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lmm comments on Confusion about science and technology - Less Wrong Discussion
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Science is a funnel of filters; there's no single point - not publishing, not peer review, not cite counts - that reliably distingushes true hypotheses from false ones. But taken together, it works.
Have you tried to test your idea? Are engineers better than scientists at predicting which results will turn out to be true?
Scientists have to come with new ideas, engineers are allowed (even encouraged) to repeat already tried ideas. So I would expect engineers to get much better predictions.
Well sure, I'd expect the predictions an engineer makes professionally to be more accurate than those a scientist does. I meant if we tested them on the same set of predictions (e.g. recent experimental results which didn't yet have a replication attempt)
A core difference between scientists and engineers is that engineers only need one working prototype to validate a design, and scientists only need one strong counterexample to invalidate a hypothesis.
(Note that some fields where practitioners call themselves scientists but operate much more like engineers, with 'studies' as prototypes.)
How do you know that it works? How would the world look like if engineers got stuff working by tinkering instead of basing their work on the work of scientists?
Because you're typing these words looking at a screen and the words are magically transported all around the world to appear at screens of other people...
Pretty medieval, I think. I don't see why engineers would discover and develop electricity, to start with, never mind all the complicated stuff like transistors and GPS and such.
To be fair to the medievals, they did end up inventing the clock, windmills, spectacles, wheelbarrows, the longbow, astrolabes, chainmail, etc... without the help of scientists.
Perhaps not, but the steam engine was invented by technologists without much input from academics and the first airplane was built at a time when many highly credentialed physicists were saying it was basically impossible. The "engineers just apply theories they get from scientists to concrete problems"-paradigm doesn't really fit the historical record. As often as not, the influence goes in the opposite direction.
Corrections: (1) The astrolabe was around since Hellenistic times, although the spherical astrolabe actually does date from the Middle Ages. (2) It seems likely that the spherical astrolabe was invented with input from "scientists" (natural philosophers).
Oskar Heil was an electrical engineers and at the same time one of the first people to get a patent for a transistor design.
How do you know that science is responsible?