Comment by K0SM0S | Hacker News Reader

Comment by K0SM0S | Hacker News Reader

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Just a few remarks, notwithstanding your/my opinions.

Physics has not "one of the better reproducibility rates" but 100%; per the Scientific Method any valid theory must:

- be reproducible (verifiable empirically)

- have predictive power

- not negate existing theories

This constitutes 'acceptable proof'.

It yields a 'compound effect' to theoretical research: for instance, Newton's Laws were never wrong, just narrower in scope than Einstein's. No future valid theory will ever prove any of these two wrong, it can only generalize more, because we know these two to be true. True is true forever, barring a fundamental change in this universe itself. So we keep the theoretical foundations forever, they're solid.

Their interpretation, however, may change as we widen the scope, and that is the 'human' part in science, the art of it, to produce valid representations linking the math with the experience of reality. That changes a lot, in time, and even from person to person.

The 'why' things are is another matter entirely and not a concern for physics nor science in general; we search for the root causes to explain 'how' things work the way they do. We stop there in theory for beyond is mere interpretation, opinion, belief.

Now this would exclude all social sciences and biology and countless others from the realm of 'science' and that's not fair; these fields yield very usable results despite the nigh impossible search for pure theory. I like the 19-20th century view that 'empirical sciences' gain value when we try to the best of our ability to apply the Scientific Method and mathematical tools to account for fuzziness.

Deep learning is certainly a formidable upgrade to the tooling of empirical sciences, brute-forcing 'how' things work for lack of a better truth than retrospective.

Just don't compare it to e.g. physics, don't ask for predictability (as you wouldn't ask a fish to fly), it's pointless and only serves to undermine the value of empirical sciences, while overemphasizing that of theory.

Because you know, in theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they're not... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think you might have misunderstood? Academic physics publications do not have perfect reproduction rates. Especially theoretical physics. The criteria for a valid theory doesn’t prevent human mistakes.

Everything you said applies to social sciences too. Per the scientific method any valid theory must be reproducible and predictive. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that the academic research and publication process allows results that turn out to be untrue, both in social sciences and hard sciences.

Maybe have a gander at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_scien...

I'll give you that it's a bit of an idealistic view, to be filed under "epistemology".

It is my understanding that margins of error in reproducible rates are on-par with our limits in engineering capabilities to 'test' experimentally. The validation becomes statistic because the real world is too chaotic/complex/whatever external cause, but the sum of evidence must tend to show (mean, SD, etc) that the theory applies to the real world, and predicts "a range of possible within some margin of error", which in practice results from our imprecisions. E.g. how we continuously prove Einstein's GR.

Quantum uncertainty is a whole other paradigm which I don't think can be discussed in the same terms; a lot of our 'logic' does not apply and thus I'd rather refrain from using classical frameworks of thinking to even characterize it.

But the fact stands that you should always be able to verify experimentally a valid theory; our failure in practice, sometimes, has nothing to do with theory.

Social sciences look at category of problems considered "hard" by any scientific metric because of their complexity. It's like meteorology and indeed astrophysics, we lack the processing power (both our brains and computers, for now) to go all-in on theory. I was however surprised, in my studies, that the more down-to-earth approach of anthropology (naive, dare I say seeking first principles) seemed to yield observation 'closer' to theory than its modern sister sociology, whose subtopic —the modern world, as opposed to very specific cultures for a quite narrow spacetime— is vastly too multi-factorial to even begin to modelize, let alone theorize.

Perhaps you can help shed some light on my apparent misunderstanding? See this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365183

I’ll give it a try. I can’t speak to the downvotes, but from my perspective you started talking about physics itself being repeatable. That is a separate topic from whether academic publications are repeatable. The thread’s context was the top comment suggesting the research linked at the very top is questionable because of it’s conclusion and it’s category (social science). My argument is that neither the conclusion nor the category can be used to assume the linked article is less than scientific, and that no sciences are designed to tell us why things are the way they are. When you add that physics itself is 100% repeatable, while true, it isn’t relevant to the topic nor does it help reflect on the article’s validity.

> Physics has not "one of the better reproducibility rates" but 100%

I'd ask if you ever taken a good look at cosmology, but your username would suggest that you have. Which makes it all the more surprising to me that you make a claim like this.

I suppose it's too late to ask for a deeper explanation. I must admit I'm puzzled on this one; these are principles that were taught to me very early on and never questioned since. I can remember by physics teacher along the lines of "physics is exact, if your experiment fails it's not the theory that's wrong, it's you!" and students were expected to make the experiment work for a good grade. If education grades can be subornated to the certainty that carefully designed experimental protocols should work within margins of error, this goes to show how confident we are that valid theory is valid... I don't know.

As for the scientific theory it was taught to me even in History class, it's just a set of principles.

Astrophysics, as far as I know, do not contradict existing theory? However it very much shows the limits thereof — but what's beyond this limit is not part of our undertanding of physics, of our theory, yet or ever. Maybe you can solve gravitation at the quantum level, maybe not, either way our accepted current theory work and keep being confirmed afaik.

Genuinely curious to know why the downvotes to GP.

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