Don't Try to Reform Science

It is worth reflecting on group dynamics - every group has a small core of members who set the standards for everyone else. They can reform the group. No-one else can. Sometimes an outsider can manage through sheer force of personality.

Groups display some sad behaviours where most of the members know that what they are doing but the leadership is committed to something silly so they go along anyway. Sometimes it gets bad enough that they quit the group, but that is all they can do since most never have a chance at reforming it. This turns up formally in corporations (the executive team have the power to reform) but that is actually just a mirror of a natural social dynamic.

Consider religion for the more natural form of this. It gives a good indication of how the ratio of insider to outsiders pans out in practice. Catholicism is a very well established one, and how many people have the moral and practical authority to reform their doctrine? Not many.

> BERT was nothing short of a revolution in the field when it happened. You could cleanly draw a line pre-BERT and post-BERT. After it came out, something absurd like 95% of papers used it. It was so good, nobody could ignore it.

>Naively, you’d think such a revolutionary paper would be met with open arms. But when it was given the best paper award (at NAACL 2019), the postdocs I talked to universally grumbled about it. Why? It wasn’t interesting, they bemoaned. “It just scaled some stuff up.”

I still hear people making this complaint, despite the extraordinary success of scaling over the last few years.

It's pretty clear that scaling is the winning method (although exactly how to make best use of scale is an open question), but many researchers find it repulsive.

The idealized (Science 1) / realpolitik (Science 2) dichotomy is both real and at first depressing. I also did a PhD in machine learning, and became quite disillusioned after seeing how the sausage was made, and how different the process is from how I had imagined it. At the same time -- engaging in 'game change' within Science 2 (perhaps not as a PhD, but after you have some security), is I think one of science's highest moral callings. The aim is not necessarily to inch Science 2 towards an impossible Science 1, but to help science to take itself more seriously (it really is a messy social process & there are ways that social process can work better or worse towards the public good -- itself a scientific question) -- and contribute towards science 2 becoming a better (and ideally better-at-self-improving) science 2.

Maybe nit-picking but the article started out problematic for me with their placement of "maybe?" after the scientific method in their definitions. Without the scientific method as the basis, science is meaningless. Both the ways they define the "idealized concept" are 100% applicable to religions and other lines of thought. It is the methodology of science that differentiates science from all the other ways of doing those things.

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