Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isn’t right when it comes to science
honestly LeCun should know better than to argue with a crazy person.
it doesn't matter how right he is, musk will turn everything around and have fun while doing it.
Yep. All he's achieving is by this is helping Twitter keep some of its legitimacy.
The point of arguing with morons online is not to convince the morons. It's to convince the spectators.
thanks to melon tusk, i don't have to
The Musk likely knows who and what he himself is, even if only in the darkest and most sleepless hours of the night, but on the other hand, his followers eat this shit up like candy. "Survival of the fittest" - caveat: in the current climate, or rather the one from the last few decades - has led to him being put in charge of way more than he should, in the same manner that a cockroach is "fitter" than humans since they will outlast our having caused WWIII (unless we make it to space, which seems increasingly unlikely at this point, at least within any of our current lifetimes).
Anyway, it is important to remember that he does not do this for reason of mere stupidity - he literally gets paid to dish out this kind of shade.
Edit: case in point, the fact that we are discussing this now, and also the title of this post. If Elon had said "I respect you", that would have been the end of the matter right there, but it would not have met his goals (or apparently, ours either).
I like the sentiment, but there are non-peer reviewed papers that are real science. Politics and funding are real things, and there is a bit of gatekeeping here, which isn't really good IMHO.
Also, reproducibility is a sticky subject, especially with immoral experiments (which can still be the product of science, however unsavory), or experiments for which there are only one apparatus in the world (e.g., some particle physics).
The things you’re describing are not science. This might seem nit picky but the scientific method as we know it today require that peer review and require methods of reproduction. Whether you can reproduce results is a different story.
The entire difference between research and science is whether or not you engage in the process of peer review and review often requires method of replication. So you usually can’t have one without the other. If you aren’t trying to have your paper reviewed by your peers, that’s fine, but that isn’t science.
To address the gatekeeping, I get it. We shouldn’t be using the word to demean people who do valuable research but don’t strictly engage in the scientific process. That’s really not important to do. However we should all be interested in preventing the scientific process from being muddied to include every R&D process under the sun. That’s all research, not science, and we call them separate things for a reason.
I think the word you're looking for is merit, publication which are cited and peer reviewed hold much more merit than those who don't.
Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. 1
Nothing in this quote requires external publication. Following the scientific method, publishing, peer reviewing and reproduction can all happen internally in organisation using independent teams. Those private publications hold but a fraction of the merit of publications in recognised journals, but are science nonetheless.
I am a bit worried the response to this here is not a unified everyone's an asshole in this screenshot.
Academic publishing is in a very sorry state for a long time by now. A lot of research that is published is not reproducible. A lot of actual research is also in fact never published like that because companies base their products on it and publish those results only as patents.
So just by trying to be smug and oppose the Muskie you show yourself to be an idiot. Well done.
It's worth saying that ml is in a very different position to most of academic publishing.
All of the serious journals are free to publish and fully open access and a significant amount of publication includes enough code that things are mostly replicable. GitHub has done wonders for our field. Also many tech companies use publications as an indication of prestige and go out of their way to publish stuff.
We're still drowning in too many papers and 95% of everything is shit, but that's every field really. Talking to musk on twitter is the not right place for a nuanced discussion about publication.
The rules and conventions to do science today are quite well known and understood by educated people (including of course Helen Mosque) ... but any rules have exceptions :
Project Manhattan to produce the atomic bomb was secret science : in many countries military will have secret science development. Pharmaceutical companies will do as well.
People in those projects will not have recognition by the wider public but they will have recognition from their group.
yes, but even within those "secret groups", there are SOP and conventions of intergrity.
Thanks ! ... if anyone else wants to know :
SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. Within secret scientific research groups, SOPs are established guidelines or instructions for carrying out routine operations to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance with regulations. These SOPs help maintain integrity, confidentiality, and efficiency within the research group.
Heck, I can think of a half dozen other examples of things that aren't published and/or can't be reproduced but would be considered science.
If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it "isn't science"?
If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn't have any reproducible experiments?
Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn't worthy of publication not science?
I like dunking on Elon as much as the next guy, but like, "only things that are published get the title of 'science'" seems like a pretty indefensible take to me...
She's wrong though, everything following the scientific method is science. The fact that you didn't pay out of your ass to publicize your research doesn't matter. Of course it reaches less people, but that's a separate issue.
The scientific method includes peer reviewing.
You don't have to post it on a commercial database, only free one will do. But it needs to be accessible by the world.
Does it require independent peer review though? How do you achieve that ~~with~~ without publication? The predatory publication system is a different point.
Edit: fix without
Wouldn't this imply that science didn't exist before academic publication existed? Was zero science conducted before the ~1600s then?
Btw his bio is:
Yeah he's a legend in CS... Muskrat just further rides himself into being the fool of centuries
Academic Journals frantically spinning up botnets to retweet this
If you science in a lab and no one is around to review it did you make a science?
There are differences between "experimenting", "research", "analysis" and "science". You can do the first three at your home, scribbling some notes that no one will ever read or know about, but science, in its hard definition, is a methodology that requires the specific dynamics that are expected of the scientific community, where plenty of people check each other's work for faults, blind spots, biases, lazy interpretations and so on.
