
There Is No Distinctly Scientific Method - sonabinu
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/there-is-no-scientific-method.html
======
dahart
My impulse is to jump in and critique, but after reading this twice, I'm
actually not sure I understand what he's saying. Is it a good point?

He doesn't really make any reference to the commonly understood definition of
the scientific method, which AFAIK, is: hypothesize, test, repeat. And the
real takeaway is: TEST. The point of the scientific method is to validate
assumptions, plain and simple, isn't it?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:The_Scientific_Method_as_an_Ongoing_Process.svg)

> "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all
> human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than
> what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science
> deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its
> results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified
> precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking."

I feel like this is the crux - the scientific method is not about quantified
precision as a goal, right? Measurement is a means to an end - we measure are
part of testing to actually complete the process of validating the hypothesis.
If that's what "highly quantified variables" means, then maybe there's an
interesting point here. But measurement was never the goal, testing is the
goal. It's not really about superior thinking either. The superior thinking,
in fact, is in not thinking about it, but proving it instead. It's more
reliable for one simple reason: hypotheses are not accepted until tested.

~~~
jballanc
There's more to it than just testing. If there weren't, then I'd be inclined
to agree with the author. What many people fail to realize is that the full
form of the scientific method (when applied properly) is:

* make an observation

* form a hypothesis that explains the observation

* design a test to _disprove_ the hypothesis

* carry out the test and collect data

* analyze the results and either reject the hypothesis or formulate a new test

It is the necessity of a hypothesis to be falsifiable, and the intent of the
scientist to _disprove_ (not prove) their hypothesis that sets science apart.

~~~
ams6110
Why then the seeming reluctance (as posted here recently) of journals to
publish "failure to replicate" papers?

~~~
jballanc
_sigh_...Do you want the short answer or the long version?

The short answer is: peer pressure.

The longer version requires a look back at the history of scientific
publishing and how it's been perverted in more recent times.

Originally, scientists (or natural philosophers as they were known then) would
carry out experiments and record their findings in their personal papers. The
problem with this is the question of priority: who discovered what first. If
you leave this question up to individuals recording their own results, then
there's nothing to stop those individuals from backdating their own writings
in a false attempt to claim priority.

So a tradition grew of communicating results via letters. When you discover
something, don't just write it down, send it in a letter to a fellow natural
philosopher. That gives you a (presumably) independent means of verifying
priority. Of course, this does nothing to prevent two friends from colluding
to falsely claim the mantel of priority.

Eventually the tradition morphed. Instead of just writing a letter to a
colleague, you would write the letter and the colleague would read it to a
gathering of natural philosophers (or, if you had the means of travel, you
could read your findings, or in some cases demonstrate them, to the gathering
in person). This gives you a much more robust means of claiming priority.
Eventually, these societies organized themselves, one of the earliest being
the Royal Society.

It didn't take long before these groups decided that all the letters being
read should be recorded in some format. Thus, you have the "Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society", the first scientific journal...

...in 1665. Since then the enterprise of scientific publishing has changed
very little. Why is this bit of history important? Because the point of the
original journals was not to be a full record of the experiments being
performed, but rather just of discoveries so that their priority could be
established. The scientists of the time still communicated their efforts, both
successful and not, with each other in myriad ways. Perhaps more importantly,
positions at universities were often based on these personal communications
(and recommendations from peers).

Fast forward 400 or so years and scientific output (and indeed the number of
scientists and universities producing this output) undergoes exponential
growth. Suddenly, hiring professors based purely on personal communications
becomes impractical. Ah, but what's this? There's also an exponential growth
in scientific journals, and some candidates for these positions have their
name on more by-lines than other candidates. Surely they must excel at
science, no?

In other words, scientific journals, which were originally just _one part_ of
a scientists work, were perverted to become a stand-in for _all_ of a
scientists work. Yet, owing to their history as a means of establishing
priority for discovery, the papers published continued to be propelled by
tradition to emphasize positive results.

If a practice that has remained unchanged for 4 and a half centuries isn't
ripe for disruption, I don't know what is!

~~~
infogulch
Published papers became the University's hire metric. So now work is focused
on publishing.

