I think your attitude is very condescending and really misguided and counter-productive. Yes, of course the modern scientific method is superior to what came before, but it was what came before that got us to the modern age and kick-started the industrial revolution that makes modern science possible. And modern science has its own set of problems, one of which is that it's incredibly resource intensive (or, as you yourself said, "hard work")... in fact it's impossibly resource intensive, as shown by the fact that even though we have millions of scientists working today (90% of all scientists who have ever lived) we still have gigantic gaps in our knowledge about basic live-or-death issues that affect millions of people. Especially in the area of human health we still take as dogma things that later turn out to be almost certainly completely wrong and in the meantime have cost millions of lives. And political and economic factors still distort the scientific process at least as much as what you call "crash and burn science".
The hard work of modern science has also produced fantastic results, but I don't think it can ever fill all the gaps in our understanding of the world by itself. We need creative approaches, wild speculation and experimentation, phenomenology, and philosophical and spiritual exploration just as much as we need those millions of scientists doing the painstaking work of endless iterations of controlled experiments.
Or maybe, my attitude is that of someone with decades of experience actually moving the needle on problems. And with decades of experience training grad students out of exactly this kind of naive view of science so that they can go on to be extremely productive.
> And modern science has its own set of problems, one of which is that it's incredibly resource intensive
No way. Science is obscenely resource efficient and low resource. People don't realize how tight science budgets are. Like, much of the CS research in the US is supported by a single organization whose budget is $1B. Cancer research is only funded to the tune of $5B per year worldwide.
The US alone spent $15B on a worthless border wall under Trump. To put useless pieces of steel in a desert. That someone can walk around or cut in a few minutes. We spent 3x the yearly cancer research budget. Yet despite all of that, cancer survival is going up rapidly.
> Especially in the area of human health we still take as dogma things that later turn out to be almost certainly completely wrong and in the meantime have cost millions of lives. And political and economic factors still distort the scientific process at least as much as what you call "crash and burn science".
I swear, listening to people here you would think all scientists go through a brainwashing course and then attend a yearly conspiracy meeting to compare notes and never discover anything. Seriously, you have no idea how hard people work to prove everything they possibly can wrong.
I do agree that there are massive gaps and millions die because of it. I would actually characterize it as billions of dead people.
The solution is simple. Fund science and be ok with failure. The gatekeepers are not individual scientists. The gatekeepers are funding agencies. That are massively starved for funds so they need to be extremely selective. And that means being extremely conservative. They cannot bet on high-risk high-reward science, because if all their bets don't pay off, then what do they tell Congress?
> The hard work of modern science has also produced fantastic results, but I don't think it can ever fill all the gaps in our understanding of the world by itself. We need creative approaches, wild speculation and experimentation, phenomenology, and philosophical and spiritual exploration just as much as we need those millions of scientists doing the painstaking work of endless iterations of controlled experiments.
Yeah, so what can I tell you? I takes me 5-6 years to teach a new PhD student that this is totally wrong. You can't make progress by random wild stabs in the dark, philosophy, spiritual whatever, wild experiments. It doesn't work. You can't build up a coherent research program that way. You can't go from result to result in a systematic way breaking down a problem. At the end of all of that "exploration" your grandma still dies of cancer because you spent your time on wild experiments instead of real work. Seriously, those are the stakes here. Work is personal for a lot of people.
You can build intuition that way, and that's cool! I run tiny experiments all the time looking for fun things. But then you need to roll up your sleeves and do the hard part. Have a hypothesis, break it down systematically, think about mechanisms and outcomes, run controlled experiments, etc. That has to be 99% of the work, because that's how you convince people, build up a body of evidence, find new ideas, etc.
> You can't make progress by random wild stabs in the dark, philosophy, spiritual whatever, wild experiments. It doesn't work.
It must be hard for a young grad student to swallow the pill of human mortality and reconcile the disconnect that a lifetime of hard and rigorous science will merely move the needle. Fruits of their labor which might only be tasted centuries after their death. Of course, only through this sacrifice has the needle been moved so much that we have the things we have now. Something something shoulders of giants. Understanding this is a key part of accepting reality and becoming a mature adult, something it seems you've helped many people do, and something many people never do.
> The solution is simple. Fund science and be ok with failure
We also live in a society dictated by political and economic forces. These forces have no qualms rejecting reality and believing in eternal life. Will science ,which has an infinite number of directions to grow and is limited in speed by the rigor of its very nature, ever be fast enough to protect itself? Or is this science just for the sake of science until societal collapse occurs? To really save and protect the billions of lives, I think a new kind of societal advancement is needed outside of science. A vanguard force of sorts. Not political or economic in nature but also not scientific because it can not be bound by the speed of the field.
I think software as envisioned by some people long ago could have been this place. Of course, software has been co-opted by all three groups but I still think there is a chance. Restructure society, reign in political and economic forces, and allow science to do its thing for thousands of years to come.
> It must be hard for a young grad student to swallow the pill of human mortality and reconcile the disconnect that a lifetime of hard and rigorous science will merely move the needle. Fruits of their labor which might only be tasted centuries after their death. Of course, only through this sacrifice has the needle been moved so much that we have the things we have now. Something something shoulders of giants. Understanding this is a key part of accepting reality and becoming a mature adult, something it seems you've helped many people do, and something many people never do.
Totally. It's so much harder in some fields too.
A friend who is a primate researcher describes it as having 20 experiments that he can run in his entire career. I still think about that sometimes.
The hard work of modern science has also produced fantastic results, but I don't think it can ever fill all the gaps in our understanding of the world by itself. We need creative approaches, wild speculation and experimentation, phenomenology, and philosophical and spiritual exploration just as much as we need those millions of scientists doing the painstaking work of endless iterations of controlled experiments.