Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
by cellular on Saturday June 15, 2019 @07:39PM
(#20192887)
I wonder if people are reluctant to do this because they would be scrutinized more and perhaps their phd, Grant etc might be at risk?
If so, is the only solution to give"credit" towards the phd, grant etc in the form of hours worked towards pushing knowledge acquisition, and not strict results?
Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
by godelski on Saturday June 15, 2019 @09:50PM
(#20193349)
I think it is partially that (but minor). Partially embarrassment (frequently code is rushed). Partially people view code/data as a trade secret. The latter I find anti-scientific, especially since a lot of funding comes from public money. I'm okay with holding on to it for a small period of time (because we live in an unfortunate world where sharing knowledge can't come first and people need to secure funding), but I don't think this should be a default mode that people do. Luckily it does seem that many are turning to GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab to make their code available.
And everyone that's in a PhD or has one knows that the majority of work you do is failing (but you learn from that failure).
Side note: I wonder if imposter syndrome would decrease if we were aware about one anothers' failures and didn't only see the accomplishments.
Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
by mlspector on Saturday June 15, 2019 @05:38PM
(#20192323)
You might be interested in OpenReview, which is doing something like this, mainly in the ML/AI academic community.
(Disclaimer: I’m one of the developers)
Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
by godelski on Saturday June 15, 2019 @09:46PM
(#20193325)
This is different than what I'm seeking. I actually in favor of blind reviews. I don't think they are just good, I think they are essential.
Re:Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
by mariushn on Saturday June 15, 2019 @05:25PM
(#20192263)
Would you please send me an email to discuss further? [email protected]
There's no contact in your profile. Thanks!
I know the first won't happen for awhile, but it is a dream (open science).
The second is direly needed but in some cases not practical. But I think there could be a lot to gain from just having a small portion of this. It could help verify results significantly. Also imagine if people could research things without having to have all the fancy instruments. Some of this already happens, but I think it is harder to find and not always easy to sort though. It isn't connected to papers and research. Just having a paper and a link to the data would be tremendous help.
Similarly code. I don't know a researcher that hasn't made an accidental bug in the code that changes results (some slight, some major). I think we need to get over that WE ALL write hacky code. Hacky code is better than a vague description in a paper because you don't have enough room to write an accurate description of your model. Science is supposed to be replicated! Even linking papers with a github account would be tremendous help. Some people don't want to share code, and I think this is a shame and anti-scientific (especially if you are using public money), but that's a rant on its own.
Researchers email one another all the time. Some of these discussions should be public. Papers leave a lot of gaps. An area researchers could add extra notes that couldn't be fit in a page limit, where collaboration can happen, or where people can just ask questions, would be great. Replicating results can be hard and we should be learning from one another's hurdles. That's the point of science after all, for to push the progress of humanity. Lack of ability to communicate should not be a gate.
Along with these things it would be nice to encourage putting up null results. Aside a paper I would love to know what challenges a researcher fought. That's where most of the work is. It is funny, we constantly talk about failure being 80-90% of research. Whole projects failing or just banging your head on the desk because you can't figure out why something isn't working. Let's open this up. Let's help one another. Let's talk about what went wrong and how we fixed things to get to our success. I can't think of anything that would help science more than this.