[munificent]

> it's insane that metascience isn't studied more.

It is, probably more than is apparent. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_scientific_knowle...

There is an interesting recursive problem here, though: what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process? Whatever tools you use will themselves be hobbled by the same systemic flaws you are trying to understand.

Also, as any sociologist will be happy to tell you, incentive structures and other human group behavior gets in the way. It's probably hard to get funding for a study that shows that all the other departments at your university aren't quite the flawless seekers of truth they appear to be.

[analog31]

Indeed, and if you think science is bad, imagine metascience.

[fnord123]

When you think about it, it's insane that metametascience isn't studied more. We're going to question every little detail about the scientific process, but we're just going to take on faith that peer-review and publication in journals is an effective method for weeding out "bad" metascience?

[caenn]

Indeed, and if you think metascience is bad, imagine meta-metascience.

[svieira]

Meta-metascience has been studied _extensively_ by previous generations, where what this generation calls "science" was called "natural philosophy" and interesting discourse and study was had on such things as:

* The study of knowledge (epistemology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

* The study of existence and what exists (ontology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

* The study of the purpose of things (teleology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

It turns out that these are hard areas of study and it requires a lot of properly focused leisure time to understand properly. Most people don't consider these things, wing it, and wind up working with a half-baked meta-meta science of their own creation ... oh, I see what you mean :-D

[analog31]

Where's tail call optimization when you need it?

[jonsen]

Would be nice if tail call optimization solved the halting problem.

[IIAOPSW]

You've caught an Orobus by the tail!

[nicoburns]

I might be biased as someone who studied philosophy. But I wish Philosophy of Science was mandatory in more science degrees. A lot of scientists don't seem to be familiar.

[andi999]

Can you point to something good and useful in the Philosophie of Science? I mean let's say physics is as good as it gets (laws in mathematical language, strong experimental evidence, solid results); from my perspective a success. But it has nothing to do with how like popper imagines science. So insisting on like a popper process would also not be benificial for physics in my opinion. But probably there is better stuff, I just couldn't find it. (with a popper mindset nobody would understand why we still study 'falsified' theories like electrodynamics)

[nicoburns]

Some key things for me would be the ideas that:

1. There is no such thing as objectivity in inquiry. There is always a scientist interpreting things, and they are always looking at things through the lens of their own biases and cultural norms. The best you can hope to do is to be aware of your limitations.

1. Statistical evidence on its own is not always a good basis for believing something to be true. Typically you also want a good theoretical model, and an understanding of the mechanism that underlies the observed phenomena (physics is good at this, psychology not so much).

3. That there is more knowledge than is detectable through statistical methods (currently at least). And that lack of evidence from statistical studies does not necessarily constitute good evidence that a theory is false.

[LudwigNagasena]

1. This is pretty trivial. Why do you think most scientists aren’t aware of their limitations?

2. This is studied in statistics classes. It is impossible to analyze data without a statistical model, so of course your conclusions rely on it. So this is also quite trivial.

3. Again, are scientists oblivious to this simple notion? I doubt it.

[twhb]

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom?

That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial.

Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own.

It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instead of to what you’d look like if you floated over the top. This assumption of horizontal travel is incredibly deeply engrained in humans, to the point that the English language doesn’t even have up/down equivalents to the words “left” and “right”, i.e. a word that means the direction closer to your head than to your feet regardless of your orientation.

[Ao7bei3s]

A mirror doesn't swap left and right, it swaps front and back.

The realizations that people expect yaw rotation because that's what they are used to, or that normal day language isn't always precise (my left? your left?), seem extremely trivial to me and doesn't require any deep philosophical "insights".

In the hard sciences, you often don't even need the handwavey "swap a and b" explanation when it is much more useful to just model its behavior (ingress ray/plane intersection, normalize ingress ray, subtract twice normal vector of plane from ray to get egress ray direction).

I'm sure Feynman was a great physicist and teacher, but he's also great at just wowing people by using lots of words without saying much. Like in his famous why-is-ice-slippery video where he goes onto a completely unnecessary discourse on the nature of questions instead of just answering the dang question.

I always felt that is the perfect way to showcase the difference between education and edutainment, and I assume his lectures were a bit more substantial.

[Kim_Bruning]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location

I guess technically correct, because they're mostly latin loan words.

[LudwigNagasena]

I fail to see how it in any way relates to #1.

[sprafa]

A lot of this stuff applies more to bad scientists, of which there are many.

[dennis_jeeves]

LudwigNagasena, to you it may be obvious ( as it was to me). However I discovered ( much to my disappointment) that it is not obvious to career 'scientists'. A fool with a phd is still a fool. What used to the domain of primarily religions (rituals, superstitions etc.) is now the domain of several offshoots, one of which is mainstream science.

[austhrow743]

Is this coming from judging peoples actions or discussion with acquaintances and colleagues, or in discussion with trusted friends who are career scientists?

My understanding is that a lot of problems in science are incentive based, and that would look very similar to someone just not knowing things from the outside.

[bsder]

> Can you point to something good and useful in the Philosophie of Science?

Every scientist should be able to answer the particular tenets that they take on faith.

Scientists do take on faith that the universe is causal and that the rules today are the same as the rules yesterday.

Yes, scientists double check these assumptions over and over, but they can never "prove" them.

This kind of introspection is important for science to set itself apart from religion, for example.

[andi999]

I meant more like book, or a philosopher.

[missingrib]

Yeah I think the fundamental distinction is that metascience is probably at its core going to be philosophy, but that doesn't have to make it any less rigorous. And I agree, Philsoophy of Science being included in more science degrees would be great. One of the most interesting courses I took in my undergrad.

