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A comment on The Future According to Stanisław Lem. Parent comment

Re:The Future According to Stanisław Lem by tjradcliffe on Saturday September 13, 2014 @09:22PM (#8314231)
HMV also is the best single book ever written about the process of science, and the way scientists actually think. I can't over-state this. I read first read it while an undergrad in engineering in early 80's and during my graduate work in physics slowly came to realize it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist.

Even though the narrator is nominally a mathematician, his approach to problems is fundamentally that of an empirical scientist, and has nothing at all to do with the cartoon hypothetico-deductive nonsense that philosophers have foisted upon the world as "scientific method".

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Re:The Future According to Stanisław Lem by DonHopkins on Saturday September 13, 2014 @10:49PM (#8314376)
>it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist

What, politics? ;)

I read it as truly brilliant and scathing social commentary about what's wrong with the "scientific process" as practiced (and corrupted) by academic and government institutions.

The initial premise of the book, how the message was discovered, is deeply hilarious: somebody was fraudulently selling some old computer tapes of raw space telescope data as truly random numbers, and then one of their customers got pissed off that the numbers were't random enough because they repeated, and demanded their money back.

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