Science

History, sociology and philosophy thereof

2017-07-08 — 2026-09-15

quality 6.5

Wherein a Repository of Scholarly Reflections Is Compiled, Bureaucratic Cargo Cults Are Catalogued, Professional Survival Is Navigated, and the Peculiarities of Australian Institutions Are Briefly Noted.

academe
agents
collective knowledge
economics
faster pussycat
game theory
how do science
incentive mechanisms
institutions
mind
networks
provenance
sociology
wonk
Figure 1

I get distracted from my job of doing science for even a moment and bam I’m philosophizing about science instead. What is the methodology of science? How do we falsify? What counts as evidence? It’s seemingly the best tool we have for understanding reality, almost despite ourselves. The human system that is science is remarkably robust despite the accretion of bureaucracy, cargo culting, geopolitical pissing contests, and so on. Occasionally the compressed canister of science vibes that I keep inside me erupts into a notebook. This page lists the ejecta.

NoteFor readers in a hurry

0.1 The Engine of Science

Still not happy with how I divided this one up, but it’s just big, you know?

Creating Scientific Knowledge
How does research produce knowledge? Funding! Culture! Institutional norms! It’s kind of complicated.
Research Discovery & Synthesis
Is my problem already solved? How do I work that out? This is obviously the notebook that will most rapidly be obsoleted by LLMs.
Disseminating Science
How do we propagate the new knowledge we just learned? Mechanisms of publishing, the culture of conferences, the role of preprint servers, shadow libraries, and the truly cursed journal business models.
Validating & Reproducing Science
Science is famously (eventually, usually-we-hope) self-correcting. Peer review, replication crises, gatekeeping systems, reproducibility…

0.2 For the Working Scientist

A Scientist’s Survival Guide— the messy system of science is not any less confusing from the inside. How do we manifest funding? How do we navigate the politics of collaboration and competition?

0.3 Designing Research Systems

Building Scientific Institutions: Science is cultural. How do we make it go right? No-one knows! But there are good examples from history like Bell Labs and maybe modern FROs.

0.4 Science and Society

Science Communication:
How do we make science understandable and useful to the public, who are to be honest a bit busy paying the bills and/or escaping coups and crises?
Science for Policy:
How should scientific evidence inform government decisions? Because, technically, when you think about it, it’s pretty hard to conduct randomized controlled trials with national monetary policy. And would the citizens of a democratic state even find that persuasive?
Science in Australia
Australia! I live there sometimes! It does stuff differently, albeit not necessarily better. Learn from our mistakes and triumphs as a middle-competence middle-power!

0.5 Other Stuff I Didn’t Know Where To File

History of Medicine
When you think about it, the history of medicine is kind of super weird. How do we even know what will cure people, given so many confounders, placebo effects, and the tedious duration of ethics approvals?
ML Benchmarks
Machine learning claims to be scientifically measuring phenomena, but the phenomena are algorithms applied to curated datasets, not natural phenomena. Is that even a science?
Citizen Science
We are all in science together already, but we could take this relationship to the next level.

1 References

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