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ChristianKl comments on Would you notice if science died? - Less Wrong Discussion
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First, I think that the chain looks like this: science produces theories/concepts/explanations/recipes, then engineering takes them and makes practical products on that basis, and then people use these products. So if science stalls, the pipeline will be empty and, basically, there will be nothing much for engineering to do except polish the existing products.
Second, looking at history is a bit iffy at the moment -- the reason is speed of progress. In our times (technological) progress is very very fast by historical standards. That makes it easy to notice if science dies. But that does not apply to, say, the Middle Ages when the progress was so slow it took many generations to produce an appreciable change. During one lifetime things (technologically) did not change much if at all.
Would you labels Google's project of AlphaGo "science" or "engineering"?
Probably engineering -- it is mostly about creating a working "thing" and not about discovering new underlying principles. But the boundary between engineering and applied science can be very fuzzy and there are often feedback loops between the two.
AlphaGo is absolutely science (as well as engineering -- all experimental science involves some engineering). It involves fundamentally new constructions...
Like what?
The simple construction of using evolutionary learning to refine heuristics that were extracted from deep learning neural networks trained on expert data.
Two previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible. That is science.
Interesting. I think that is pretty clearly engineering :-)
Of course, this is all a matter of definitions.
It's not an either-or. Some reasonable working definitions: Science is a process by which we expand human knowledge. Engineering is using extant human knowledge to construct artifacts, sometimes repetitive, sometimes novel. Doing some mindless engineering task is not science. But doing something innovative and new makes available new knowledge, which if processed in the correct way is doing science. So you can do both.
You are basically saying that the creation of s'mores was science ("previously known and well understood components, put together in a new and novel way that expands our knowledge of what is possible").
My idea of science is more narrow.
The first person that created a s'more? Yes. Culinary science is a thing.
Would you label the LHC "science" or "engineering"?
I think the science/engineering-distinction used by Douglas Knight and Lumifer provides no good model, so you have to ask them.
It's both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean - science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
The LHC is multiple things
(and also a social process driving the people to do all this)
Both. AlphaGo is a major engineering achievement in itself, and a pretty significant step in the empirical science of reinforcement-learning systems.
Does that interpretion suggest that the model of science first producing
theories/concepts/explanations/recipesand engineering then using them is falsified?Not strictly. It could very well be that