All my homies love meta science

What’s it about?

I’ll find it and put it on your doorstep.

No work is wasted if it gives a clearer picture of something. Even if you get disproven, it just means that you found one of the dark parts of the picture. Now sure, people mostly remember the ones that discover the brighter parts of the image. But the whole picture is still made of both the dark and bright parts. We don’t just need to know what works, we also need to know for sure what DOESN’T work. Or else we’ll never know the real bounds of something.

Now if you don’t mind, i’ll go back to slamming my head against analysis.

Theoretically yes, but in practice, negative results don’t usually get published. People don’t want to fund negative results. Every fu ding agency is always chasing novelty, and impact. Our scientific community is actually kind of bad with actually doing science. We are lucky if we get negative results widely known these days.

If all is being done on the up and up, nobody’s got an agenda to push, they’re actually doing science: no. Doing an experiment, publishing results, and then having your peers replicate your experiment and be unable to reproduce your results is not failure. In the words of Adam Savage, “It’s not ‘my experiment failed,’ it’s ‘my experiment yielded data.’” But also, if one scientist gets a result and no one else does, the real thing we learn might be in finding out why.

REPEAT is a part of the scientific process.

It’s not a failure in the usual sense we think about it, no. You were still “technically wrong” in whatever hypothesis you had that was disproven. But the end result is different because theoretically everyone involved cares more about the answer being found, not necessarily that they are the one to do it.

Hell, in cases where whatever you did was later proven incorrect it’s usually that whatever you did was the most correct answer for the information we had at the time. Then new information is discovered and often someone else builds off what you did to get this new answer.

In my opinion, the obsession with being able to measure everything with numbers is the cause. And those numbers are inevitably converting d to units of money, because capitalism.

A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.

Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.

Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.

The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.

Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.

Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.

Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.

So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.

This doesn’t disprove their meme. What it is saying is still true. Those scientist you mention held back progress and couldn’t be “real scientists”

Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.

Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…

Not to mention all the bs around science publishing, like not publishing negative results

Yeah, my first thought when I saw this was that it was definitely not made by a scientist.

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Or “your research results will hurt my profits, this media campaign will slander your credibility. We’ll do our own research, with blackjack and hookers, and bribed results”

For example, a friend of mine ran a study that disproved a company’s study that they used to push a product. Then my friend’s company got blacklisted by the first company for all future products.

Or “my research is true because of conspiracy theories”

Everyone in science I’ve ever met agrees there should be a Journal of Stuff That Didn’t Work