Thread by @Meaningness

∑ Fascinating indeed! This is how MOST research works, but I didn’t appreciate quite how true it is in math (or at least current number theory). Lots of tasty morsels in this thread; h/t @DRMacIver

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281153983500290

🧪 Science also USED to be like this and isn’t any more: “Mathematicians’ intuition about what's true is mysteriously really good, so publishing false results is quite rare.”

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281168529338373

🧪 A few decades ago, most published science was more-or-less true, even though there were often glaring gaps or outright mistakes in experiment. [My informal observation; I don’t have numbers on this.]

Now most published science is more-or-less false, even when done “right.”

💡 “Mysterious intuition” is reliably used to describe meta-rationality. It’s a thought-stopping cliché that signals you are not to ask how it works. metarationality.com/no-new-ideas

Meta-rationality is mainly a group activity. It requires a particular sort of social structure: a scene. “Lone geniuses” are lone to avoid wasting time on nonsense, but if you check their bios, they crucially depended on a small network of peers. metarationality.com/upgrade-your-c…

In the “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” model, a highly functional scene typically has about ten core geeks, who lead the innovation by cooperatively competing to top each other’s best work:

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281160857956354?s=20

To contribute to the scene, you need to be close enough *socially* to the core geeks to absorb the critical informal understanding (which is meta-rational in the case of math and science; it’s probably meta-musical in a music scene?)

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281162351042561?s=20

💡 Much of supposed “genius” is spending completely unreasonable amounts of effort on *getting things right* where everyone else thinks “must be good enough, everyone else gets by without dealing with this seriously.”

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281166100832260?s=20

🧪 So what happened to science? Why is most of it wrong, whereas most math is still right?

The MOPs and sociopaths moved in, enabled by a tidal wave of government funding.

Nobody cares about math except fanatics… meaningness.com/geeks-mops-soc…

🧪 “Science is expensive but profitable for society, so we want more science, and we’ll have to pay for it.”

We all believed this until about ten years ago…

More funding gets you more “scientists,” not more science.

Fortunately, no $$ for math! metarationality.com/upgrade-your-c…

🧪 Fixing science, if it is possible, must start from a realistic appraisal of its current state is, even though that is unpleasant to discuss.

Most “scientific” work now has negative value. It can’t realistically be stopped, so the real thing must be isolated from it.

🧪 Infinite funding guarantees institutions are run by sociopaths, who assemble mop armies.

Scientists who care about doing actual science must recognize the dynamics, and coordinate functional scenes sub rosa. These must EXCLUDE most mops and all sociopaths.

This is not nice.

🧪 Covert, highly productive scientific scenes are inimical to the interests of both mops and sociopaths. Mops (science careerists) hate their exclusivity and their demand to do unreasonable work. Sociopaths want to loot them and/or destroy them.

Both will say they are evil.

🧪 If you want to do real science, from now on you will have to be slightly evil. And you will need to coordinate your slight evil with other slightly evil people—who subvert or defy institutional imperatives in order to find out what is true.