Hacker News Reader

Comment by xor99 | Hacker News Reader

I think this comes down to the growth of scientific management and technocracy in research and that bureaucracy's attempt to fight over dwindling public funding for the sciences coupled with lack of private non-commercial sources of funding. Universities are mostly made up of managers or researchers that end up acting like managers in order to justify their position. This leads to a set of bureaucratic rules for scientific success and a range of conferences that prop that system up. Disagreement, the possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the ability to take random choices based on intuition are eliminated when the majority of a field acts like scientific managers.

I highly recommend reading "The Body Electric" which details an excellent example, in both technical and social terms, of how structural effects like the above impede highly "random" or creative ideas in science.

View on HN

> Disagreement, the possibility to be stupid and wrong, and the ability to take random choices based on intuition are eliminated when the majority of a field acts like scientific managers.

How do we democratize physical sciences in the same way as CS? My bet would be on the combination of the two (simulation) and providing the high-level tools to the masses.

By focusing on Small Science. Big Science needs big money, big equations, big machines, big careers, big meetings, etc, so big science should be last resort. Make experiments cheap, cheap enough that it becomes embarrassing not to double check. Cheap enough that half of the comments in a science article are about people doing the experiment themselves right there.

That doesn't work. The scientific literature is already flooded with cheap theory papers and a clear absence of real heavy lifting. Such papers are routinely filled with basic errors or flawed methodologies. There's no embarrassment associated with not double checking, failed replications happen all the time and there are usually no consequences.

are there guarantees that "Small Science" is productive? Regardless of how knowledgeable I am I don't think I can do experimental particle physics in my garage.

Would you mind sharing the author's name as well please? I'm interested in checking this book out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_(book)

This one, the main relevance is that the author came up against bio and medical establishment that refused to accept even the scientific interest of studying the effect of small voltage profiles/current on tissue and bone growth. One reason was that the main source of info in the mid-20th century was a soviet scientist, but thats definitely not the whole reason as it comes back to debates about vitalism and the role of electricity in bodily functions/philosophy (etc). Theres a whole lot of similar work in studies on bioelectricity at the moment which if successful seems like it could become a dominant approach too lol. Pretty tricky to think about how that process works over decades or hundreds of years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com