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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.
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).
I’ve read plenty of times about bullshit published papers that disprove it must be correct and reproducable to get published.
Edit: Where did I claim it was or wasn’t science? I’m pointing out the statement that “to be published it must be checked for correctness” simply isn’t true.
Some published papers are not reproducible. All unpublished papers are not reproducible. You’re creating a dangerously wrong equivalence.
I feel like I’m missing something here so I’ll be the devil’s advocate, why can’t unpublished papers be reproducible? Multiple teams could independently be verifying hypotheses and results under the same organisation, adhere to the same standard but never publish, that would still be science no? Not doing humanity any favours, but science nonetheless.
Because science is about objective, provable fact following a known and public method. An organization can say their findings are reproducible, but reproducibility is more than just getting the same results every time the same lab runs the same PCR on the same machine. To be truly reproducible your results need to be able to be replicated by anyone with appropriate materials and equipment.
What you are describing is research, not science. It’s not that research is bad, but that science is a philosophical adherence to a method as much as it is that method itself.
The tobacco companies conducted research when they realized smoking caused cancer and hid those findings from others. That’s not science even if their internal researchers were consistent with each other.
Seems like the only difference is that if it’s public or not ie published. I think it becomes a matter of opinion then, because independent teams within the same organisation can absolutely peer review eachother, use completely different methodology to prove the same hypothesis and publish papers internally so it can be reproduced internally.
Science should be made public, but just because it’s not doesn’t mean it’s not science. When the organisation starts making public claims they should have to back that up along the official route, but they could just as well keep their findings a secret, use that secret to improve their working formula and make bank while doing that. Not calling their internal peer reviewed studies science just seems pretentious.
No, they can’t. Peer review is not the peers you determine - it’s the peers of your community. Science that is not public is not science, because it cannot be independently verified and reproduced. It is not a small point, it’s one of the foundations of the disciplines of science.
An organisation with fully independent teams tackling the same problems can absolutely be defined as peer review. Not in the traditional sense, but reviewing, confirming and replicating nonetheless. Following the scientific method is what makes something scientific, not the act of publishing.
You can argue of the merits of those papers, an organisation can never make public statements about private research. But saying that what their doing is not science, then you’re just needlessly gatekeeping.
No it literally cannot be so defined. The last part of the scientific method is “report conclusions.” That means public scrutiny free of bias. Internal groups are not public.
This is akin to saying that a corporation doesn’t need to use the courts because it has internal judges. They might have trials, but by definition they are not doing justice.
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. :-(
Btw his bio is:
- Professor at NYU
- Chief AI Scientist at Meta
- ACM Turing Award Laurete
Yeah he’s a legend in CS… Muskrat just further rides himself into being the fool of centuries
Yeah who is Elon? I’ve never heard of him or SpaceX or Tesla. I guess this Musk guy will die in obscurity. Too bad he didn’t publish a paper.
Ideally he can go down in history as the 21st century version of Thomas Eddison.
The guy that bought Lodygin’s patents? Yep.
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.
This refers to his conviction that the laws of physics were fundamentally deterministic
What was the bit about quantum mechanics yesterday? “Embrace the chaos and you start to see a pattern.”
If you science in a lab and no one is around to review it did you make a science?
The difference between science and fucking around is writing it down - Adam Savage
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.
Yann LeCun is a dude
With all these “she” talk in this comment section, I was like when did LeCun change gender?
I don’t even do anything remotely related to AI, but I know LeCun is a dude.
There’s no such thing as a scientific method
The scientific method varies from field to field. In medicine you usually need to proof it by taking a significant amount people. Then create a control group and a testing group. Then test your medicine on the group and give the other placebos.
When you can measure health improvement for one group over the other there is a reasonable amount of proof that the medicine works.
The scientific method has one major goal. Reduce human made errors in science. Humans do not work objectively. Humans always have an bias. Things like reproduceable tests and peer review try to reduce the bias.
Does it require independent peer review though? How do you achieve that
withwithout 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?
Well you’re not entirely incorrect with that assumption. What we call science today is actually the Scientific Method Which is a much more skeptical approach to science than the earlier methods, hence the credibility. I like many others agree that the fees built into the system is quiet absurd and the process is not perfect, but currently that is the only legit way to get others evaluate your research.
I ask with genuine curiosity, as I am not an academic and come from a software development mindset
Why is paid-for services the only “legit” way to get others to evaluate your research? Why is it not kosher to publicly publish your research, and simply invite peers to evaluate it? This idea is essentially the entire process behind Open Source Software, and is the backbone of most modern tools/programs/apps/software/linux development.
What does paying a publishing company provide you, as a researcher, that makes it worth it?
I don’t know what to tell you man, sometimes even I wonder if it’s worth it at all. Publishing to a journal is such a difficult task. Before submitting your paper you need the approval of two other well-established individuals. Then you send in your paper to your selected journal and each one has some specific format and policies, which many are arbitrary and inthe end of the day depends on the person reviewing your paper. This can take weeks of back and forth.
However if you think you did something noteworthy, as far as I know, this is how you get it in front of the eyes of your peers. Even then there’s a chance that your paper gets ignored lol.
So like many others in this thread, I’m not a fan of this process because even though it’s strict, a lot of bs still passes through
Science, real science like Elon is describing, happens when you write stuff down. “Published science” is where the glamor is but that’s, quite obviously, not what Elon was talking about.
So sad to see bitter people lash out at the successful. (projection is also a classic trait)
Science requires peer review, so just keeping it all private isn’t doing much for the scientific community as a whole