[SiempreViernes]

It's not that useful in practice though, for many fields a bit more ethics is a much more pressing issue.

[chromaton]

>what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process?

Iterating on existing systems to see if you can get results to converge and also testing new systems to see if they also result in known good values.

[munificent]

It's fun to realize how deeply ingrained the current scientific process is in our way of thinking.

All of these ideas that you tacitly take for granted are itself mutable parts of the scientific process:

* That iterative improvement and hill-climbing is an effective process for improving results.

* That replication of experiments and convergence is a truth-generating enterprise.

* That truth can be expressed numerically.

* That there are some values that are "known good". By what process? According to whom?

To be clear, I don't disagree with those. However, these rules aren't baked into the firmament of the universe. They are processes we humans have chosen to apply in our social process of reaching conensus on truth. In other words, this list here isn't physics, it's technology.

It's entirely possible to imagine a culture whose truth finding bodies don't take for granted one or more of these rules at all. That culture might be more or less effective (again, according to what metrics?), but it would still be well-defined.

[dragonwriter]

> That iterative improvement and hill-climbing is an effective process for improving results.

Not essential to science; in fact, there’d a major viewpoint within metascience that explicitly rejects this as popular mythology of how science works in practice, holding that models change by revolution more than evolution.

> That replication of experiments and convergence is a truth-generating enterprise.

Not part of science, in the same way that your use of “truth” later is not.

> That truth can be expressed numerically

No. While scientism may make essential connections between science and truth, science itself only depends on useful predictive models being expressable, not about truth being expressable, numerically or otherwise, or even being a coherent, meaningful concept.

> That there are some values that are "known good"

That's not only not essential to the scientific process, but contrary to something that is: that all results are contingent.

[chromaton]

Yeah, I'm reminded of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance where the author was driven to insanity by the quest to define "quality".

[didibus]

> That culture might be more or less effective (again, according to what metrics?)

Isn't this the idea of "free will". That you get to choose for yourself the metrics you want to optimize your life for?

Now I think that you'll use a combination of learned and inherited desires for it. But the idea here is that each individual can express those desires, and then the "success" of a society is thus to maximize each individuals success, even when they differ in their metrics.

That's a made up concept as well, but I think it still stems from individual desires. We've just mostly all individually observed that an organized society that compromises with each other to maximize each and everyone's individual desires has less risk to our own desires being squandered.

The alternative would be to try to achieve power over others to maximize your desires, and maybe from history and life experience, people have found that to be not sustainable or only achievable for a few, thus your chances at it are lower.

In essence, I think I'm saying that it seems over time people know their desires, but don't know how to beat fulfill them, and this is the metric.

[svieira]

> That truth can be expressed numerically

I don't think this is what is held by those-who-do-science-and-philosophy-at-large (though it may be a generally accepted hand-wave, I don't know). See, for example Category Theory for a branch of what-I-believe-would-generally-be-called-science that doesn't use numbers, but instead expresses things with sets and relations.

The logician is the intersection of the set of all scientists and the set of all philosophers.

[panagathon]

I think I disagree, since mathematics cannot be reduced to logic (or any other instrumentalisation).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/#M...

[lupire]

That article says that mathematics is ill-founded, not that math has something inexpressible by logic. Mathematics can be reduced to logic that is ill-founded.

[xxpor]

The only nit I'd pick with the list is:

* That truth can be expressed numerically.

Isn't the basic point of quantum physics that this isn't true? We can only make guesses with probabilities, but we can't know the actual truth, and therefore can't express it numerically.

[munificent]

Sure, but the probabilities are numbers too. Which is again sort of acknowledging the need to fit quantum mechanics into a numeric framework.

Imagine you were studying ice cream flavors. You might design a study like, "We'll ask a lot of people and the flavor that the most people prefer is the best." In other words, the metaprocess you use to design your experiment itself tacitly assumes you need a numeric result. The presumption of comparison and quantifying frames the questions you even think to ask.

But you can imagine an alternate culture that when studying ice cream flavors doesn't even ask questions with numeric answers. It could be, "We'll ask a lot of people to try flavors and write poems about the experience."

We wouldn't even call this "science". Because there is a hidden border around even the term that affects how we are able to evolve the scientific process.

[klyrs]

Funny thing about quantum mechanics... we use numbers to describe probabilities and functions to describe probability distributions. But the mathematical models we use are incomplete (and, looking at neutron decay, incompatible) so can we really conclude that numbers are the right abstraction?

And no, not poems. Elements of finite groups are not numbers, but they crop up in physics frequently. Topologies are not numbers, but they're also significant in physics.

[licebmi__at__]

That seems broad enough to describe the human history isn’t it? So, “keep doing what you do”?

[chromaton]

Not necessarily. You could just fall back on authority, superstition, or navel-gazing.

[dpe82]

That would probably fall under "testing [new/other] systems to see if they also result in known good values."

[fallingknife]

> what tools do you use to scientifically analyze the scientific process?

Engineering. If you can build something that works based on the rules theorized by scientists, they are on to something. e.g. building a skyscraper proves we know the properties of steel to a pretty good margin of error.

[BurningFrog]

For many sciences, like psychology, that's not normally an option.

[sprafa]

Psychology is basically applied neuroscience. They are both in their infancy and we are using the best information we can, but I wouldn't call the body of work comparable to other sciences.

[thu2111]

Which raises the question why we study this subject at all, if it's not actually applicable to anything beyond making viral TED talks.

[rijoja]

Yeah so it is not science but rather philosophy and it is called Epistemology and not metascience. Even though I suppose metascience would be an apt description in a way.