[coldtea]

>Just represent everything in a machine readable set of axioms, problem solved

Great idea! Let me just tell my friends, Hilbert and Russel about it! Maybe my friend Kurt will like it too!

/s

Not to mention that most of the problems science has to tackle we cannot even begin to have them formulated in some concise "set of axioms" even if that worked in theory.

And that's for hard sciences...

[woodman]

I never said that it would be "concise". Also, there would be nothing preventing the use of stubs in the knowledge graph.

[mturmon]

I can't be sure from such a short reply, but in this glib statement, and the one you made above, you seem to be unaware of the very real consequences of the Godel Incompleteness Theorem. This is what @coldtea is referring to.

In short: even for a relatively easy-to-quantify universe of discourse like Mathematics, this theorem implies that (of necessity) some propositions will not be provably true or false, or that the system will contain a contradiction. You have a choice of either incompleteness or contradiction (incompleteness seems better).

That's for Mathematics. Now, consider physics, biology, or sociology. And more important, consider that the questions present are at the frontiers, so are very much not reducible to codification. It's a real problem. If you'd ever worked on a really complex, multifaceted, end-to-end science problem (say, weather forecasting, or drug design), you'd have a little more humility.

[woodman]

You saw my link to the open world assumption above... so I'm not sure why you'd go on about the incompleteness theorem.

Can you think of an idea that cannot be represented as true, false, or unknown? Now consider a hypothesis. I'm not saying it would be simple or easy, just possible and preferable to the present system.

As far as my apparent lack of humility: in the interest of not wasting your time or my own, I've truncated my correspondence. From now on, just imagine that all my posts are prefixed with a paragraph in which I grovel before the throne of scientific greatness.

[cinquemb]

>As far as my apparent lack of humility: in the interest of not wasting your time or my own, I've truncated my correspondence. From now on, just imagine that all my posts are prefixed with a paragraph in which I grovel before the throne of scientific greatness.

You should write some code, that when you press the reply button it appends some form of lexical prostration that is derived from the comment space of the identity you're commenting to :P

In all seriousness, it appears that for the effort that goes into all the signaling that goes in within academia (and to the external world) to all the "real problems" people are solving, automatic approaches to all aspects of how research is conducted will happen because it is more efficient and consumes less energy than say a human being worrying about if their methods paper will be accepted and how to please reviewers, and etc…

I mean the fact that my PI hired me, as someone who didn't graduate from undergrad over all the phds who get rejected for volunteer positions, because i can slap some code together must say something about the direction things are going in this world. But when I tell the postdoc that the reason his spectrograms looks the way they do when he downsamples due to less constructive interference (while also trying signaling to appear humble because how dare some non-degreed folk pontificate on such things as a matter of established fact like the rest of the folks do around here, even when asked for help), he has to go ask the sr. research scientist the next day to only tell me that I was right… that's 24 hours his clunky matlab script could have ran! lol

Meh… inefficiencies, inefficiencies…

[woodman]

I'm happy to report that I have zero experience in the postgrad industry. While I'd love to spend most of my time working in pure theory and potentially influencing an entire field, I really don't think I'd be able to put up with some of the antics I've heard about. There is plenty of silliness that occurs in the corporate world, with the information silos and kingdom building, but at the end of the day money talks and bullshit walks - with little delay.

This problem is being worked on, and I'm pretty confident that the solution will be based on the principals of the semantic web. I have a feeling that academia will be pretty late to the party when it comes to implementation though, if half of the stories I've heard are true.

[cinquemb]

With humans at the helm of figuring out ways to allocate resources to such efforts, I'm not holding my breath for academia or industry.