In particular, four research activities were often highlighted as difficult and costly (here in order of decreasing frequency of mention):
Running experiments
Formalizing intuitions
Unifying disparate insights into a coherent frame
Proving theorems
I don’t know what your first reaction to this list is, but for us, it was something like: “Oh, none of these activities seems strictly speaking necessary in knowledge-production.” Indeed, a quick look at history presents us with cases where each of those activities was bypassed:
Faraday figured out the key principles of electromagnetism without formalization by careful experiments and geometric visualizations of lines of force (Post on Faraday’s insights and Maxwell’s take on them soon to come).
Complexity theorists gathered evidence for P≠NP without a proof by connecting it to many different problems, notably the breakdown of approximation algorithms (Post on the ways complexity theorist generate evidence soon to come).
What these examples highlight is the classical failure when searching for the need of customers: to anchor too much on what people ask for explicitly, instead of what they actually need.
I disagree that this conclusion follows from the examples. Every example you list uses at least one of the methods in your list. So, this might as well be used as evidence for why this list of methods are important.
In addition, several of the listed examples benefited from division of labour. This is a common practice in Physics. Not everyone does experiments. Some people instead specialise in the other steps of science, such as
Formalizing intuitions
Unifying disparate insights into a coherent frame
Proving theorems
This is very different from concluding that experiments are not necessary.
Actually, I don’t think we really disagree. I might have just not made my position very clear in the original post.
The point of the post is not to say that these activities are not often valuable, but instead to point out that they can easily turn into “To do science, I need to always do [activity]”. And what I’m getting from the examples is that in some cases, you actually don’t need to do [activity]. There’s a shortcut, or maybe just you’re in a different phase of the problem.
Do you think there is still a disagreement after this clarification?
I think the confusion is because it is not clear form that section of the post if you are saying 1)”you don’t need to do all of these things” or 2) “you don’t need to do any of these things”.
Because I think 1 goes without saying, I assumed you were saying 2. Also 2 probably is true in rare cases, but this is not backed up by your examples.
But if 1 don’t go without saying, then this means that a lot of “doing science” is cargo-culting? Which is sort of what you are saying when you talk about cached methodologies.
So why would smart, curious, truth-seeking individuals use cached methodologies? Do I do this?
Some self-reflection: I did some of this as a PhD student, because I was new, and it was a way to hit the ground running. So, I did some science using the method my supervisor told me to use, while simultaneously working to understand the reason behind this method. I did spend less time that I would have wanted to understand all the assumptions of the sub-sub field of physics I was working in, because of the pressure to keep publishing and because I got carried away by various fun math I could do if i just accepted these assumptions. After my PhD I felt that if I was going to stay in Physics, I wanted to take year or two for just learning, to actually understand Loop Quantum Gravit, and all the other competing theories, but that’s not how academia works unfortunately, which is one of the reasons I left.
I think that the fundament of good Epistemic is to not have competing incentives.
I disagree that this conclusion follows from the examples. Every example you list uses at least one of the methods in your list. So, this might as well be used as evidence for why this list of methods are important.
In addition, several of the listed examples benefited from division of labour. This is a common practice in Physics. Not everyone does experiments. Some people instead specialise in the other steps of science, such as
This is very different from concluding that experiments are not necessary.
Thanks for your comment!
Actually, I don’t think we really disagree. I might have just not made my position very clear in the original post.
The point of the post is not to say that these activities are not often valuable, but instead to point out that they can easily turn into “To do science, I need to always do [activity]”. And what I’m getting from the examples is that in some cases, you actually don’t need to do [activity]. There’s a shortcut, or maybe just you’re in a different phase of the problem.
Do you think there is still a disagreement after this clarification?
I think we agreement.
I think the confusion is because it is not clear form that section of the post if you are saying
1)”you don’t need to do all of these things”
or
2) “you don’t need to do any of these things”.
Because I think 1 goes without saying, I assumed you were saying 2. Also 2 probably is true in rare cases, but this is not backed up by your examples.
But if 1 don’t go without saying, then this means that a lot of “doing science” is cargo-culting? Which is sort of what you are saying when you talk about cached methodologies.
So why would smart, curious, truth-seeking individuals use cached methodologies? Do I do this?
Some self-reflection: I did some of this as a PhD student, because I was new, and it was a way to hit the ground running. So, I did some science using the method my supervisor told me to use, while simultaneously working to understand the reason behind this method. I did spend less time that I would have wanted to understand all the assumptions of the sub-sub field of physics I was working in, because of the pressure to keep publishing and because I got carried away by various fun math I could do if i just accepted these assumptions. After my PhD I felt that if I was going to stay in Physics, I wanted to take year or two for just learning, to actually understand Loop Quantum Gravit, and all the other competing theories, but that’s not how academia works unfortunately, which is one of the reasons I left.
I think that the fundament of good Epistemic is to not have competing incentives.