This is fundamental because everyone, including universally recognized geniuses, do sometimes fuck up. Have you heard of Einstein's famous phrase "God does not play dice with the universe"? This refers to his conviction that the laws of physics were fundamentally deterministic, which was put in question by the early experiments that were opening the way for quantum physics. Einstein found himself at odds with a new generation of physicists that weren't as inflexible as he was on this issue, and whenever there were indications that extremely small particles may behave in a non-deterministic way, Einstein would argue and push for the most hostile interpretation possible, which did lead other physicists to put his interpretations to the test, which did ironically further prove the non-deterministic pillars of quantum physics.
Science is necessarily a social endeavor because it is meant to help us overcome the fact that each individual human is doomed to be, sooner or later, at one specific issue of many, an inflexible idiot.
I've seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.
Fuck, I really hate to agree with Elon on anything, but that is a ridiculous argument. LeCun must also really believe that trees only fall in the woods when someone is around to see it happen.
Science is strictly a social activity. You can’t have a social activity without the social component.
Again, fact-finding is not the same as science.
Yeah, they're both pretty wildly off base. Publishing papers that are vetted and used as a foundation for other work is science. Also, sorry, but developing advancements behind closed doors is still science. Oppenheimer's secret research for the government is pretty fucking foundational. Thomas Edison wasn't interested in sharing his ideas, but rather in selling them. Everyone remembers him.
This argument reads like two people having an ego trip past each other.
Couldn't science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then...
There are open access platform that is more reputable than git, like arxiv or hal.
Plus most conferences, at least in my field, support open access. But unfortunately for some of them, you do need to pay a fee in order to get the article to be open-access.
The prestige of the conference/journal is still the best way to get your article known, so that others can review and built upon your work, as of now.
Science devolved into politics. :-(
I find it especially amusing that in my Lemmy feed the post right before this one is a quote from a book by a Nobel laureate talking about the importance of self-marketing, politicking and ladder climbing in academia. You know, all the stuff that isn't science that plays a part in what Yann LeCun considers to play a vital role in what counts as science.
Seems like a very elitist and gatekeeping perspective, specially considering how closed off the academic world is for the rest of society in some places, never mind expensive to publish. It's also basically saying that if you, say, come up with a groundbreaking hypothesis, that that's not science until you get a research paper out, and that might require mastery that goes beyond the hypothesis.
Sure, this might stop most of the looney theories from being called Science, but it also prevents public access in favor of those with the means and capacity to sustain an ever more complex geocentric model of the fashion of the times, from which any divergent theories must generally part from or involve renown in.
You think the person who made that hypothesis will die bitter and forgotten? Is that the general view of people who are not Scientists by Scientists? They might know what's up, and might not want the gatekeeper to take all the credit, as is often the case in academic circles, and might just feel satisfaction in seeing their hypothesis gratified. They might place more importance in exploring and understanding reality than compensating for personal insecurities. Perhaps it is science itself that might stagnate by stalling until it itself is able to discover these hypothesis under the properly accepted emeritus when they are eventually able to get to it.
Mostly it's just looney theories, but given Musk is involved, I imagine this discussion involves proprietary patents that do have a lot of research involved and under peer review of teams under non-disclosure agreements. Then again, it's Musk, could be mostly looney theories too. But the fact that it involves Musk, the man living off of Nikola Tesla's fame, a man whose demise could have been described to have occurred under the circumstances of a bitter and forgotten end, makes the gatekeeping particularly ironic.
It doesn't need to be published in a scientific journal. Publication in journals is the most streamlined way to go through the process, but you could publish your hypothesis and methodology to a blog and potentially get the same benefits.
Even patents need to be published. Publication is how discoveries are shared and verified.
how about you figure out how to make a gas pedal that doesn't try to kill people before you talk shit?
There's private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those aren't academic science with it's peer review and publication.
tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if it's science if the methods are transparent and you have access to data, as well as critiques from unbiased parties.
This thread seems to have formed two sides:
I would say that "closed"/unpublished science may be science, but since peer review and replication of results are the only way we can tell if something is legitimate science, the problem is that we simply can't know until a third party (or preferably, many third parties) have reviewed it.
There are a lot of forms that review can take. The most thorough is to release it to the world and let anyone read and review it, and so it and the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.
If "closed" science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever has access to the work and critique can know it's science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure.
The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this; I'll use Oppenheimer as an example.
In the 40s, no one outside the Manhattan project knew how nuclear bombs were made. Sure, they exploded, but no one outside that small group knew if the reasoning behind why they exploded was correct.
Now, through released records, we know what the supporting theory was, and how it was tested. We also know that subsequent work based on that theory (H-bomb development, etc.) and replication (countries other than the US figuring out how to make nukes, in some cases without access to US documents on how it was originally done) was successful and supported the original explanations of why it worked. So now we all know that it was science.
Shit take, everyone sucks here
Real science is trying random stuff until you get slightly better performance out of your model and then creating contrived explanations for why you think it worked
btw yann lecun is the head of meta ai so this is just a couple of rich dickheads having a slap fight
They both come across as pompous asses in this one.
If you develop a product in secret, take it to market, and make a fortune off it, far more people will know your name than almost any scientist.
I'm too lazy to edit it, but you get the idea:
Is the Tweet still up or did it not sit right with Elmo so he took it down?
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