> No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge
what about one with a falsified result?
fwiw I think convexity and understanding are relatively orthogonal, but how could one employ the former without the latter? However the author's position seems to be more that gaming systems works better than exploring their contexts. Sometimes you might make more money in less time, but the money is all you'll get out of it. In practice, maybe understanding and convex payoff functions are both useful at different scales.
Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data. Experiments that Aristotle performed to demonstrate classical elemental theory are still valid and useful, his incorrect interpretation of the underlying mechanisms notwithstanding
> Falsification is something that you do to hypotheses, not data.
Nonsense. Falsification of data happens all the time. But more importantly, falsification as applied to hypotheses and falsification as applied to data are two completely different concepts.
Falsification in the sense "we tried this, and got unexpected results, disconfirming our hypothesis" is something you do to hypotheses. This is Popperian falsification.
In the sense of what happens to data, falsification is "we tried this, and got data that disconfirmed our hypothesis. But instead of recording that data, we recorded spurious data which confirms our hypothesis". (Or, of course, "we didn't try anything, but here are some numbers that we feel reflect what would have happened if we had".) This is falsification in the same sense you'd see it applied to, say, accounting records.
Technically that is fallacious - a lie doesn't make the claim false it not being true does. Rarely frauds can be accidentally accurate.
It has a bit of a meta role I suppose - a system must be robust enough with replication that it shouldn't matter. Knowing bad actors are about can promote better verification practices than a blind trust.
Sure he did. He didn't follow the modern Bacon/Popper empirical method with testable hypotheses, but he still performed experiments and drew conclusions based on what he saw.
All beside the point: his observations are not invalid, his conclusions are
Productivity is a poor metric for actually improving your quality of life, solving hard problems, or doing much of anything other than running in circles at speed.
Brouwer's career suffered as a consequence of his disagreements with Hilbert.
EDIT (with links to the political aspect):
Letters written more about the politics of publishing than the math itself are referenced in a book called "The War of the Frogs and the Mice"
(PDF) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224... (see bottom of pg 9 as displayed for the letter Brouwer wrote to Hilbert's wife)
>In the later 1920s, Brouwer became involved in a public and demeaning controversy with Hilbert over editorial policy at Mathematische Annalen,
It doesn't read like the political fights were about math. Although Hilbert disagreed with Brouwer, it sounds like the falling out was precipitated by arguing over something subjective.
I've come to think of machine learning as an engineering approach for building more scalable statistical systems. Computational neuroscience seems like it does more math modeling for understanding of brain function, but still might use machine learning methods as part of its research.
Also, good is subjective, and we don't have wetware in our engineering toolchain anyway. Loosely coupled metaphors seem to be popular and effective due to ambiguities like this.
The jobs/companies are genuinely interested in hiring people with disabilities. I am working on adding more copy to the website to make it more clearer.
Meaning is a process of its own creation, not a measuring stick. Often when people speak of meaning as though it were quantitative, they usually are referring to how much they help other people. Meaning is also interactive, it rarely happens in total isolation. If everyone around is constantly conflating meaning with monetary success, it's easy to feel confused and despair. Don't blame money, but rather look for bits of beauty in life and share them with people you care for. At least that's what seems to work for me
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engine-not-camera