A lot of what this talks about can be summed up as trying to root out confirmation bias and personal blind spots.
Since humans make science, dealing constructively with human tendencies is a necessary part of science, though it's one we tend to not really address directly. We act like the process matters and equipment matters but we give short shrift to the people, their character, how aware they are of their own bad habits, what best practices counter such human tendencies, etc.
But this quote is about a kind of systemic issue, about scarcity of resources and about broken bureaucratic processes:
In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen to light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying—possibly—the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
And I am reminded of how in the early days, scientist often seemed to be wealthy or eccentric individuals who found some way to buy or create what they needed on their own rather than cogs in a bigger science machine. And we should try to recreate more of that, which is part of why I liked that "I baked ancient bread!" story so much:
Honestly it reminds me of the Enlightenment, when most research scientists and mathematicians were bored rich guys who were looking to impress other bored rich guys.
Since humans make science, dealing constructively with human tendencies is a necessary part of science, though it's one we tend to not really address directly. We act like the process matters and equipment matters but we give short shrift to the people, their character, how aware they are of their own bad habits, what best practices counter such human tendencies, etc.
But this quote is about a kind of systemic issue, about scarcity of resources and about broken bureaucratic processes:
In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen to light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying—possibly—the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
And I am reminded of how in the early days, scientist often seemed to be wealthy or eccentric individuals who found some way to buy or create what they needed on their own rather than cogs in a bigger science machine. And we should try to recreate more of that, which is part of why I liked that "I baked ancient bread!" story so much:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24914460
My "top level" comment at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24915559
And someone replied to one of my remarks thusly:
Honestly it reminds me of the Enlightenment, when most research scientists and mathematicians were bored rich guys who were looking to impress other bored rich guys.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24920287