Science
History, sociology and philosophy thereof
2017-07-08 — 2026-09-15
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.
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.
- For a working scientist: Start with the Scientist’s Survival Guide for practical advice on navigating a research career.
- For a policy wonk: oh lor’ sorry this one really spilled over. Maybe The Engine of Science, and then see how those ideas play out in Science for Policy
- For an Australian policy wonk: Science in Australia seems good.
- For speculative institution designers: jkjk no-one has that job. But we can dream in Building Scientific Institutions.
- For making science understandable: If you believe in your heart of hearts that science is not only for showing off to you sciencey peers but is also for the benefit of the great human project, you might care about Science Communication.
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.
