98 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. Will artificial intelligence create useless class of people? - Yuval Noah Harari

      1:00 "bring the latest findings of science of the public", otherwise the public space "gets filled with conspiracy theories and fake news and whatever".<br /> he fails to mention that ALL his beautiful "scientists" are financially dependent on corporations, who dictate the expected results, and who sabotage "unwanted research".<br /> for example, the pharma industry will NEVER pay money for research of natural cancer cures, or "alternative" covid cures like ivermectin / zinc / vitamin C, because these cures have no patent, so there is no profit motive, and also because the "militant pacifists" want to fix overpopulation this way.<br /> a "scientist" should be someone, who has all freedom to propose hypotheses, which then are tested in experiments (peer review), and compared to real placebo control groups. because that is science, or "the scientific method". everything else is lobbying for "shekel shekel".

  2. Nov 2023
    1. Muchrecent scholarship on card indexes and factuality falls into one of two modes: first,scholars have excavated early modern indexes, catalogues, and the pursuit of ‘facts’to demonstrate information overload prior to the contemporary ‘information age’ as wellas the premodern attempts to counteract the firehose of books and other information(Blair, 2010; Krajewski, 2011; Mu ̈ ller-Wille and Scharf, 2009; Poovey, 1998;

      Zedelmaier, 1992). All the same, a range of figures have tracked and critiqued the trajectory of the ‘noble dream’ of historical and scientific ‘objectivity’ (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, 1994: 241-70; Daston and Galison, 2007; Novick, 1988).

      Lustig categorizes scholarship on card indexes into two modes: understanding of information overload tools and the "trajectory of the 'noble dream' of historical and scientific 'objectivity'".

  3. Mar 2023
    1. Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. (Sektion 1.2 Die Kartei) Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

      annotation target: urn:x-pdf:00126394ba28043d68444144cd504562

      (Unknown translation from German into English. v1 TK)

      The overall title of the work (in English: Technique of Scientific Work) calls immediately to mind the tradition of note taking growing out of the scientific historical methods work of Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos and even more specifically the description of note taking by Beatrice Webb (1926) who explicitly used the phrase "recipe for scientific note-taking".

      see: https://hypothes.is/a/BFWG2Ae1Ee2W1HM7oNTlYg

      first reading: 2022-08-23 second reading: 2022-09-22

      I suspect that this translation may be from Clemens in German to Scheper and thus potentially from the 1951 edition?

      Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende. 8., Umgearb. Aufl. 1931. Reprint, Berlin: R. Kiepert, 1951.

  4. Nov 2022
    1. Empiricism was thenew intellectual trend. Before this, just about any difficult question on anysubject at all could find a perfectly acceptable answer in authority of one kind oranother—in ‘It is God’s will’, rather than ‘Let’s find out’.

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  5. Oct 2022
    1. Thus Paxson was not content to limit historians to the immediateand the ascertainable. Historical truth must appear through some-thing short of scientific method, and in something other than scien-tific form, linked and geared to the unassimilable mass of facts.There was no standard technique suited to all persons and purposes,in note-taking or in composition. "The ordinary methods of his-torical narrative are ineffective before a theme that is in its essen-tials descriptive," he wrote of Archer B. Hulbert's Forty- Niners(1931) in 1932. "In some respects the story of the trails can notbe told until it is thrown into the form of epic poetry, or comes un-der the hand of the historical novelist." 42

      This statement makes it appear as if Paxson was aware of the movement in the late 1800s of the attempt to make history a more scientific endeavor by writers like Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and others, but that Pomeroy is less so.

      How scientific can history be as an area of study? There is the descriptive from which we might draw conclusions, but how much can we know when there are not only so many potential variables, but we generally lack the ability to design and run discrete experiments on history itself?

      Recall Paxson's earlier comment that "in history you cannot prove an inference". https://hypothes.is/a/LIWSoFlLEe2zUtvMoEr0nQ

      Had enough time elapsed up to this writing in 1953, that the ideal of a scientific history from the late 1800s had been borne out not to be accomplished?

  6. Aug 2022
    1. Neurath claimed that magic was unfalsifiable and therefore disenchantment could never be complete in a scientific age.[18]
      1. Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
  7. May 2022
    1. Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47
      1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

      Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

      This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

  8. Apr 2022
    1. Dr Ellie Murray, ScD. (2021, September 19). We really need follow-up effectiveness data on the J&J one shot vaccine, but not sure what this study tells us. A short epi 101 on case-control studies & why they’re hard to interpret. 🧵/n [Tweet]. @EpiEllie. https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1439587659026993152

    1. In this way the pressures of the multitude and diversity of authorita-tive opinion, already articulated in the previous century by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), were heightened by the development of reference books, from indexes and concordances that made originalia searchable and to the large compilations that excerpted and summarized from diverse sources.

