> There is a simple test the public can use for any scientific model: does it make accurate predictions, or not? You don't need to understand how a model works to test that.

It's quite obvious from your position on this matter that you're not a practicing scientist, so it's very unfortunate that your position is so assertive, as it's mostly wrong.

To understand the predictions, as it were, you do have to understand the experiments; if you don't, you have no way of knowing if the predictions actually match the outcomes. Most publications involve some form of hypothesis-prediction-experiment-result profile, and it is the training and expertise (and corroboration by other experiments, and time) that help determine which of those papers establish new science, and which ones go out with last week's trash. The findings in these areas are seldom accessible until the field is very advanced and/or in practical use, as with the example of GPS you gave elsewhere.

> The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way. There is no mechanism for having an independent record that the public can access of predictions vs. reality.

There is; it's called a textbook.

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pdonis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It's quite obvious from your position on this matter that you're not a practicing scientist

You're correct, I'm not. But I'm also not scientifically ignorant. For example, I actually do understand how GPS works, because I've read and understood technical treatments of the subject. But I also know that I don't have to have any of that knowledge to know that my smartphone can use GPS to tell me where I am accurately.

In other words, it's quite obvious from your position that you haven't actually thought through what the test I described actually means.

> To understand the predictions, as it were, you do have to understand the experiments; if you don't, you have no way of knowing if the predictions actually match the outcomes.

Sure you do. See my examples of GPS and astronomers' predictions of comet trajectories downthread in response to MengerSponge.

It's true that for predictions of things that the general public doesn't actually have to care about, often it's not really possible to check them without a fairly detailed knowledge of the subject. But those predictions aren't the kind I'm talking about--because they're about things the general public doesn't actually have to care about.

> There is; it's called a textbook.

Textbooks aren't independent. They're written by scientists.

I'm talking about a record that's independent of scientists. For example, being able to verify that GPS works by seeing that your smartphone shows you where you are accurately.

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jiggawatts 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

An example of this ideal can go horribly wrong is CERN.

There's one apparatus (of each type) and each "experiment" ends up with its own team. Each team develops their own terminology, publishes in one set of papers, and the peer reviews are by... themselves.

I don't work at CERN, but that criticism was from someone who does.

They were complaining that they could not understand the papers published by a team down the hall from them. Not on some wildly unrelated area of science, but about the same particles they were studying in a similar manner!

If nobody else can understand the research, if nobody else can reproduce it, then it's not useful science!

Note that this isn't exactly the same as Sabine's criticism of CERN and future supercolliders, but it's related.

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cauch 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm surprised by what you say, it is not at all my experience. Are you sure you are not over-interpreting what your friend said, or that your friend's experience was not unusual?

1) People at CERN publish papers in "normal" physics journals, which do the usual peer review. Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment. There is, of course, also an internal reviewing for each collaboration, but it is to improve the quality and something totally natural and obvious if you want to have a collaboration (by definition, a collaboration is a place where people read each other work and feedback to each others). But it is totally different from "the work is only reviewed by the collaboration".

2) I've worked ~5 years in one experiment, and ~5 years in another, and I did not notice any different terminology. In both experiments, I've very rapidly met and learned the name of people of other experiments working on similar subject. I don't know any workshop or conference where the invited scientists are not from different experiment. During these events, there are a lot of exchanges.

3) What is true, and it is maybe the reason of your misunderstanding, is that you are strongly advised to not share non-cross-checked material outside of the collaboration. The goal is to avoid biasing the independent experiments: if you notice a strange phenomena that will later turn out to be a statistical fluctuation or if you use a new methodology that will later turn out to have unnoticed systematical biases, if you mention this to the other experiment, you will "contaminate" them: they may focus their research or adopt the flawed methodology. But this is only for non-cross-checked and it does not make any sense to pretend that it has a negative impact (a lot of scientists, in collaboration or not, towards all history, don't like to share their preliminary results before they acquired a good confidence that what they saw it reliable).

4) Do you have example of things that one could not understand while it was done down the hall from them? I don't recall "not being able to understand" (the point of a publication is to explain, so people care about making it understandable). I do recall "harder to understand", but it was often from people from the same collaboration, and the reason was because of they needed to use some mathematical tools I did not know and that there was not really any other way.

I'm sure there are cases where two groups end up diverging and it makes the collaboration more challenging. But I really doubt it is not something exceptional, and that everyone in the collaborations will try to mitigate.

Your comment makes me wonder to which extend the outsiders of CERN don't have plenty of crazy myths totally disconnected from the reality. I guess it is a good example why people like Hossenfelder are a problem: they feed on these myths and cultivate them.

	▲	jiggawatts 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> journals, which do the usual peer review. They don't though! They farm it out to expert physicists, which in the case of CERN research almost certainly also work at CERN. > Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment. But were they from CERN? > Do you have example This was a few years ago, it was a comment here on HN, but it would be hard to dig it up without an AI reading through everything.