The "hire metric" problem seems to have poisoned all jobs, science work not
exempt.

~~~
jballanc
Right, but this wouldn't be _as_ big of a problem for science if it weren't
for the fact that the tradition of scientific journals was already focused on
publishing positive results.

There are efforts underway that may eventually change this (Open Data, Open
Publishing, pre-print servers, etc.), but it's a big ship to turn.

------
woodandsteel
It is true, everything that scientists do is an extension and refinement of
ways of getting at the truth found in ordinary living and various other fields
of expert study. The main difference is that modern science systematically
excludes supernatural explanations. Much of modern philosophy of science
affirms this, such as Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

People want to dispute this basically because they are implicitly subscribing
to the philosophical belief that what we ordinarily experience is simply
mistaken, and the really real is radically different. This belief is common to
metaphysical idealism (such as Platonism) and absolute mysticism, and also
materialism, cartesian dualism, and classic analytic philosophy. Other
philosophies, such as phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein,
ground our knowledge of reality in our ordinary experience, instead of trying
to escape into a radically different realm.

A key issue at stake here is finitude. In the realm of ordinary experience, we
experience we are limited in many ways, and this means we cannot escape
suffering. The various anti-experiential philosophies generally believe that
their alleged really real realms are such that we can escape such suffering.

------
adrianratnapala
I am in guarded agreement with the article. The most distinctive thing I can
come up with about science is the habit of rigorously asking "what do you know
and how do you know it" \-- but that is (a) not all that distinct from what
rational non-scientists do, and (b) not a particular method.

And yet -- I get queasy when I hear philosphers talking about (for example)
Aristotle's "science". The idea being seeminlgy that anything he said about
plants or falling bodies or other such subject matter is science.

Now Aristotle was an observant, rational fellow -- and yet his results in
these fields don't feel all that scientific to me. I don't know what I
missing.

~~~
pjlegato
The distinctive thing about science is rather that you must answer the
question "what do you know and how do you know it" with _evidence_ , derived
from repeatable experiments.

Other modes of thinking do not have this requirement, and often rely upon
nothing more than "it seems to me..." to answer those questions.

~~~
pjscott
Repeatable? Sorry in advance for quibbling, but -- suppose that a star goes
nova, and you weren't expecting it, but you happen to have telescopes
gathering interesting data from this once-in-a-stellar-lifetime event. If you
learn interesting things from it, is that science? I'd say yes, but this isn't
repeatable. It's also not really an experiment. It's wonderful evidence,
though, really priceless stuff that you couldn't get any other way.

What is the essence of science? I'm not convinced that it involves
repeatability or experimentation in any really fundamental way.

~~~
snowwrestler
Yes, repeatable. The specific event of that nova will not be repeated, of
course, but the interesting observations, when compared with existing theory,
will suggest repeatable experiments.

And that's where the science really gets done. Not in the initial observation,
but in the controlled experiments that follow, in which individual hypotheses
can be tested.

Experiments do not need to be run in a lab, BTW. As long as the variables are
accounted for, natural observations are just as valid as those that are
synthesized in a lab. One of the most famous "experiments" in physics history
was the observation of gravity-deflected star images during an eclipse, which
helped support Einstein's general theory of relativity.

------
alayne
James Blachowicz, professor emeritus of philosophy with a focus on the
philosophy of science according to his Loyola page wrote "Of Two Minds: The
Nature of Inquiry". I found 51 references to Popper searching the book on
Amazon. I'm not a philosophy expert, but based on this article and wikipedia
information about Popper and falsifiability, I'm going to go out on a limb and
suggest this guy actually knows what he's talking about and perhaps some of
the commenters here aren't up to date on the science of philosophy issues he
is addressing.

~~~
twblalock
It's amazing how many people here think that philosophy of science ended with
Karl Popper.

~~~
cassowary
Karl Popper or Carl Sagan? I actually don't know the latter's views very well,
but I very much get the impression that he popularised a Popperian view of
science in a way that Saganites simply can't get past.

A lot of people who think themself scientific and modern independent thinkers
simply regurgitate what they learnt from scientific and modern independent
thinkers.

------
rbancroft
The tl;dr as far as I can tell is: scientific reasoning is a subset of
reasoning, and not necessarily superior to other forms of reasoning.

I can agree with that. There is a need for philosophy and purely theoretical
pursuits, we can't predict what will come out of them. But at the same time,
the world of science is where I want to make my bed. As the probability of a
scientific "endgame" for a particular philosophical idea decreases, so does
the probability of it's usefulness, or something like that. Philosophy can be
one engine of creativity, but science will best determine what ideas should
survive.

