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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I recently got more of an appreciation for the difficulty of material sciences because I was watching a YouTube channel of a chemist trying to make purple gold (a gold and aluminum alloy). https://youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI?si=DDwlYOfvMRViAWSk (warning: the video creator has some annoying conversational ticks, turns out of you want oddly detailed science videos you might not get the most charismatic presenters).

A good portion of the video is him trying to read and understand a paper and figure out what he should be doing for his process. But by the end of the video I think his video is a better presentation of what you need to make purple gold than the academic paper written on the topic.

This makes me think that the format of scientific papers is a bit outdated. I wonder how many questions in material sciences could be resolved by scientists just recording and talking through their experiments.

I know videos are sometimes now included with papers. I hope that trend continues.

Yeah, that sorta work is absolutely wonderful; while I find AppliedScience one of the easier people to watch, NileRed is a blast, and there's a small army of amateur scientists and researchers and builders. I've also definitely got a lot of sympathy for the 'science is hard' perspective, where even clear-cut stuff still depends on a lot of hard-to-define knowledge: the field as a whole has a lot of chicken-sexing. It's not even the difficulty distinguishing between replication failures because of those sort of problems, and where it's just made up, that gets me.

It's that there's often cases of clear jumping-up-and-down-admitted bad behavior with seemingly little serious personal impact, and only rare opportunity for actions within the existing and tremendously well-funded system to point it hidden bad behavior. Unfortunately, I don't think video (or prediction markets, as presented elsewhere in this thread) can really help with those issues.

This makes me think that the format of scientific papers is a bit outdated. I wonder how many questions in material sciences could be resolved by scientists just recording and talking through their experiments.

What makes you think it is outdated rather than having always required auxiliary books and papers to describe the processes involved?

There are a large amount of books by the name of "formulary" out of copyright that solve this very issue, so I think it is more that the format was never really meant to do that.

The life sciences have the Journal of Visualized Experiments. The problem is that most protocols have a plethora of minor details to be tweaked, so getting a protocol from the literature is often more of a first step than 'plug and play.'

I agree that formalized Scienceâ„¢ has really not caught up to technological possibilities.

Pictures? Diagrams? How quaint.

The closest to taking full advantage is the ML community, useful and novel technical work takes place in Discord servers by people with anime avatars, and you'll learn more from watching a v-tuber tweak hyperparameters and debug on a live stream than you will from the average textbook.

Before I even clicked, I knew this would either be NileRed or Action Lab 🤣

I've actually watched a ton of Action Lab as well. Damn that describes him as well.

I think I enjoy watching action lab a little more since its a bit more scripted and end result oriented. But I learn more about the process of science with NileRed videos.

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