Science is amazingly reliable compared to any other method of generating knowledge about the world.
It’s misleading to talk about science in general in this context, as different sciences have different amount of “kicking back” going on. The more the world kicks back, and the faster it happens, the easier it is for scientists to falsify & iterate. Technology is based on sciences with some of the most testable hypotheses. This doesn’t mean (necessarily) that scientific articles are more reliable in those areas, but the unreliable ones are detected faster.
We happen to live in a universe where physical interactions are highly local, and forces generally fall off very quickly with distance. On the typical scales we build things at, the physical laws are also very close to deterministic and can be modeled with high accuracy by simplified models with few entities (e.g. looking at a body as a point particle with mass at its center of mass). There’s an anthropic argument about why this should be so somewhere in Feynman, I forget where. Taken all together, this allows very high reproducibility, which enables rapid development of technology by iterated experiments.
Indeed, engineering is distinct from science and contains vast lore all of its own that’s not reducible to basic science.
I feel like I’ve just written a bunch of trivialities.
I would say there is not a sharp dividing line. There is engineering practice, there is research and development into incremental modifications and improvements of existing engineering practice having varying degrees of novelty, and way at the other end of the spectrum is pure research into the mass of neutrinos and whatnot. In between there is an infinite range of degrees.
In some sense engineers are always doing “science.” Pilot projects and prototypes are a common way of experimentally demonstrating the feasibility of a new engineering design or process. One might say that this is “science” but not “Science.” Some seem to feel that it isn’t Science without peer review. I’ve been part of the peer review process numerous times from both sides of the table and it’s nothing like what you would think if you gleaned your impression of peer review from reading about it on lesswrong. In short, the process barely serves to filter out the obviously wrong.
The market provides a continuous and generally valid test of engineering principles. I think it’s more scientific than peer review, in the most meaningful sense of the word “science”.
Not all engineering is about developing products to sell to consumers. Engineers also design bridges and rockets. I don’t think these are subject to the open marker in any meaningful sense.
Engineers also design bridges and rockets. I don’t think these are subject to the open marker in any meaningful sense.
Rockets (until recently) had only one buyer, true, but bridges are certainly subject to the open market. When, say, a government entity wants to build a bridge it writes down the specs and invites people to submit designs and expected costs—there’s your open market.
Some of the best science has come out of the engineering industry, actually, and this is widely recognized (look at how many nobel prizes in physics were awarded to people who did work in the electronics industry; the 1956 prize for transistors stands out in particular).
In industry the stakes are higher and there is a higher penalty for being wrong about the world. This drives a lot of good science.
Science is amazingly reliable compared to any other method of generating knowledge about the world.
It’s misleading to talk about science in general in this context, as different sciences have different amount of “kicking back” going on. The more the world kicks back, and the faster it happens, the easier it is for scientists to falsify & iterate. Technology is based on sciences with some of the most testable hypotheses. This doesn’t mean (necessarily) that scientific articles are more reliable in those areas, but the unreliable ones are detected faster.
We happen to live in a universe where physical interactions are highly local, and forces generally fall off very quickly with distance. On the typical scales we build things at, the physical laws are also very close to deterministic and can be modeled with high accuracy by simplified models with few entities (e.g. looking at a body as a point particle with mass at its center of mass). There’s an anthropic argument about why this should be so somewhere in Feynman, I forget where. Taken all together, this allows very high reproducibility, which enables rapid development of technology by iterated experiments.
Indeed, engineering is distinct from science and contains vast lore all of its own that’s not reducible to basic science.
I feel like I’ve just written a bunch of trivialities.
To my mind, that’s the interesting one. Does the lore ever get fed back into science?
I would say there is not a sharp dividing line. There is engineering practice, there is research and development into incremental modifications and improvements of existing engineering practice having varying degrees of novelty, and way at the other end of the spectrum is pure research into the mass of neutrinos and whatnot. In between there is an infinite range of degrees.
In some sense engineers are always doing “science.” Pilot projects and prototypes are a common way of experimentally demonstrating the feasibility of a new engineering design or process. One might say that this is “science” but not “Science.” Some seem to feel that it isn’t Science without peer review. I’ve been part of the peer review process numerous times from both sides of the table and it’s nothing like what you would think if you gleaned your impression of peer review from reading about it on lesswrong. In short, the process barely serves to filter out the obviously wrong.
The market provides a continuous and generally valid test of engineering principles. I think it’s more scientific than peer review, in the most meaningful sense of the word “science”.
Not all engineering is about developing products to sell to consumers. Engineers also design bridges and rockets. I don’t think these are subject to the open marker in any meaningful sense.
Rockets (until recently) had only one buyer, true, but bridges are certainly subject to the open market. When, say, a government entity wants to build a bridge it writes down the specs and invites people to submit designs and expected costs—there’s your open market.
Some of the best science has come out of the engineering industry, actually, and this is widely recognized (look at how many nobel prizes in physics were awarded to people who did work in the electronics industry; the 1956 prize for transistors stands out in particular).
In industry the stakes are higher and there is a higher penalty for being wrong about the world. This drives a lot of good science.