      Prior to the flourishing of reference materials, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) had articulated the idea of "the multitude and diversity of authoritative opinion" to be found in available material. How was one to decide which authority to believe in a time before the scientific method?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/oMSaKLb2EeyXOE_0Yh1Chw

    2. Even if the Speculum was copied only in parts, Vincent of Beauvais exposed the reader to multiple opinions on any topic he discussed. Neither the concordance nor the encyclo-pedic compendium resolved the textual difficulties or contradictions that they helped bring to light. Vincent explicitly left to the reader the task of reaching a final conclusion amid the diversity of authoritative opinions that might exist on a question: “I am not unaware of the fact that philosophers have said many contradictory things, especially about the nature of things. . . . I warn the reader, lest he perhaps be horrified, if he finds some contradictions of this kind among the names of diverse authors in many places of this work, especially since I have acted in this work not as an author, but as an excerptor, that I did not try to reduce the sayings of the philosophers to agreement but report what each said or wrote on each thing; leaving to the judgment of the reader to decide which opinion to prefer.”161

      Interesting that Vincent of Beauvais indicates that there were discrepancies between the authors, but leaves it up to the reader to decide for themself.

      What would the reader do in these cases in a culture before the scientific method and the coming scientific revolutions? Does this statement prefigure the beginning of a cultural shift?

      Are there other examples of (earlier) writers encouraging the the comparison of two different excerpts from "expert" or authoritative sources to determine which should have precedence?

      What other methods would have encouraged this sort of behavior?

  9. Mar 2022
    1. ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘@alexdefig are you really going to claim that responses to the introduction of passports on uptake across 4 other countries are evidentially entirely irrelevant to whether or not passports are justified or not?’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 31 March 2022, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1444358068280565764

    1. James Heathers. (2021, October 26). Perish the thought I would be as peremptory as @GidMK. No, I’m going to hector, mock, or annoy those replies, THEN ask for money, THEN block you when I get bored. See, these aren’t rebuttals. No-one’s said anything about the actual work. Nothing. Not a sausage. [Tweet]. @jamesheathers. https://twitter.com/jamesheathers/status/1452980059497762824

    1. These ways of knowinghave inherent value and are leading Western scientists to betterunderstand celestial phenomena and the history and heritage thisconstitutes for all people.

      The phrase "ways of knowing" is fascinating and seems to have a particular meaning across multiple contexts.

      I'd like to collect examples of its use and come up with a more concrete definition for Western audiences.

      How close is it to the idea of ways (or methods) of learning and understanding? How is it bound up in the idea of pedagogy? How does it relate to orality and memory contrasted with literacy? Though it may not subsume the idea of scientific method, the use, evolution, and refinement of these methods over time may generally equate it with the scientific method.

      Could such an oral package be considered a learning management system? How might we compare and contrast these for drawing potential equivalencies of these systems to put them on more equal footing from a variety of cultural perspectives? One is not necessarily better than another, but we should be able to better appreciate what each brings to the table of world knowledge.

  10. Feb 2022
    1. 9/8g Hinter der Zettelkastentechnik steht dieErfahrung: Ohne zu schreiben kann mannicht denken – jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvollen,selektiven Zugriff aufs Gedächtnis voraussehendenZusammenhängen. Das heißt auch: ohne Differenzen einzukerben,kann man nicht denken.

      Google translation:

      9/8g The Zettelkasten technique is based on experience: You can't think without writing—at least not in contexts that require selective access to memory.

      That also means: you can't think without notching differences.

      There's something interesting about the translation here of "notching" occurring on an index card about ideas which can be linked to the early computer science version of edge-notched cards. Could this have been a subtle and tangential reference to just this sort of computing?

      The idea isn't new to me, but in the last phrase Luhmann tangentially highlights the value of the zettelkasten for more easily and directly comparing and contrasting the ideas on two different cards which might be either linked or juxtaposed.


      Link to:

      • Graeber and Wengrow ideas of storytelling
      • Shield of Achilles and ekphrasis thesis

      • https://hypothes.is/a/I-VY-HyfEeyjIC_pm7NF7Q With the further context of the full quote including "with selective access to memory" Luhmann seemed to at least to make space (if not give a tacit nod?) to oral traditions which had methods for access to memories in ways that modern literates don't typically give any credit at all. Johannes F.K .Schmidt certainly didn't and actively erased it in Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.

    1. The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanelystarts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about,is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant.

