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- Hacker News
- Nice read. I believe that traditional software is a great way to showcase the proofs when it comes to physics and mathematics. You can easily code up a theorem in a language of your choice and justify that 'Okay, the output matches the expected value'.
I am particularly fascinated by labs like DeepMind [https://deepmind.google/science/]. The recent advances in their frontier models that are able to predict diseases before they're diagnosed is incredible. This is what AI should be built for and actually do!
by samayashar - An interesting thought experiment, but I'm not sure I follow the reasoning of these two statements, which is the crux of why open software fits this mold.
1. Reproducible, meaning executable, as well as modifiable, and 2. Reliable, meaning that the results are consistently trustworthy
Why does modifiable fit reproducible. Modifiable fits the open source theme, but not the science theme. Can someone set me straight on this if I am missing something?
Number 2 is something I've been thinking about more recently, and the definition of science from the post being "testable hypothesis and predictable".
Medicine is testable and predictable, but not reliable. To me reliability is the job of engineering. To take what is known in science and make it reliable.
I used to work at CSIRO (Australia's science and technology org) and I remember my boss telling me that researchers always think their work is ready to go from the lab into the real world, but it is our job as engineers to make that translation so that the work outside of the lab. That's what I think about when I think of reliable.
Thoughts?
by pedalpete - In an utopia, yes, but I have raised the argument also elsewhere: who wants to be a maintainer of a paper forever? So, yes, science is indeed a lot like open source software, but more like the write-only software platforms and repositories are full of. Replication is also a lot more important than reproducibility in most fields and for most questions.by jruohonen
- Science is open, but science is not software and software definitely not science.by random3
- Science should be more like this, in current times, yes.
But until much of academia is burned to the ground, or until science can be properly separated from modern academia, this will never be so. The current academic incentives are all wrong: low-quality research is rewarded and results in publications, whereas high-quality research (that takes time, and usually reveals that most exciting publications depend on p-hacking or other highly data-dependent analyses and selective presentations) is not published or actively blocked during peer review.
So instead you get BS arguments about how data can't be released for various privacy concerns (when in reality the vast majority of most datasets are trivial to scrub of identifying factors, and even in more complex datasets where you need to consider k-anonymity, it is still trivial to release data that allows replication of core analyses), and academic science is increasingly irrelevant unless it is tied to tech and industry, where producing junk actually has real negative economic and personal consequences.
I don't know what world this article / post lives in, but it isn't the messy world of actual reality.
by D-Machine - This article is correct but it bummed me out. It made me think of how much of science has been perverted into other goals, like medical science for example. The advancement of human health largely depends on corporate interests, and that is so insane to my brain it hurts to think about. very few independent scientists can research anything because everything costs money so you need a corporate interest to even do research. And the corporation gets the "rights" to those findings? It's absolutely insane to discover something natural and claim it as your own, and science is natural nobody is inventing it or being creative and writing it themselves, they're essentially walking up to a mountain and saying "Ok it's mine now I'll charge you 100$ to walk on the mountain". It genuinely makes my brain do somersaults in my skull that we've somehow backed SCIENCE of all things into this weird gatekept scenario its in now. It wouldn't bum me out so much but it clearly does nothing but hinder progress
The point at the end "The scientific revolution succeeded because it insisted on transparency, reproducibility, and constant scrutiny." is a good one. But the real kicker that makes the situation so bleak is it's not the scientists who get to decide whether or not these things get applied to science or not, it's government policies and corporate interests.
- > modern science is synonymous with open source software.
Another problem with reproducibility is the openness of the underlying data. Many academics are terrified of giving away the golden goose and the software is often useless without the data.
However many scientists do work openly, e.g. The Journal of Open Source Software:
- > Every result is instantly reproducible. When you read a paper claiming that a new drug reduces symptoms by 30%, you click a link and watch the exact analysis run in your browser. The data processing, statistical tests, and visualizations execute in seconds using the same environment the authors used—preserved perfectly through reproducible containers.
At least some journals have this as a stipulation e.g. https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/r...
Particularly the "data availability" and "Availability and peer review of computer code and algorithm".
However, in my limited experience, of trying to reproduce certain scRNA-seq processing pipelines, in practice it's never available as just a Github link. I can understand that some/many researcher's code is not in good shape, so I think it'll be quite a stretch to have this available.
I do think it's laudable though, to try and make it available. It would certainly have been very useful for me in the past.