institutions-of-science-salon

institutions-of-science-salon

  • Anton Troynikov

  • R:salons

  • Vol 2

  • Ideology of science

    • Why ideology and not philosophy?
      • Why is a given aspect of science something we actually want?
    • Learning how not to fool ourselves?

  • What is a scientific institution?

    • Where scientific work is getting done

  • University as a space for scientific production

    • Industy labs probably don’t address fundamental questions to the extent to which academia is likely to address

  • H-index

    • A simple number to approximate the influence of our publication
    • These systems can be hacked and gamed

  • American approach to science vs European vs Asian

  • Within universities, different departments have different social norms and ethos

    • Rotation in US Universities
    • The decision to pick a field of study is heavily dictated by culture

  • Communities with a scientific tradition

  • Insitutions can discretize new research in terms of existing research, forcing researchers to pick one of the existing paths to follow

  • Ancient greek geologers

    • birth of mathematics
    • Abstract concept of platonic ideals
      • paved way for ideas like reason, and justice
    • Groups of people gathered around particular line of thought
      • Schools of thoughts frequently contend and clash
      • The fervor around ideas were frequently cult like - people had moral reaction to proofs

  • Institutions continue to have a tacit self-preservation instinct

  • Decentralized set of incentives

    • Economics/funds, H-index influencing what work proliferates

  • How do scientific ideas materialize and percolate into general public as something tangible

    • This is easier to achieve in Psychology or medicine, but relatively difficult with Physics or math
    • That said, the ease with which a discovery can affect the world places massive burden on how research happens in these high impact fields

  • All Models are Wrong - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All%5Fmodels%5Fare%5Fwrong

    • Instrumentalist perspective

  • https://xkcd.com/435/

  • Discipline

    • Which facts are you going to admit into your way of thinking and which ones will you banish?

  • Science of distortions

  • Takes a superhuman mind to see the connections between different prioritization choices

  • Psychology has the burden of having to prove itself as science

    • This pushes the field to appropriate hard science methods like mechanitic/statistical models just in time when hard sciences are moving away from those to dynamical thinking, science of explanation
    • Institutional norms of other disciplines infecting this one despite their relative lack of efficacy?

  • Institutional norms being perverted because of the homogenization

    • Similar to the pythogorean feuds

  • Looking for specific conclusions vs working from an hypothesis

  • What is science from a communcation standpoint?

    • The degree to which institutional norms around production of science produce inadvertent crises in other fields where these methods are not applicable
    • How can we move pass this when there isn’t a clearly better system

  • How has science been inadvertently “gamified” to incentivize maladaptive behaviors, and how might that gamification be redesigned for better results?

  • At some point in history, scientific institutions needed to maintain a certain level of detachment from society and its norms in order to flourish

    • Genomic theory of inheritance coming from a monastery
    • Closed cities for military research in the Soviet union paradoxically developing their own internal cultures, almost defeating the purpose of detaching from “outside” human cultures

  • Ideological homogeny

  • Scientists are currently unhelpfully coupled to society and the economy

    • NSF for example prioritizes short-term research, which is antithetical to pursuing fundamental science research
    • Platforms like twitter can potentially be detrimental

  • Two ideologies in sciene - science embedded in society vs detached from it

  • “Foot solidier of science”

    • People often look up to science in general and hesitate to question it
    • Part of being a scientist is to poke and prod existing knowledge
    • This sort of prodding requires scientific literacy and certain level of economic support

  • Conflict between : Basic science, sandbox playing vs. grants, implication of work

  • Misaligned incentives

    • what does the public need?
    • what are scientists being incentivized to work on?

  • funding systems are capricious and contingent on the workings of scientific society

    • A lot of successful scientific continues to boil down to luck

  • “survival of the funded”

  • Entities that fund science have a major influence on what work gets done, which is a problem

  • Individual patronage vs Institutional Funding

    • the process of acquiring funding can shape what work gets done
    • An institutional funding committee can come with a ton of bureaucratic checks and balances, which can discourage outlandish but impactful work that might otherwise be funded by an adventurous patron

  • Art of grant writing, where you craft together an application that panders to the system but also creatively add in the interesting new ideas

    • It can be a useful framework for iterating on new ideas with external feedback

  • small scale systems vs large scale systems

    • How can healthy micro systems of people be put together with the background goal of fostering meaningful scientific work?

  • Apprenticeships in scientific communities fostered interpersonal relationships, which preserved healthy norms characterizing scientific production

  • Parallels between enlightenment era artist-scientists

    • Jazz tradition continues to preserve this inheritance of interpersonal norms within a larger framework of institutional norm

  • But if inherited norms prevail with good reason, how does anything new ever get made?

  • You need a deep understanding of rules in order to break them

  • Cross-pollination of ideas

  • Influence of audience and distribution channels on proliferation of science

    • Final product of a lot of scientific work is a paper - but these are not directly digestible

  • Vannevar Bush

    • Pushed for scientific and academic literacy among larger groups of people
    • Indirectly resulted in the industrialization of the academy
    • Egalitarian idea of education
      • Universities went from being sites of scholarship to being sites of production
      • Makes it more equitable, and fosters collaboration with the industry
      • This resulted in reduced amounts of radical thought, and a general dissolution of scholarship

  • The academy is today an institution trying to juggle between scientific production and vocational training. And it does both poorly(?)

    • This leads to concentration of resources
    • “science operating at scale”
      • Overwhelmed mechanisms of scientific production - like peer reviews; makes it hard to ascertain relative importance of scientific work except via what is fashionable, which in turn homogenizes research
      • Work done by scientists increasingly becomes dealing with politics, administration etc

  • Under the pretext of equity, we have put together a system that makes it harder for people to get where they want to be - via crowding classes and favoring mass production

  • Bozo explosion

  • Clout and status games in academia and sciences

    • Can result in intellectual dishonesty

  • Ratio of good to bad ideas, and the extent to which people reconcile with that reality

    • The academic pipeline system works fine for a set of people who are capable of conform to existing institutional norms
    • The shortcomings show up when you consider the amount of scientific work that is implicitly discarded by making the space inconvenient for people that are incapable, or unwilling to conform to existing norms

  • Scale necessitates a certain level of standardization

    • This isn’t necessarily with the objective of putting out scientific work, but to keep the system running
    • Results in pedestalization of specialized work

  • Cartography of knowledge

    • Clear map of interconnecting bits of knowledge
    • They will not be compeletely objective, and will forever be contingent on specific vantage points

  • Creating new mechanisms and using community as a space for practicing that

  • Four minute mile effect

  • Bringing science back to humanistic norms

    • Ask scientists for difference in approach, more explicit look at people’s styles in approaching science

  • Put everyone in an on-call scientific reserve

  • Advice for a young investigator - Ramón y Cajal