Conversation

Replying to
Side thought. The older I get, the more I appreciate experimental breakthroughs over theory. Theoretical genius breakthroughs are admirable, but science IMO is seeing sone thing nobody has seen before. Everything else is paperwork.
1
40
🤔… borderline scut work in some ways, on par with comet searching, but still kinda cool.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
Smartphone. @inaturalist app gives you naturalist superpowers to find new species: forum.inaturalist.org/t/things-poste That was the biggest lesson for me with OpenROV etc. The pros are leaving massive holes for sufficiently curious amateurs to fill.
2
16
There’s a bunch of responses along the lines of: pencil, paper, your brain, etc., which (all due respect) are part of a patronizing false Horatio Alger narrative of citizen science. It’s “you too can be a real scientist with everyday kitchen things!”
1
32
If chutzpah and pencils were all it took, why don’t pro scientists turn up their noses at big, delicate, billion dollar instruments and go looking fit inspired results from duct tape and vinegar?
2
23
This narrative is frankly as bad as the Westinghouse/Intel/whatever-it-is-now science fair narrative where 16 year olds apparently do real science, and it’s just a coincidence that parents typically tend to have PhDs and big institutional access.
1
43
A pragmatic democratization of science will avoid the temptations of both the disingenuous prep-school and imagination-and-duct-tape narratives, and solve for empowering above-average smart but not good-will-hunting grade talent.
2
34
This is certainly a great thing to have, but the reason I’m asking about low-cost instruments is that owning the means of discovery outright, without reliance on having to “apply” to institutional gatekeepers (good or bad) is a crucial feature of open science cultures.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
Anyone can apply for telescope time! Beyond that, so much data is publicly available. The cost is in training, what’s an interesting problem and how to ask good questions of the data. The cost of entry to robust data access is a computer.
3
25
I get that you can’t let any rando off the street just sign up for Hubble time and trawl the skies randomly like I sometimes do with my amateur 4.5” scope, but something important lies in the ability to just idly play with instruments without having to do proposals and stuff.
1
31
The economic forces and fundamental causes are different, but science becoming dependent on big, essentially monopolistic instruments causes the same pathology as big companies getting monopolistic. Hubble and LHR aren’t Google or Facebook, but share some features…
2
25
Replying to
So here's one: Your computer, and the computers of a large enough set of collaborators. The biggest breakthroughs of the next century will probably be surrounding Social Science of some kind. Think on it: a majority of efficacy problems are human-made obstructions to resources.
1
Replying to
I guess you missed the point of my reply. The only way for the tool access to improve is if human relations do. That takes real science, about people. That doesn't take instrumentation, but leads to better, more egalitarian access to it. Guaranteed.
Replying to and
In discounting “second-order computational work” there’s an embedded assumption that the current high-end tools aren’t providing enough data for citizen scientists to trawl through. Is that true? If there’s piles of data waiting to be investigated, why discount 2nd order work?