mstdn.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

18K
active users

Taylorism is a management philosophy based on using scientific optimization to maximize labor productivity and economic efficiency.

Here's the result of making the false Taylorist assumption that the output of scientific research is scientific papers—the more, faster, and cheaper, the better.

Papers are not the output of scientific research in the way that cars are the output of automobile manufacturing.

Papers are merely a vehicle through which a portion of the output of research is shared.

We confuse the two at our peril.

The entire idea of outsourcing the scientific ecosystem to LLMs — as described below — is a concept error that I can scarcely begin to get my head around.

sakana.ai/ai-scientist/

@ct_bergstrom
The kinds of LLM misuse that people will fall for, and •who• falls for them, has certainly been…eye-opening. So many times, I’ve thought, “oh, wow, these people don’t even know what that job •is•.”

ICYMI, you’d probably be interested in this now-classic essay from @jenniferplusplus:
jenniferplusplus.com/losing-th It’s about how assuming LLMs can take over programming fundamentally misunderstands what programming is. Much of its line of critique translates over to science.

Jennifer++ · Losing the imitation gameAI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.

@inthehands @jenniferplusplus

Paul, I'm really enjoying this piece. Thank you very much for bringing it to my attention. Lots to ponder here.

@ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
It’s a good one. The realization that programming involves forming and refining mental models is crucial and frequently unrecognized; the translation to (from?) science is obvious.

The related treatise on this topic I’m always recommending is Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations: we make imaginary things, they talk back and surprise us, we reimagine them.

@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Pickering’s /The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science/¹ is along similar lines, using the example of the bubble chamber (invented because Glaser wanted to do lab-top science, but ended up inventing a symbol of Big Science) and Hamilton’s quaternions (he was trying to solve a completely different problem).

¹ goodreads.com/book/show/556449

GoodreadsThe Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and ScienceThis ambitious book by one of the most original and pro…

@marick @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
Nice writeup, lovely example! Brings this passage to mind:

“Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.”

“On the other hand, once you have made your choices…then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back!”

worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2

@inthehands @marick @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus I’ve always thought of us as creating rules and then seeing what games we can play with those rules. Sometimes there’s a connection to “real life” and sometimes it’s just fun.

@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Since you said that nice thing, may I present my sole academic sociology publication: “Agile Software Development: A Manglish Way of Working”¹, in a followup book collection: /The Mangle IN Practice/² (2009).

¹user.fm/files/v2-21dcabb6abbfd
²dukeupress.edu/the-mangle-in-p

@marick @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus
“The Mangle of Practice” and its subsequent line of thought (including your essay) are all new to me. Thanks for the introduction!

@marick
That sounds quite interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!