103 karma · joined November 19, 2015
It's almost like the same type of people who use antidepressants also like to live near woodlands. And they get depressed when they don't live near woodlands.
"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater.
With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.
In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.
The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.
"An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. [...] In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science."
I appreciated how this quote emphasizes that science and modeling are inextricably connected.
It's brought to life for me Richard Feynman's idea that the way to do great work is to keep a dozen questions at the forefront of your mind and wait for inspiration. It's remarkable how often I'll see something in my daily review that helps me reframe my approach to a question.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo361492...
It's like if someone wrote a book called "What is consciousness?" and just provided an annotated list of neurotransmitters. That approach leaves a lot out.