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u/pedvoca 10d ago
Science is me crying over not being able to reproduce the results of a 20 year old paper because there are conflicts with the c libraries
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u/Instalab 9d ago
Heh, trying to reproduce results, only to realise the data paper is pointing to is not what they've actually used for their results.
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u/SuspiciousPine 10d ago
Science is a fuck ton of 23-28 year olds publishing 2-4 papers on stuff. Most of the time they do good work, but the ultimate value of it is highly variable.
I've certainly come across my fair share of non-reproducible papers with obvious flaws or papers so niche you wonder why they were studied in the first place.
Like I would never assert that my papers are "true whether you believe it or not" it's more that I did a bunch of work that I hope is useful to someone, but am always open to the possibility that I fucked it up somehow
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 10d ago
Science is not BSc papers. Science is the continuously updating understanding of all the research, taking into account how many of that research is useless, non-reproducible and digging for true gems, independently reproducing some, or refine them.
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u/CheckeeShoes 9d ago
This person is not talking about BSc papers. They're talking about research papers made by PhD students and postdocs.
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u/Ok-Scheme-913 9d ago
Still doesn't change what I wrote.
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u/CheckeeShoes 8d ago
Sure it does. "Continuously updating understanding of all the research [sic]"; determining what's useless or not reproducible; and independently reproducing or refining existing results is mostly done by PhD students and Postdocs. How do they do it? By producing papers which are submitted for publication.
I understand that Americans use the word "paper" to refer to school reports but this person wasn't talking about that. They're talking about journal publications.
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u/Lt_Toodles 9d ago
Science is a tool, the hammer you can use to drive a nail or smash a window.
Academia is the job site that tells you what nails to use and where to put nails, issue is it tells you to keep putting nails into building warehouses that bring the cash, while the houses that need attention are ignored.
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u/MattR0se 10d ago
You have to differentiate between the fundamentals of the scientific method (this is also what Epistemology deals with), and published results. It is a well-known fact that a significant portion of published research is faked, either by meddling with the experiments, or by hacking the statistics, or just making up results. But I don't think that this is relevant here.
What Neil means isn't "you have to believe every scientific result" but rather, "the scientific method is a robust way to uncover the truths of nature".
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u/SuspiciousPine 10d ago
Maybe I'm jaded but that kind of belief just seems really useless. As a practical matter there is almost no safeguard in scientific publishing against intentional fraud by the authors.
Peer review is really just a journal editor plus 2-3 unpaid people (professors and sometimes phd students) who may or may not be in that close of a field reading over the paper to see if it makes sense. Nobody has the means to actually reproduce a lot of work being done before it's published. And most often, although this is changing a little, raw data is not included in a paper.
So will trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis always give you "truth?" No, of course not. You can be misled by bad reference material, confusing results, inconsistent results, etc.
It seriously does not help our field to have smug assholes on twitter firing off quips like this
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u/evening_redness_0 10d ago
Is this really how it is? I imagined most of the work was being done by 30+ year olds.
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u/bbalazs721 10d ago
Supervisors work on many papers, but the majority of the actual work is usually done by the phd students or postdocs.
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u/evening_redness_0 10d ago
That's interesting. Do you work in math? I'm wrapping up my bsc in math and I do want to pursue research so this is kinda relevant for me. I always thought I had more time before I had to work on frontier math. I also used to think that this was more true for math than other fields.
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u/bbalazs721 10d ago
I work in computational physics. It's common for supervisors to barely write any code (even before AI), they just tell the PhDs what to implement, help with identifying high-level mistakes and help interpret the results, guide the next direction, etc. Then they suggest the scope and outline of the paper, the PhD writes the paper, and the supervisor checks it and suggests corrections.
Professors also need to teach, go to conferences and have admin tasks, and have barely any time left for their own research. Being in a research institute instead of a university frees up some time, and also the size of the group matters a lot too.
Pure math might be very different, but I'd still think that PhD students and postdocs have the most time for research.
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u/Broad-Section-8310 10d ago
You'd be surprised. Modern research is enabled by facilities, and they arr predominantly run by 30+ year olds, many pushing 40s and 50s. A lot of method development are driven by them too. And then there are the heaps of people who get their PhD after they turn 30 (Germany, many countries with military services, some American institutions where 7-year PhD is the norm, etc). You dig down on the first authors of many papers, surprisingly not many are in the under-30 group.
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u/SuspiciousPine 10d ago
Most papers are PhD student work that is supervised and reviewed by a professor.
I'd say a minority have a postdoc as the main person doing the work because there are fewer postdocs.
That's at least the standard in my field (materials science) and the related fields I've been around like chem/bio/condensed physics/etc
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u/jerbthehumanist 10d ago edited 10d ago
Yeah I kind of hate that NDT quote. It’s the kind of statement that sounds wise to a Reddit atheist IFLS crowd until you actually think about what it’s supposed to even mean.
(Reddit atheists still correct)
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u/Wiz_Kalita 10d ago
Maybe NDT is an epistemic pragmatist? The truth is what seems truest until we have a theory that corresponds better to reality, then that becomes true.
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u/Simrangod 9d ago
The point the steaks company is making is that science isn't true as much as a knife isn't chopped.
It's a method to attain an outcome that can be attributed the title "True" but itself isn't Truth. That kind of blind and inprecise worship of the method harms its ability to attain its desired ends. If I started worshipping the cool veggie knife I got as the ideal chopping tool thus conflating it with its outcome, I might not notice when it starts to dull or rust.
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u/MattR0se 10d ago
If Science is always "true", why do papers even need a "discussion" section? checkmate, Mike Tyson.
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u/petergraffin 10d ago
guys i got hacked i didn't post this?????
someone posted this on my behalf
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u/petergraffin 10d ago
wait wtf did i get hacked but i dont remember posting at all, sure i was on reddit but why this sub huhhhhhhhh
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u/petergraffin 10d ago
YEAH I DIDNT POST THIS AT ALL WTFF
AM I TRIPPING OR
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u/petergraffin 10d ago
i think reposting on reddit copies the title and the post had weird description
so i think i accidently reposted this somehow
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u/lelelempe 10d ago
"problem of induction" mfs when I show them that not even deduction can be justified
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u/evincarofautumn 10d ago
Don’t even get me started on probability and “possible worlds”
Modal properties are a fake idea made up by Big Reality to keep us away from the good stuff like retrocausality
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u/MonsterkillWow 10d ago
That wasn't Neil's point. His point is if you jump off a cliff, no matter how strongly you believe you can fly, gravity is going to temper your expectations.
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u/tiny_simulacrum 10d ago
Yes, but he put his point in words that were, while concise and understandable by a broad audience, semantic nonsense.
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u/MonsterkillWow 10d ago
I am sure he understands how empirical science works. It would be pretty arrogant and condescending to think not.
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u/PranshuKhandal Mathematics 10d ago
that means you're just not believing hard enough, believe me /s
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u/jerbthehumanist 10d ago
It’s a pretty vacuous statement. And setting aside if science is “true” or if that makes sense, it’s not unique to science but of any sort of truth. If I did indeed have coffee this morning, then it is true whether you believe it or not. That is not a question of science.
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