This tweet thread prompted by the analogy with upset responses whenever I say “deep learning stuff is mostly nonsense.” Those seem to come mostly not from actual AI researchers, but AI fans. Personal and non-professional community identities depend on belief in AI progress.
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“Quasiscience” may be a useful term for a field somewhere between science and pseudoscience. The foundations are dubious and the whole thing may be nonsense. There well may be some real stuff there, but it’s impossible to sort out which, given the methods used.
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Quasisciences address problems everyone wants answers for, but for which no good methods are available. Practitioners collude to obscure the foundational problems. Funders want answers and choose to overlook doubts. Identity communities form around the field’s outputs.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Hmm. Seems like you’re conflating application métis and fan theories a bit? Most programmers don’t understand semiconductor manufacturing but build their theories atop abstractions that they trust up to a point. Programming lore does not appear to be a quasiscience in your sense.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
There is a spectrum going from programming lore on one end (based on strong, nearly leakproof abstractions) through fMRIology to social psych and say startupology. The abstractions they depend on get progressively leakier, and conclusions shakier.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
Fandom seems almost like an epiphenomenon of shaky foundations but not in itself an indictment of the foundations. You look for more social reassurance when your truths have a half life of 5 years rather than 50. But that’s degree, not kind.
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Replying to @vgr
This sounds like an interesting thread of questions, but I’m not sure I understand what it is. Is the point that there’s a continuum from reliable science to pseudoscience? Yes definitely. “Quasi” refers vaguely to the middle ground there.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
There are fields that haven’t quite managed to get into a normal-science groove yet, because the methods are still shaky or there’s still ontological problems. Kuhn called them “pre-paradigm”.
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Replying to @Meaningness
I think my line of questioning is trying to get at whether the fandom community around a science or quasiscience is directly relevant. Radiologists and psychologists aren’t signal processing experts re fMRI, but they are not “fans” so much as adjacent experts
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
Related thread I’m pulling at is that not all domains will even admit a strong paradigm understanding. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily dubious. They’re just low paradigm. Fundamentally nebulous rather than just at a nebulous stage on the way to a more rigorous stage.
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Right. One can do good work in a field in which nebulosity is inevitable and no hard-edged ontology is possible. Again in fact that’s what I most enjoy.
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Replying to @Meaningness
I think what you’re calling a quasiscience may be the specialized restriction to science of what I’ve been calling an escaped reality. A domain of phenomenology that admits a shaky epistemology and ontology that will crash with probability —> 1 given enough time
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
Like the world of a movie, where the suspension of belief is possible for about 2 hours if you do nothing more than stay in a seat and watch. Or a conspiracy theory where you can sort of believe so long as you avoid asking certain skeptical questions.
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