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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Okay, here's something that could grow into an article, but it's just rambling at this point. I was planning this as a prelude to my ever-delayed "Explain yourself!" article, since it eases into some of the related social issues. Please tell me what you would want me to elaborate on given what I have so far.
Title: On Mechanizing Science (Epistemology?)
"Silas, there is no Bayesian ‘revival’ in science. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce science to a mechanical procedure." – Gene Callahan
“It is not possible … to construct a system of thought that improves on common sense. … The great enemy of the reservationist is the automatist[,] who believes he can reduce or transcend reason. … And the most pernicious [of them] are algorithmists, who believe they have some universal algorithm which is a drop-in replacement for any and all cogitation.” – "Mencius Moldbug"
And I say: What?
Forget about the issue of how many Bayesians are out there – I’m interested in the other claim. There are two ways to read it, and I express those views here (with a bit of exaggeration):
View 1: “Trying to come up with a mechanical procedure for acquiring knowledge is futile, so you are foolish to pursue this approach. The remaining mysterious aspects of nature are so complex you will inevitably require a human to continually intervene to ‘tweak’ the procedure based on human judgment, making it no mechanical procedure at all.”
View 2: “How dare, how dare those people try to mechanize science! I want science to be about what my elite little cadre has collectively decided is real science. We want to exercise our own discretion, and we’re not going to let some Young Turk outsiders upstage us with their theories. They don’t ‘get’ real science. Real science is about humans, yes, humans making wise, reasoned judgments, in a social context, where expertise is recognized and a rewarded. A machine necessarily cannot do that, so don’t even try.”
View 1, I find respectable, even as I disagree with it.
View 2, I hold in utter contempt.
How hard do you think mechanizing science would be? It strikes me as being at least in the same class with natural language.
I've been poking at the question of to what extent computers could help people do science, beyond the usual calculation and visualization which is already being done.
I'm not getting very far-- a lot of the most interesting stuff seems like getting meaning out of noise.
However, could computers check to make sure that the use of statistics isn't too awful? Or is finding out whether what's deduced follows from the raw data too much like doing natural language? What about finding similar patterns in different fields? Possibly promising areas which haven't been explored?
Not exactly sure, to be honest, though your estimate sounds correct. What matters is that I deem it possible in a non-trivial sense; and more importantly, that we can currently identify rough boundaries of ideal mechanized science, and can categorize much of existing science as being definitely in or out.