Part of doing science is the development of new methods and terminology.
Rather than speculating in the abstract, the best solution is perhaps to try to come up with concrete standardization ideas, and discuss whether they would work.
No, the best way is too look at standardization effort that actually exist in the real world.
But standardization can also be dangerous as it generates power. The ACS (American Chemical Association) for example introduced CAS numbers for researchers to identify chemical compounds and encouraged researchers in articles to use those compounds to identify what substances they are speaking about.
The problem is that they want you to pay money every time you want to look up a compounds via it’s CAS number. They sued Wikipedia for putting CAS numbers in their articles.
If you want to mine the literature you have to do hundred thousands of lookups and can’t just pay what the ACS wants at per compounds lookup prices.
Given how crapy the new DSM5 has become the NHI made a move to less standardization and encouraged researchers to develop other ways of mental disease classification.
If a biologists finds a method that gives him 99% of the time the results he wants he is really happy. If a mathematician has a methods that gave everyone in history the same result that’s an assumption that might or might not be true and is in need of a mathematical proof. Trying to get the biologist and the mathematician to agree on the same terminology is going to be very hard because they have very different standards.
The need for computer understandable text has driven bioinformaticians to publish huge ontologies of vocubulary.
When one reads scientific papers using statistical techniques, one is often struck by the number of relatively simple mistakes. These mistakes are not due to some mysterious lack of tacit “practical knowledge” but are rather quite easy to point out and explicate.
I think that’s primarily a problem of peer review where only the colleagues of a researcher are asked but it would be good someone with a statistics background would look over every paper.
Sure, but standardization has, by and large, been to the better, I would argue. If we hadn’t converged on e.g. a specific terminology on measuring various quantities, communication would have been much harder (and to the extent that we have not converged, for instance because Britons and Americans use alternatives to the metric system, this gives rise to lots of unnecessary complications.) But you’re right that it could lead to problems. ACS’ practice seems quite malign.
The point about it being hard to get different disciplines agree on one terminology because of different standards and norms is a good one. I agree with it, and I don’t think consensus is possible. The question is whether it is necessary. I’m thinking one could try to set up this system and let researchers join if they want (e.g. if they want to advertise their results through the system). Postmodernists and others who would not want to use the standardized terminology would not join, but if the system became sufficiently influential, this would presumably be to their disadvantage.
My idea is very much in line with the Unity of Science movement; an idea that I am unfashionably positive to. Science should not be compartmentalized—even though there should of course be a thorough division of labour science should be a heavily integrated enterprise.
I’m thinking one could try to set up this system and let researchers join if they want (e.g. if they want to advertise their results through the system). Postmodernists and others who would not want to use the standardized terminology would not join, but if the system became sufficiently influential, this would presumably be to their disadvantage.
‘Influence’ is a strange thing as it depends not only on the factors we want it to depend on. ‘Ideally’ we’d want scientific results to be the ultimate criterion but the effort to publish in high impact journals shows that it is not so. It could a very long time until such a system is fixated in the scientific ecosystem.
My idea is very much in line with the Unity of Science movement; an idea that I am unfashionably positive to. Science should not be compartmentalized—even though there should of course be a thorough division of labour science should be a heavily integrated enterprise.
I’m learning more and more that my thoughts are not original.
It could be worse but a non-profit scientific association holding back the advancement of science through locking up knowledge is a serious issue.
The DSM-5 is more problematic. People who get hit strongly on the head often develop an depression. Should psychologists really diagnose them with the same “depression” as the person who’s depressed because his parent died?
I don’t think so. That means we need to develop better vocabulary and better tests to distinguish those two people who get labeled the same via DSM-5 criteria.
It would also be nice to have criteria for depression that are optimized in a way that two psychologists will agree on whether a particular person is depressed.
Let’s say the fMRI people finally do something useful and find a way to diagnose depression via fMRI and give us an objective numerical score for how depressed someone is. Depression_fMRI won’t be exactly the same thing as depression_DSM5.
Maybe we need 5 different depression definitions and test interventions for every depression definition separately to find the best treatment for particular patients.
Looking up the definition of what depression means prevents that process from going forward.
Part of doing science is the development of new methods and terminology.
No, the best way is too look at standardization effort that actually exist in the real world.
But standardization can also be dangerous as it generates power. The ACS (American Chemical Association) for example introduced CAS numbers for researchers to identify chemical compounds and encouraged researchers in articles to use those compounds to identify what substances they are speaking about.
The problem is that they want you to pay money every time you want to look up a compounds via it’s CAS number. They sued Wikipedia for putting CAS numbers in their articles. If you want to mine the literature you have to do hundred thousands of lookups and can’t just pay what the ACS wants at per compounds lookup prices.
Given how crapy the new DSM5 has become the NHI made a move to less standardization and encouraged researchers to develop other ways of mental disease classification.
If a biologists finds a method that gives him 99% of the time the results he wants he is really happy. If a mathematician has a methods that gave everyone in history the same result that’s an assumption that might or might not be true and is in need of a mathematical proof. Trying to get the biologist and the mathematician to agree on the same terminology is going to be very hard because they have very different standards.
The need for computer understandable text has driven bioinformaticians to publish huge ontologies of vocubulary.
I think that’s primarily a problem of peer review where only the colleagues of a researcher are asked but it would be good someone with a statistics background would look over every paper.
Sure, but standardization has, by and large, been to the better, I would argue. If we hadn’t converged on e.g. a specific terminology on measuring various quantities, communication would have been much harder (and to the extent that we have not converged, for instance because Britons and Americans use alternatives to the metric system, this gives rise to lots of unnecessary complications.) But you’re right that it could lead to problems. ACS’ practice seems quite malign.
The point about it being hard to get different disciplines agree on one terminology because of different standards and norms is a good one. I agree with it, and I don’t think consensus is possible. The question is whether it is necessary. I’m thinking one could try to set up this system and let researchers join if they want (e.g. if they want to advertise their results through the system). Postmodernists and others who would not want to use the standardized terminology would not join, but if the system became sufficiently influential, this would presumably be to their disadvantage.
My idea is very much in line with the Unity of Science movement; an idea that I am unfashionably positive to. Science should not be compartmentalized—even though there should of course be a thorough division of labour science should be a heavily integrated enterprise.
‘Influence’ is a strange thing as it depends not only on the factors we want it to depend on. ‘Ideally’ we’d want scientific results to be the ultimate criterion but the effort to publish in high impact journals shows that it is not so. It could a very long time until such a system is fixated in the scientific ecosystem.
I’m learning more and more that my thoughts are not original.
It could be worse but a non-profit scientific association holding back the advancement of science through locking up knowledge is a serious issue.
The DSM-5 is more problematic. People who get hit strongly on the head often develop an depression. Should psychologists really diagnose them with the same “depression” as the person who’s depressed because his parent died?
I don’t think so. That means we need to develop better vocabulary and better tests to distinguish those two people who get labeled the same via DSM-5 criteria.
It would also be nice to have criteria for depression that are optimized in a way that two psychologists will agree on whether a particular person is depressed.
Let’s say the fMRI people finally do something useful and find a way to diagnose depression via fMRI and give us an objective numerical score for how depressed someone is. Depression_fMRI won’t be exactly the same thing as depression_DSM5.
Maybe we need 5 different depression definitions and test interventions for every depression definition separately to find the best treatment for particular patients.
Looking up the definition of what depression means prevents that process from going forward.