DIY science seems to ignore prior work. You claim using google is a medieval way of doing science. On the contrary, its a very modern way of science. Medieval science relied on polymaths discovering things for the first time. Gallileo needed his thought experiments to determine such things as the inverse square law and that mass did not impact the acceleration of a falling object (he also reasoned that light was instantaneous, but given the tools at the time it wasn’t such an unreasonable conclusion). Nowadays scientists make progress by building on the progress of others, so while it can be useful to develop a critical mind to figure out from first principles how one’s fridge functions, you’d be better off using your critical facilties to assess the evidence someone else has collected.
Note that the critical assessment of scientific literature is a non-trivial skill, but a far more valuable one. By myself, doing some work on how to become rich, I might make some decent conclusions, but I have neither the man power nor training to necessarily come to the correct conclusions. If I can accurately assess scientific papers, however, I should be able to discern which papers are closest to reflecting the evidence.
Put it another way: looking up other people’s research is scholarship, not science. Scholarship isn’t bad. In most fields scholarship is useful, and in technical fields it’s a prerequisite to doing science. But—people should also look at the data directly. If the literature isn’t useful (and “how to get rich,” for instance, doesn’t have an obvious body of sound literature behind it) then unless you look at the data, you’ll never know.
And is the literature accurate on more explicitly scientific topics, like global warming? Well, I don’t know. To know the answer, I’d have to know more about geophysics myself, be able to assess the data myself, and compare my “DIY science” to the experts and see if they match. Or, I’d have to know something about the trustworthiness of peer-reviewed scientific studies in general—how likely they are to be true or false—and use that data to inform how much I trust climate scientists. Either way, to have good evidence to believe or not believe scientists, I’d need data of my own.
The phrase “DIY science” makes it sound like there’s some virtue in going it alone. All alone, no help from the establishment. I don’t think there’s any virtue in that. Help is useful! And after all, even if you do what Tom did and tabulate data about millionaires, it’s data that someone else gathered. This isn’t My Side of the Mountain science. It’s not idealizing isolation.
The trouble with doing all scholarship but no science is that you have no way to assess the validity of what you read. You can use informal measures (prestige? number of voices in agreement? most cited? most upvotes?) but how do you know if those informal measures correlate with the truth of an argument? Eventually, at some point you have to look at some kind of data and draw your own conclusion from it. Critically assessing scientific literature eventually requires you to do some DIY science. (Here, let’s look at the data section. Do the paper’s conclusions match their actual data?)
Yes, because most of the ‘prior work’ that floats around on the Internet and in books is terrible, and it’s a lot more difficult to figure out which parts are good than to just do simple empiricism yourself.
“You claim using google is a medieval way of doing science.”
The important thing isn’t the act of using Google (a tool), but where you’re getting your information from. If you simply Google X and click on the first result, this is basically equivalent to just asking the person who wrote the web page what they think about X. The distinction is:
medievalism: go to someone who seems like they’re an expert, and ask them about X
rationalism: look at the data, see what the data says about X
This also applies if you’re reading books or whatever.
“Nowadays scientists make progress by building on the progress of others,”
You don’t provide evidence that this actually works well. In physics this seems to genuinely be the case, and in a few other sciences to varying degrees, but for the sorts of questions I’m considering here the “progress of others” is largely gibberish.
I’m not saying that doing science oneself in areas where problems are genuinely unsolved is un-useful, I’m saying the first instinct of the scientist would be to see what work others have done, and then, if that proves useless, do it oneself. Usually discovering what others have done is instructive because it allows you to see things they’ve missed.
I’m not particulary interested in the question of how one becomes wealthy, but I’d be surprised that there aren’t useful answers out there if one searches hard enough. Certainly clicking the first link on google is basically medieval, but using google as it is meant to be used, a tool which allows you to discover information as efficiently as possible, will usually be better than finding the answers oneself.
On an investigation into wealth, I might critisise your work [note, this is a guess because you do not (understandably) give your results and I have no interest in repeating them myself] by supposing that the top 400 may not be a terribly useful sample, being rather exceptional, and might not provide useful insights: I’d much rather look at the aggregate of the thousands of millionares, for example, and think about that.
I’m not necessarily dismissing this post, using your mind to solve these kind of problems is often very instructive, but I’m not sure its the best way to acheive results.
