Thought-provoking piece by @Meaningness on cargo cults and epistemic virtue & depravity. Not for the faint of hearthttps://meaningness.com/metablog/upgrade-your-cargo-cult …
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Replying to @siminevazire @Meaningness
I really appreciated this article, especially the take home that even an open science system, once implemented, will be game-able. But I take issue with the idea that cargo cult science must be done before real science can be done. That rings false from my experiences. ->
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Many young scientists are the ones doing the questioning of the methods, because the first thing that happens when they enter the field is they ask "how does this work?" If they don't get good answers, some of them say "we need to change things!" There's little "cargo cult time"
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I think it's more common for someone to jump into the field fresh and say that it needs an overhaul than for someone to go through a stage of doing by rote and then later emerge as having deep curiosity
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My sense is that others see scientists as playing a sort of game--look, pick a prime, pick a DV, then do a creative writing assignment about them--and find that they want to play, too. They can be rewarded for it, but their motives make it less likely for them to "break through"
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The virtue framing inherent in this piece suggests that character matters--some people develop virtuous characters, while others do not--and I think concluding everyone needs to blindly follow instructions before gaining deeper understanding misses the phenomenology of it. ->
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It doesn't *feel* blind when you are learning new things everyday. You never feel like you're doing by rote until you hit a series of questions that just don't have satisfactory answers. You assume everyone is taking a similar questioning trajectory, until you see some aren't.
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Those first few times when you see your idols answer questions based on authority and/or cargo cult logic are really hard. Maybe you had been programming experiments in whatever style was requested, but hopefully you had also been asking questions about why along the way.
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Thanks for these thoughts—they are insightful, and make me optimistic! As for myself, I was always relatively ready to question scientific authority, but it wasn’t until I’d finished my MS and started my PhD before I really took on the establishment wholesale.
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Replying to @Meaningness @siminevazire
Yeah, and it does seem like there are levels to it. Maybe a few comments in a discussion group feels as subversive as you're willing to go for a long time, but publicly saying that the experts are getting it wrong is an upgrade. I appreciate your discussion of it out there.
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