      Many study and writing guides suggest to start ones' writing or research work with a topic or hypothesis. This is a recipe for disaster to succumb to confirmation bias as one is more likely to search out for confirming evidence rather than counter arguments. Better to start with interesting topic and collect ideas from there which can be pitted against each other.

    1. Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 29). Going to say this again because it’s important. Case-control studies to determine prevalence of long COVID are completely flawed science, but are often presented as being scientifically robust. This is not how we can define clinical syndromes or their prevalence! A thread. [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1487366920508694529

    1. Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 30). Have tried to now visually illustrate an earlier thread I wrote about why prevalence estimates based on comparisons of “any symptom” between infected cases, and matched controls will yield underestimates for long COVID. I’ve done a toy example below here, to show this 🧵 [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1487578265187405828

  11. Jan 2022
  12. Dec 2021
    1. Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that werestartling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Nowtheir ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them thatjustifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If socialscientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic,two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anythingoriginal, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists areexpected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is toimpoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our senseof possibility.

      The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

      Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.


      This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

    1. Every serious (academic) historical work includes a conversation with other scholarship, and this has largely carried over into popular historical writing.

      Any serious historical or other academic work should include a conversation with the body of other scholarship with which argues for or against.

      Comparing and contrasting one idea with another is crucial for any sort of advancement.

    1. Tom Moultrie. (2021, December 12). Given the comedic misinterpretation of the South African testing data offered by @BallouxFrancois (and many others!) last night ... I offer some tips having contributed to the analysis of the testing data for the @nicd_sa since April last year. (1/6) [Tweet]. @tomtom_m. https://twitter.com/tomtom_m/status/1469954015932915718

    1. Foucault proclaimed in a footnote: “ Appearance of the index card and development of the human sciences: another invention little celebrated by historians. ”

      from Foucault 1975, p. 363, n. 49; see Foucault 1966, pp. XV and passim for discourse analysis.

      Is he talking here about the invention of the index card about the same time as the rise of the scientific method? With index cards one can directly compare and contrast two different ideas as if weighing them on a balance to see which carries more weight. Then the better idea can win while the lesser is discarded to the "scrap heap"?

  13. Nov 2021
    1. tack towards discovery, towards truth

      This sailing metaphor is a useful one. Buffeted on all sides by distraction. Constantly shifting pressures, but generally going in the same direction. There maybe an ideal path forward, but the variables are too numerous to know where the ideal path lies.

  14. Oct 2021
  15. Sep 2021
    1. Bracher, J., Wolffram, D., Deuschel, J., Görgen, K., Ketterer, J. L., Ullrich, A., Abbott, S., Barbarossa, M. V., Bertsimas, D., Bhatia, S., Bodych, M., Bosse, N. I., Burgard, J. P., Castro, L., Fairchild, G., Fuhrmann, J., Funk, S., Gogolewski, K., Gu, Q., … Xu, F. T. (2021). A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave. Nature Communications, 12(1), 5173. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25207-0

  16. Aug 2021
    1. After a long and influential career, commonplace books lost their influence in the late seventeenth century. Classical passages were relegated to the anti- quarian scholar; they no longer molded discourse and life. Men who sought confirmation in empirical evidence and scientific measurement had little use for commonplace books.

      I believe that Earle Havens disputes the idea of the waning of the commonplace book after this.

      I would draw issue with it as well. Perhaps it lost some ground in the classrooms of the youth, but Harvard was teaching the idea during Ralph Waldo Emerson's time during the 1800s. Then there's the rise of the Zettelkasten in Germany in the 1700s (and later officially in the 1900s).

      Lichtenberg specifically mentions using his commonplace as a scientific tool for sharpening his ideas.

      Can we find references to other commonplacers like Francis Bacon mentioning the use of them for science?

  17. Jul 2021
  18. Jun 2021
    1. Soderberg, C. K., Errington, T. M., Schiavone, S. R., Bottesini, J., Thorn, F. S., Vazire, S., Esterling, K. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2021). Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01142-4

    1. We just cannot know all that life will throw at us, and if we want our grading contract to be fair and equitable for everyone, we need to reexamine it, reflect on how it has been working for each of us, and perhaps adjust it. 

      This idea of re-evaluating at regular time points can be a very useful and powerful tool in more areas than just writing.

      Society as a whole needs to look carefully at where it is do do this same sort of readjustment as well.

      It's the same sort of negative feedback mechanism which is at work in the scientific method and constantly improving the state-of-the art.

    1. Lynne Kelly's observation that oral cultures revised useful knowledge into their memories appears to me to be a simple precursor to annotation and the idea of the scientific method all in one...

