🧬 Science reform should be evidence-based. We need WAY more qualitative evidence to better understand what makes scientists productive or not.
There are only a handful of people doing science ethnography. Can we get more researchers onto this task? nintil.com/science-fundin…
To do science ethnography well, you need to understand both the scientific field AND ethnographic theory and methods at the Master’s level at least, and ideally PhD-level in both.
Currently this is nearly career suicide. Must change if we want to understand how science works.
A success story is Park Doing’s ethnography of the Cornell synchrotron. After doing an electrical engineering Master’s, he managed the synchrotron X-ray source while doing an ethnography PhD.
His PhD thesis has a lot of insight both into the grungy details of how science is done in practice, and laboratory politics, and how they interact. This paper is extracted from it, and it’s fun to read: journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…
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@FluidityAudio@nosilverv A persistent confusion I keep trying to dispel: “postrat” generally contrasts specifically with LW rationalism; “meta-rationalism” contrasts with the whole 2500+ year history of rationalism, but especially its still-influential mid-20th-century high point. meaningness.com/collapse-of-ra…
@FluidityAudio@nosilverv I also wasted a lot of effort trying to find some specific content in LW rationalism. I have a professional interest in different rationalist theories (going back 40+ years now). It took me years to figure out that there’s nothing at the center; it’s all vibe and no substance.
Three categories of faculty-level intellectuals, extending this sports analogy.
1️⃣ Nearly everyone is running toward the scrum where the ball is. By the time they get there, it will be somewhere else. This is a total waste, but you can make a decent career of it.
2️⃣ There’s a half dozen big-swinging-dick types in the scrum fighting to move the ball a few feet forward. They have the connections and funding to stay in the scrum and get most of the glory.
I find this tiresome and unattractive, but it’s how we get incremental progress.
@slatestarcodex The @slatestarcodex micro-grants program excites me because—at a guess—great things will come out of it, but most awardees would not have survived accountable, BUREAUCRATICALLY RATIONAL evaluation:
@slatestarcodex 👨💼 When you can’t be rational in a way that meaningfully optimizes what actually matters, but you are accountable for being rational anyway,
you naturally fall back on using a mindless procedural checklist. That lets you avoid blame and makes your work look smooth and competent.
.@lumenphosphor was telling a wild story over dinner about friends of hers who put on a play based on a wild story about someone nearly burning down a house
and partway through I started nodding and saying Yah, yah,
when she got to the explosion, I pulled down my shirt
@lumenphosphor “I still have the scars on my chest,” I said
and gradually it dawned on her that she was telling me the a story about a play based on a diary entry about me
FRAME COLLAPSE: when you realize that the world in the story is THIS world and it is sitting across the table from you
@lumenphosphor Now you are reading a story I am telling you about @lumenphosphor telling me a story about a play about a diary entry about me….
Tfw you learn one of your most spectacularly stupid moves got made into a play thirty years later—and a performance is on YouTube.
The play is a dramatic rendering of an entry someone found in a diary, then thirty years old. Apparently the performers assumed, based on mentions of consumption of copious quantities of counterfactual substances, that it was largely or entirely hallucinatory.
The diary entry is, in fact, entirely accurate. I am "Dave" in the account.
I myself had not consumed any counterfactual substances. I can be spectacularly stupid without needing chemical help.