input. Then it became possible to measure the universe's outputs for velocities near the speed of light and masses that were subatomic. We then realized that our reverse engineered "source code" and the universe gave divergent answers. Based on this, Einstein rewrote the reverse engineered source code in such a way that it was both very elegant and matched the universe for velocities near the speed of light while still passing all the Newtonian unit tests.

Bohr et al, wrote code, that matched the universe's output when feeling with subatomic particles.

Unfortunately, while both the Einstein's code and Bohr's code both give correct answers, there is a giant if statement that governs whether we call Einstein or Bohr.

Having that giant if statement and separate Einstein and Bohr functions is seen as not elegant and scientists have been trying to write a single function that gets rid of the if statement and still passes the Einstein and Bohr unit tests. This is called "grand unification".

This model, at least for software people like me makes a lot of sense. For example, just like a unit test that fails gives you far more information than one that passes, so an experiment that diverges from the expected value of our current "source code" can tell us in which way our source code needs to be refined.

This is clearly a piece targeted at a lay audience. It says basically nothing interesting about the scientific method or science, but a lot about the nature of defining words. It's basically word salad with a click-bait headline (thankfully fixed here).

The author demonstrates that he doesn't know what science is. There is much more than correct reasoning necessary to do science. For example, philosophers spent thousands of years pondering ideas in topics such as gravity and chemistry, without getting much ahead. And this is possible because there is a practically infinite number of ways in which the world could be explained using logic, but these explanations cannot be ruled in as true until you perform at least some experimentation.

What makes science different is that it requires observation of the world and testing of hypothesis about the observed behavior. Without a rigorous process to do these things there is no science, only philosophical speculation.

The author of this article is profoundly ignorant. There is a scientific method. Exactly how and why it works are both very well understood. The correct answer was worked out by Karl Popper and popularized by David Deutsch. Writing about the scientific method without mentioning Popper is like writing about physics without mentioning Einstein.

> James Blachowicz is a professor emeritus of philosophy

Why am I not surprised.

Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher!

Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).

You may or may not be "right" in this particular case, but in general it's stupid to assume philosophers in the HN audience won't be drawn out to comment on such an article.

I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen.

For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.

So why didn't the author even mention falsification?

Because many philosophers of science reject Popper's views as unrepresentative of the way science is done by real people in the real world. The Wikipedia page for falsifiability enumerates some of these criticisms.

Well, then those real people aren't doing science.

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a rather obvious example of it.

OK, so what do you consider to be science with hypotheses that can't be falsified?

Edit: Much cosmology and some theoretical physics seem pretty iffy to me, but at least there's the possibility of falsifiable hypotheses.

http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/f...

Interesting, but it doesn't mention Kuhn.

Also, there's seems to be some attachment to the idea that truth can be proven.

> is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries

That's true. But that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable, and it does not mean that the problem has not been solved. It has. Popper solved it.

I took one class in the philosophy of science in college, and feel qualified to smugly dismiss the article.

The article makes the point that knowing what something is and defining it are different. He then repeats that claim about 55 times, and says nothing else about science at all, certainly nothing about attempting to define the scientific method.

(I don't really want to spend time arguing about Popper or Lakatos here. But that's not relevant to the content of the article at all.)

I first thought the article was a bit of a fluff piece, but after seeing this thread and the misunderstanding and over-simplification, it does seem apropos and worth discussing. The toolkit that makes a scientist does not necessarily make a philosopher of science and vice-versa. Thankfully I am neither so I can see both sides :)

(and the comments section on the nytimes site is a mixed bag as well)

He may know about Popper, but he clearly has not understood Popper or he would not have written this article. For example, he would have understood why this:

"When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data."

is a straw man.

It's good to push back against glib dismissals, but please don't do it with snarky attacks. That's considerably worse, and degrades the thread for everybody.

I really wonder how "snarky attack that pushes back against glib dismissal" is somehow worse than "snarky attack which glibly dismisses the work of a professional philosopher". Do you have any clarification of your opinion?

It's worse because personal attack (such as name-calling) toward a fellow community member is more destructive of the community. Both are bad, though.

I suppose with respect to this particular community, I am most likely to take a position similar to that of Ra's al Ghul toward Gotham in Batman Begins...

By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense), than it is for a HN member to attack another?

Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here (as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down.

I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.

> "I'll end my participation in this convo here, though"

Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind lately about this community.

> "the usual HN nonsense"

> "nonsense which is so prevalent here"

These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'. There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part of the community as anyone else is.

People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I guess that makes it my job to do.

I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your position, which is almost everyone here, including me.)

> deserves to be smacked down

No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how someone's manners need improving by socking them.

> Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument.

Apologies---my intention was to signal that I wasn't interested in escalating the conversation or causing unpleasantness. I am completely happy to leave the last word to you.

Re "vandalism" and "being part of the community", thanks for your thoughts. I don't see myself at all as part of this community, but I do occasionally comment in it and on it. How is that possible? HN is a community of hackers and startup doers, and I once really was part of that (when I had the misfortune of being employed by a YC company); but a community is defined not just by collocation but by shared values & shared norms. Completely understandable if you'd rather I just buzzed off!

I understand the remainder of your comments, but I don't agree with them at all; to me, it is quite similar to the old bourgeois-liberal argument against antifa action, "you're just as bad as them!". In any case, it's completely understandable how & why you think that way, and I'm not interested in having a fight about it.

I will simply take the position that it is worse to arrogantly claim instant expertise than it is to (snarkily) criticize arrogance.

Uh, well gosh. Did you have this comment below on your HN profile before or after the above conversation?

"[...] if you notice that I have been hell-banned, just let me know so I can delete my account from this shithole."

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonsterling

I'm probably not the first person to suggest this to you, but I've found that what I get from a community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with what I put into it.

> but I've found that what I get from a community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with what I put into it.

Huh? The comment I am criticizing in this thread is not directed at me, and has nothing to do with me. Seems a bit of a stretch to think that I caused it by my attitude, etc. It's a general characteristic of the HN community, not caused or sparked at all by my criticism or engagement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#Criticism

Einstein didn't do all of the physics, and Popper did not solve all of the problems of establishing a clear scientific method.

He lacks basic understanding of science. He repeatedly uses the phrase "scientific method" and proclaims its pretty much what you instictively would do, even in many other areas, like writing poems (??!?).

The Demarcation Problem (What is scientific) and Falsifiability.

The english Wikipedia Article is sadly rather poor on the Demarcation Problem. - Karl Popper - Logik der Forschung (Das Abgrenzungsproblem) has the good stuff.

The author compares any kind of investigation and iterative refinement with science, but does not understand the effects this method has in combination with a specific subset of "sentences" - Those which can be disproven by empiric observations.

A rather trashy article. Especially the third-to-last paragraph:

"If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking."

That awefully sounds like, "Ah, science, its just like opinion".

I agree that it's not a great article, perhaps typical of philosophical writings, which I have always struggled with. It's hard to digest, I read it about 4 times. But the author is a philosopher of science, I am pretty sure he has heard of Popper. I think he is trying to write it in a simple style for mass consumption, but as a result the examples seem shoe-horned in to fit his thesis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com