| ▲ | jegp 5 hours ago |
| TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. |
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| ▲ | gradus_ad 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| What's the equivalent of closed source? |
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| ▲ | Matumio 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Like if CERN published the discovery of the Higgs boson with 99.9997% certainty, but refusing to tell you how they calculated that number, or what equipment they used and how they calibrated it, in order to prevent other labs from copying their methods. Or like a machine learning lab claiming SOTA on a benchmark, beating a well-known method that they re-implemented, possibly with bugs, on their private dataset, for millions of compute. But you don't get the source to check, and they don't release any intermediate results or ablation experiments. Aka, from the outside you can't distinguish it from corporate marketing. | |
| ▲ | random3 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s research happening privately without publishing, usually going into products | |
| ▲ | jegp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Equivalent? In the analogy of the math or physics results it would be a mental model in someone's brain that you can't access or verify. You just hope it's true | | |
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| ▲ | jibal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You argue that open software is science, which is not at all the same as claiming that science is software. ("is" in this context is not equivalence -- "a poodle is a dog" != "a dog is a poodle".) |
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| ▲ | jegp 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree the post is muddy about whether the relationship is bijective (equivalent, poodle=dog) or injective (onto, poodle is a dog).
I make it slightly more precise in the statement "I posit that open source software is a necessary condition if we are to science in a computerized world". That's where the "is" comes from in the title. Throughout history, this definitely has not been the case. I'm arguing that's changing. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not just "muddy", it's thoroughly inconsistent and impenetrable (which probably has a lot to do with why there is so little engagement here). You say "TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software" which is radically different from your "slightly more precise" statement. I won't put any more time into this ... good luck in figuring out what it is you really want to claim and presenting a coherent and cogent argument for it. | | |
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