    2. Scholars are likely familiar with the so-called “Great Conversation,” or the idea in Western thought that we collectively participate in an iterative process of knowledge production through reference, review, and refinement. As our conversation continues over time, an ever-expanding network of annotation–through notation, citation, links, and data–traces an interconnected lineage of ideas and insight.

      Again, Dr. Lynne Kelly discusses this sort of process in non-Western and primarily oral cultures as well. Songlines has some interesting discussion of this in the Australian aboriginal cultures.

  19. May 2021
    1. Long before Vannevar Bush, Francis Bacon cited Seneca to describe a similar ambition for his scientific method, which he hoped would “abridge the infinity of individual experience ... and remedy the complaint of vita brevis, ars longa.”
    2. Blair’s previous work demonstrated that the practices of literary reading and writing were central to the rise of scientific method. Focusing on the lawyer and scientist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, she meticulously examined how Bodin collected commonplace reading notes and then stored and analyzed them as scientific evidence.

      I really do need to create a historical timeline for commonplace books already.

      Georg Christoph Lichtenberg also did this in the late 1700's and became famous for it after his death and the publication of his Waste Books. Worth looking into who his influences may have been?

    1. Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

      This idea is far from new and is roughly what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was doing with the science portions of his Waste Books in the late 1700's where he was running experiments, noting wins, losses, and making progress using the scientific method.

    1. The scrapbooks reveal a critical and analytical way of thinking and emphasis on experimental evidence in physics, through which he became one of the early founders and advocates of modern scientific methodology. The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become. It is always good though not to abandon them instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the conflicting experience separately, until it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts necessary to edifice a new theory. (Lichtenberg: scrapbook JII/1602)

      Georg Christoph Lichtenberg used his notebooks as thinking tools with respect to scientific methodology.

  20. Apr 2021
  21. Mar 2021
    1. ‘bold’ means to have many observational consequences

      As I said at the wiki I saw this link from, you don't test the hypothesis directly, you test the predictions, the "observational consequences", from the hypothesis.

    1. Cailin O’Connor. (2020, November 10). New paper!!! @psmaldino look at what causes the persistence of poor methods in science, even when better methods are available. And we argue that interdisciplinary contact can lead better methods to spread. 1 https://t.co/C5beJA5gMi [Tweet]. @cailinmeister. https://twitter.com/cailinmeister/status/1326221893372833793

  22. Feb 2021
  23. Dec 2020
    1. A scientist who does not utilize the scientific method is as much use as a carpenter who cannot make chairs or a plumber who cannot fix toilets. A science that exists as a fixed absolute, whose premises are not to be questioned, whose data is not to be examined and whose conclusions are not to be debated, is a pile of wood or a leaky toilet. Not the conclusion of a process, but its absence.

      Understanding science is a process.

  24. Oct 2020
    1. Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces,

      Science could learn something from this. Science is too far focused on the idealized positive outcomes that it isn't paying attention to the negative outcomes and using that to better define its outline or overall shape. We need to define a scientific opportunity cost and apply it to the negative side of research to better understand and define what we're searching for.

      Of course, how can we define a new scientific method (or amend/extend it) to better take into account negative results--particularly in an age when so many results aren't even reproducible?

  25. Sep 2020
  26. Aug 2020
  27. Jul 2020
  28. Jun 2020
  29. Jul 2018
    1. I buy into Newton’s philosophy that we see further by standing on the shoulders of giants.

      I take his general point here, and Newton said something along these lines, but I wouldn't call it "Newton's philosophy". If anything this philosophy is really the scientific method and Newton didn't invent it.

  30. Feb 2017
    1. mechanistic approach

      "ars est celare artem: art consists in concealing art"

      I do not dig this mechanical, technical, scientific method dissection of writing. Unfortunately, this article is filled with this pre-Freudian crap. You wouldn't tear Raphael a new one because he painted The School of Athens figures in the wrong order.

      Are these mechanics the result of the scientific method?

  31. Sep 2016
  32. Aug 2016
    1. Performance CategoryDesign Categoriesi. StructureFrame design, shape and materials –for functionii. MobilityThrusters: number, power, orientationiii. SensorsCameras, lights, sonar, touch sensors, compass, GPSiv. ToolsArms, claws, rakes, wrenches, hammersv. Ranging DistanceTether length: waterproofing required vi. Buoyancy/ BallastFixed or variable, location and materialsvii. ControlsRC via wire or signal via fibre optic cableviii. Other?Depends on the specific mission

      Are you doing science projects? Maybe you can use an old mission scope to have students ask questions about. That way some of the questions we will need to face will be answered before we actually get the mission for this year.

  33. Jan 2016
    1. Is he saying something about inductive vs deductive methods? Where typically historians have a model or a hypothesis but now they are allowing the data to tell the story?