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Comment by macando | Hacker News Reader

> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good research.

I'm always baffled with how disjointed and chaotic the global science community seems. Why there isn't something like Facebook for science? Are there grants for solving meta problems like this?

One interesting fact about using a foreign language: There is a research saying that lying in a foreign language is easier. English is not my mother tongue so don't take this for granted :D

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Math, and Science in general, is slow. Arxiv, mathexchange, ncatlab, have each changed how scientists collaborate, as have so many other projects. Wikipedia itself is way way better than a "facebook" for Science. Science is best practised in person

To elaborate, and mis-quote a general, He wins who gets there fastest with the mostest.

Imagine if China had developed digital computers first and had to map their writing to n-ary. It would not be extensions of ASCII upon which we still rely. Imagine instead an algebra of notation based on composition of analogies. Which is why English is not entirely unusual as a Lingua Franca.

English is easy to learn, incorporates a smorgasbord of techniques from other languages, has a rich literature (there has to be more than one good reason to learn a language) and so has ample comparatives. It uses an alphabet, has a lot of law, and is subject to no central authority.

English is a committee of language camels trekking through our desert of ignorance. Kinda like C++

Flame on!

Connecting empirical studies to epistemological formulations is not easy, getting unconnected scientist to exchange ideas is not easy. I think that collaborative potential of the internet for the science as a whole is yet to be realized, I sure hope it won't end up like "Elsevierbook" or some shit like that.

Biology has "ResearchGate" which, ironically, is a bit like facebook and is somewhat proprietary. It is, however, incredibly useful for solving common lab problems like "I stuck all my histo slides together, how do I dissolve the mounting media?".

Bioinformatics has BioStars, stack exchange, and bioarvix.

The fastest developing branch of AI NLP could help with translation, classification and reorganization of knowledge. Fast internet links, HQ videos, VR and simulation software could accelerate the adoption of new concepts and provide possibilities for remote collaboration. Getting up to speed on a new project would be much more interesting and inviting than sifting through a see of bland PDFs and grainy 2D images.

Given the number of speakers of English in the world there really is no alternative to English - maybe Chinese, but I doubt anyone in the world outside of China thinks that it is easier to read Chinese than English.

Of all the problems Science faces the language used is the least of our problems. Little things like funding, insecure tenure, and the immense publish or perish pressure are what we need to be looking at.

No one thinks Chinese is easy even the chinese themselves. One almost as easy language to learn would be Spanish, or even Hindi for goodness sake.

English has additional advantage of being painfully simple logical, grammar-wise. There's only a handfull of grammar rules to learn, and they are pretty consistent, exceptions are quite rare. This helps to write clear and concise text, unlike languages like, say, Polish, which evolved when Poland was under foreign rule for over a century, and for that reason it is deliberately cryptic and ambigous :)

> exceptions are quite rare

... are you sure we speak the same language?

English has less exception than say French but far more than Esperanto. It is a question of reference frame.

Yeah but two of the languages with exceptions are in active use by millions or even billions, while the cohesive one is used by a sum total of... A few dozen? Should Esperanto enter any active usage, however unlikely that is, the exceptions will come.

BTW, Esperanto has a few _hundred_ native speakers and tens or hundreds of thousands of speakers. I agree that it's not comparable to a natural language, but there are many, many natural language communities that are much smaller.

English painfully simple, grammar wise? Wait until you tried constructed language like Esperanto or Ido.

Eh the hard parts of English arise because it likes to mug languages in dark alleys and pick their pockets for spare grammar and vocabulary.

This makes it difficult to form a unified theory of the language. The more elegant your rules, the more exceptions there are.

But it’s also a super power. It makes the language feel more familiar to just about anyone who speaks an Indo-European language. There’s something homely and welcoming in english for anyone.

And the readiness with which english adopts foreign vocabulary when practical is simply inspiring. You can introduce basically any word from any language and make it stick.

And then there’s Slavic languages where at least in mine, every verb or pronoun can come in one of 20 or so different forms. Nouns have 20+ different forms too.

Not expecting Slovenian to become lingua franca of anything any time soon. It’s just too hard.

I can't speak from any experience outside Romance languages, but English verb conjugation is significantly simpler, along with a lack of gendering of nouns. Those two points alone go a long way.

Mandarin the spoken language has quite simple grammar and is pretty easy to learn as languages go.

The written form is painful though.

I was amazed to learn that even native Chinese readers forget the written language if they don't use it for a few years.

The one major thing English has going for it is that native English speakers are pretty tolerant of non-native speakers getting the grammar wrong. With just a little effort you can get people to understand you which is not the case for many languages.

I would say that instead of logical, it is instead familiar and flexible/redundant. You can use essentially whatever structure you like - it may be incorrect, but you have to mess up fairly significantly for English to be unintelligible.

> Why there isn't something like Facebook for science?

I hope not, why would there even be something as dreadful. Interdisciplinary research and science communication are great things and yes there are those who pursue PhDs in that but it's very difficult career wise.

One huge problem is the amount of jargon each and every field accumulates, there are also a too many gibberish meta research papers written and published, they're using the right scientific words and packed with clever explanations but are mostly utterly worthless. And the worthlessness doesn't end there, splitting one subject and it's findings into different articles is just one of those anti-patterns made to show the number of papers to receive more grants.

Thanks for the insights. Facebook for science is a bad metaphor, maybe the Slack for science or something like that is more appropriate. How to build a platform for scientists with incentive structures that reward meaningful research instead of grant fueled hyper-production of fluff?

Maybe form an incubator a la YC but for scientist in cross disciplinary fields (or involve existing ones), then connect the scientist on the interest basis and they maybe deliver some platform for online collaboration, it's the collaboration part online that's the difficult part. Anyone with some programming skills could throw together a django install with orcid.org login but what do with the platform if the most important. Most of these efforts end up like Figshare, holding the data but not encouraging anyone to go outside their boundaries of the field.

It seems it's about discovery and incentives. Which interesting/important project to join and why. Something like GitHub and Open Source Software is possible because programmers can easily make money on the side while donating their time to something they believe in. Plus being successful at that will bring them even more high paying gigs.

Would there be enough engagement in Facebook for Science to sell meaningful amount of ads?

You could target the ads really well, at least—lasers for the physicists, pipettes for the biologists, chalk for the mathematicians…

Facebook and social media in general is already horrible as is, why would you want to infect academia with it as well? The community does have a lot of issues but a social network and more blog posts are not the solution.

The traditional way is to organize meetups in the way of conferences, workshops, symposia, etc. It has a number of issues since some labs can't afford sending students or postdocs overseas and some countries are disadvantaged (for geographic or visa restriction reasons) but the organizers are usually well-aware of it and e.g. give out grants to cover expenses for students who apply for it.

I think the onus is on English speakers to reach out for the hidden knowledge out there, and not for the majority of the community to adapt to the native English-speaking minority. Right now they don't feel challenged because Anglo-Saxon univeristies are pretty much 'where it's at' and European ones more or less follow suit, but with the rise of Chinese research the situation may be about to change.

> There is a research saying that lying in a foreign language is easier.

I totally agree. I guess since you have to use more those areas involved in language and rational thinking, I find much more easy to say emotional content in a foreign language. You feel more detached of what you are saying.

Tldr: It's easier to say "I love you" or "I hate you" in a foreign language.

So being super rational is not a good thing. Found the research https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180719142154.h...

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