Comment on Confusion about science and technology

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 19:35:22 GMT

Wikipedia breaks the "it's not immediately obvious how it works even when it's right in front of you" rule. A window does not pass this criteria, but glass passes. Once you have glass, you can expect people to innovate cool ways to use it...but you can't expect people to come up with glass making without any evidence to work from.

The reason for that rule is that scientists only come into the picture where the limiting factor is a lack of knowledge about the world. If it's a clever implementation of existing knowledge (like wikipedia), it's not science

Glass is fairly simple - at some level of complexity, you need a systematic knowledge of what you are working with to do useful stuff. Informal knowledge won't cut it. It's easy to point to some bad statistics, but stats are baby science taking first steps into a new field - in its mature "we're finally starting to get this" stages, science creates mechanisms which are highly predictive of reality. Finding correlations is just a method of knowing what direction to go.

Science is optimized for taking credit for the discovery. Engineering is optimized for taking credit for the invention. It's not like engineers are disinterested in who gets credit for the work...and the discovery and invention both get produced nonetheless. Although I suppose you are correct that popular culture (and thus the wiki page) might favor the scientist.

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