------
vmorgulis
There is the Occam's razor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor)

------
return0
He 's talking about scientific reasoning, not the scientific method.
Empiricism is distinctly scientific.

------
jbandela1
For myself, I think a good way to think of science is to consider the universe
as a program, and that scientists are doing black box reverse engineering.

We attempt to reverse engineer the mathematical logic of the universe based on
observations, and once we think we have the mathematical "source code", we do
experiments which compare the outputs of the source code (our mathematical
models) with the outputs of the universe given the same set of inputs.

There is even the analog of refactoring where a better overall "architecture"
can dramatically simplify the "source code". An example would be the move from
Ptolemy and epicycles to the heliocentric view of Copernicus and Kepler that
greatly simplifies the "code" for planetary motions.

In addition, just like when you test a function, extreme inputs can reveal
bugs. Relativity and quantum mechanics came about in this manner. We had the
Newtonion "source code" and it seemed to work very well in that the output of
our source code matched the output of the universe for all values that we were
able to supply as input. Then it became possible to measure the universe's
outputs for velocities near the speed of light and masses that were subatomic.
We then realized that our reverse engineered "source code" and the universe
gave divergent answers. Based on this, Einstein rewrote the reverse engineered
source code in such a way that it was both very elegant and matched the
universe for velocities near the speed of light while still passing all the
Newtonian unit tests.

Bohr et al, wrote code, that matched the universe's output when feeling with
subatomic particles.

Unfortunately, while both the Einstein's code and Bohr's code both give
correct answers, there is a giant if statement that governs whether we call
Einstein or Bohr.

Having that giant if statement and separate Einstein and Bohr functions is
seen as not elegant and scientists have been trying to write a single function
that gets rid of the if statement and still passes the Einstein and Bohr unit
tests. This is called "grand unification".

This model, at least for software people like me makes a lot of sense. For
example, just like a unit test that fails gives you far more information than
one that passes, so an experiment that diverges from the expected value of our
current "source code" can tell us in which way our source code needs to be
refined.

------
powera
This is clearly a piece targeted at a lay audience. It says basically nothing
interesting about the scientific method or science, but a lot about the nature
of defining words. It's basically word salad with a click-bait headline
(thankfully fixed here).

------
coliveira
The author demonstrates that he doesn't know what science is. There is much
more than correct reasoning necessary to do science. For example, philosophers
spent thousands of years pondering ideas in topics such as gravity and
chemistry, without getting much ahead. And this is possible because there is a
practically infinite number of ways in which the world could be explained
using logic, but these explanations cannot be ruled in as true until you
perform at least some experimentation.

What makes science different is that it requires observation of the world and
testing of hypothesis about the observed behavior. Without a rigorous process
to do these things there is no science, only philosophical speculation.

------
lisper
The author of this article is profoundly ignorant. There is a scientific
method. Exactly how and why it works are both very well understood. The
correct answer was worked out by Karl Popper and popularized by David Deutsch.
Writing about the scientific method without mentioning Popper is like writing
about physics without mentioning Einstein.

> James Blachowicz is a professor emeritus of philosophy

Why am I not surprised.

~~~
jonsterling
Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science
than an actual philosopher!

Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).

~~~
dang
It's good to push back against glib dismissals, but please don't do it with
snarky attacks. That's considerably worse, and degrades the thread for
everybody.

~~~
jonsterling
I really wonder how "snarky attack that pushes back against glib dismissal" is
somehow worse than "snarky attack which glibly dismisses the work of a
professional philosopher". Do you have any clarification of your opinion?

~~~
dang
It's worse because personal incivility (such as name-calling) toward a fellow
community member is more destructive of the community. Both are bad, though.

~~~
jonsterling
I suppose with respect to this particular community, I am most likely to take
a position similar to that of Ra's al Ghul toward Gotham in Batman Begins...

By the way, do you mean that it is better for a HN member to attack an
outsider (who has not consented to be subjected to the usual HN nonsense),
than it is for a HN member to attack another?

Anyway, thanks for the clarification---personally, I believe the dogmatic “We
are hackers, therefore we can easily grasp any topic in 20 minutes which it
has taken an expert a lifetime to learn!” nonsense which is so prevalent here
(as I am sure you have observed) is worse, and deserves to be smacked down.

I'll end my participation in this convo here, though, since I don't think
there's anything to be gained for anyone in continuing it.