DIY science seems to ignore prior work. You claim using google is a medieval way of doing science. On the contrary, its a very modern way of science. Medieval science relied on polymaths discovering things for the first time. Gallileo needed his thought experiments to determine such things as the inverse square law and that mass did not impact the acceleration of a falling object (he also reasoned that light was instantaneous, but given the tools at the time it wasn’t such an unreasonable conclusion). Nowadays scientists make progress by building on the progress of others, so while it can be useful to develop a critical mind to figure out from first principles how one’s fridge functions, you’d be better off using your critical facilties to assess the evidence someone else has collected.
Note that the critical assessment of scientific literature is a non-trivial skill, but a far more valuable one. By myself, doing some work on how to become rich, I might make some decent conclusions, but I have neither the man power nor training to necessarily come to the correct conclusions. If I can accurately assess scientific papers, however, I should be able to discern which papers are closest to reflecting the evidence.
Put it another way: looking up other people’s research is scholarship, not science. Scholarship isn’t bad. In most fields scholarship is useful, and in technical fields it’s a prerequisite to doing science. But—people should also look at the data directly. If the literature isn’t useful (and “how to get rich,” for instance, doesn’t have an obvious body of sound literature behind it) then unless you look at the data, you’ll never know.
And is the literature accurate on more explicitly scientific topics, like global warming? Well, I don’t know. To know the answer, I’d have to know more about geophysics myself, be able to assess the data myself, and compare my “DIY science” to the experts and see if they match. Or, I’d have to know something about the trustworthiness of peer-reviewed scientific studies in general—how likely they are to be true or false—and use that data to inform how much I trust climate scientists. Either way, to have good evidence to believe or not believe scientists, I’d need data of my own.
The phrase “DIY science” makes it sound like there’s some virtue in going it alone. All alone, no help from the establishment. I don’t think there’s any virtue in that. Help is useful! And after all, even if you do what Tom did and tabulate data about millionaires, it’s data that someone else gathered. This isn’t My Side of the Mountain science. It’s not idealizing isolation.
The trouble with doing all scholarship but no science is that you have no way to assess the validity of what you read. You can use informal measures (prestige? number of voices in agreement? most cited? most upvotes?) but how do you know if those informal measures correlate with the truth of an argument? Eventually, at some point you have to look at some kind of data and draw your own conclusion from it. Critically assessing scientific literature eventually requires you to do some DIY science. (Here, let’s look at the data section. Do the paper’s conclusions match their actual data?)
Top level post, please!
“DIY science seems to ignore prior work.”
Yes, because most of the ‘prior work’ that floats around on the Internet and in books is terrible, and it’s a lot more difficult to figure out which parts are good than to just do simple empiricism yourself.
“You claim using google is a medieval way of doing science.”
The important thing isn’t the act of using Google (a tool), but where you’re getting your information from. If you simply Google X and click on the first result, this is basically equivalent to just asking the person who wrote the web page what they think about X. The distinction is:
medievalism: go to someone who seems like they’re an expert, and ask them about X
rationalism: look at the data, see what the data says about X
This also applies if you’re reading books or whatever.
“Nowadays scientists make progress by building on the progress of others,”
You don’t provide evidence that this actually works well. In physics this seems to genuinely be the case, and in a few other sciences to varying degrees, but for the sorts of questions I’m considering here the “progress of others” is largely gibberish.
I’m not saying that doing science oneself in areas where problems are genuinely unsolved is un-useful, I’m saying the first instinct of the scientist would be to see what work others have done, and then, if that proves useless, do it oneself. Usually discovering what others have done is instructive because it allows you to see things they’ve missed.
I’m not particulary interested in the question of how one becomes wealthy, but I’d be surprised that there aren’t useful answers out there if one searches hard enough. Certainly clicking the first link on google is basically medieval, but using google as it is meant to be used, a tool which allows you to discover information as efficiently as possible, will usually be better than finding the answers oneself.
On an investigation into wealth, I might critisise your work [note, this is a guess because you do not (understandably) give your results and I have no interest in repeating them myself] by supposing that the top 400 may not be a terribly useful sample, being rather exceptional, and might not provide useful insights: I’d much rather look at the aggregate of the thousands of millionares, for example, and think about that.
I’m not necessarily dismissing this post, using your mind to solve these kind of problems is often very instructive, but I’m not sure its the best way to acheive results.