~~~
dang
> _" I'll end my participation in this convo here, though"_

Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as a
presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument. There's no need to
announce that one's participation is ending; one can simply end it. I don't
want to end mine, because your comments raise points that have been on my mind
lately about this community.

> _" the usual HN nonsense"_

> _" nonsense which is so prevalent here"_

These fall under the trope of 'dissing the community while being part of it'.
There's something unbecoming about that. It feels like a status move, a way of
putting oneself above others. If you're commenting here, you're as much part
of the community as anyone else is.

People post such supercilious putdowns of the community all the time and have
done for years, but it has slowly dawned on me that it's a kind of
vandalism—like smashing windows in a neighborhood—that subliminally
communicates that no one much cares about this place. (Yes I buy the Broken
Windows Theory.) Somebody needs to stand up for the opposite position: that
this is a community worth making better, not a swimming pool to pee in. I
guess that makes it my job to do.

I'm sure you wouldn't smash windows, pee in a pool, or throw litter out the
car window, so please don't do their online forum equivalents here. (When I
say 'you', I don't just mean you personally, I mean all of us in your
position, which is almost everyone here, including me.)

> _deserves to be smacked down_

No one could agree with you more strongly than I about the badness of being
shallowly dismissive of others' work, and how important it is to have a
culture of resisting that. But the sad fact is, there are worse layers than
that in the layer cake of incivility—and if you go around smacking others
down, you're doing one of them. That's incongruent with your case that people
should be more considerate of others, much as it would be to point out how
someone's manners need improving by socking them.

~~~
jonsterling
> Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but when people do this it usually strikes me as
> a presumptuous attempt to seize the last word in an argument.

Apologies---my intention was to signal that I wasn't interested in escalating
the conversation or causing unpleasantness. I am completely happy to leave the
last word to you.

Re "vandalism" and "being part of the community", thanks for your thoughts. I
don't see myself at all as part of this community, but I do occasionally
comment in it and on it. How is that possible? HN is a community of hackers
and startup doers, and I once really was part of that (when I had the
misfortune of being employed by a YC company); but a community is defined not
just by collocation but by shared values & shared norms. Completely
understandable if you'd rather I just buzzed off!

I understand the remainder of your comments, but I don't agree with them at
all; to me, it is quite similar to the old bourgeois-liberal argument against
antifa action, "you're just as bad as them!". In any case, it's completely
understandable how & why you think that way, and I'm not interested in having
a fight about it.

I will simply take the position that it is worse to arrogantly claim instant
expertise than it is to (snarkily) criticize arrogance.

~~~
jccc
Uh, well gosh. Did you have this comment below on your HN profile before or
after the above conversation?

"[...] if you notice that I have been hell-banned, just let me know so I can
delete my account from this shithole."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonsterling](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonsterling)

I'm probably not the first person to suggest this to you, but I've found that
what I get from a community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with
what I put into it.

~~~
jonsterling
> but I've found that what I get from a
> community/workplace/neighborhood/family has a lot to do with what I put into
> it.

Huh? The comment I am criticizing in this thread is not directed at me, and
has nothing to do with me. Seems a bit of a stretch to think that I caused it
by my attitude, etc. It's a general characteristic of the HN community, not
caused or sparked at all by my criticism or engagement.

------
ysleepy
He lacks basic understanding of science. He repeatedly uses the phrase
"scientific method" and proclaims its pretty much what you instictively would
do, even in many other areas, like writing poems (??!?).

The Demarcation Problem (What is scientific) and Falsifiability.

The english Wikipedia Article is sadly rather poor on the Demarcation Problem.
- Karl Popper - Logik der Forschung (Das Abgrenzungsproblem) has the good
stuff.

The author compares any kind of investigation and iterative refinement with
science, but does not understand the effects this method has in combination
with a specific subset of "sentences" \- Those which can be disproven by
empiric observations.

A rather trashy article. Especially the third-to-last paragraph:

"If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all
human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than
what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science
deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its
results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified
precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking."

That awefully sounds like, "Ah, science, its just like opinion".

~~~
rbancroft
I agree that it's not a great article, perhaps typical of philosophical
writings, which I have always struggled with. It's hard to digest, I read it
about 4 times. But the author is a philosopher of science, I am pretty sure he
has heard of Popper. I think he is trying to write it in a simple style for
mass consumption, but as a result the examples seem shoe-horned in to fit his
thesis.

