Some European languages have a word for "science". Some have a word for "Wissenschaft". I'm not aware of any language that has separate words for both concepts. Confusion ensues when "science" inevitably gets translated to "Wissenschaft", or the other way around.

Science is centered around the scientific method. A naive understanding of it can lead to an excessive focus on producing disconnected factoids called results. Wissenschaft has different failure modes, but because you are supposed to study your chosen topic systematically by any means necessary, you have to think more about what you are trying to achieve and how. For example, whether you want to produce results, explanations, case studies, models, predictions, or systems.

The literature tends to be better when people see results as intermediate steps they can build on, rather than as primary goals.

> This maybe didn't exist at the time of writing of this blog post. But this is not super difficult now a days- though it does take some time. You can use services like connectedpapers.com which will build out graphs of references and will at a glance tell you which papers are sited more. You can find the more reliable stuff .. ie the "node papers".

True, but the aim isn't really in finding which ones are cited the most, although it does help you in the ordeal. In a sense those tools help having a macro understanding, but are very prone to an initial seed bias. It is difficult to get out of a closed sub-section of the field. This is especially the case in technical papers, which often fail to address surrounding issues. These issues might still be technical, just not within the grasp of that particular sub-group of authors.

In the end, like you said, it is very time consuming. You do need to go through each one individually and build an understanding and intuition for what to look for, and how to get out of those "cycles" for a deeper understanding. And you really are better off reading them yourself.

> The review paper is the traditional way. It's usually okay.. but very biased towards the author's background. > > If it's very "fresh of the press" stuff then you judge it based on the journal's reputation and hope the reviews did their jobs. You will have more garbage to wade through. To me recent is generally bad...

Some guidelines like PRISMA, or the various assessments of self-bias are generally good indicators the author cared. Having sections like these will help you getting the aforementioned intuition for what else to look through, given you have a recognition from the source itself of their bias (your own assessment may be biased, so some ground truth is good). Plus really thorough description of their methods for gathering the information (databases, queries, and themes they spent time on).

Agreed recent is generally bad, you need to allow some time for things to have a chance to get looked at.

This is sad for people that are not related to science. Since platonic ideal science is axiomatically infallible, by agreed definition (as is platonic free market and other similar models), it is assumed that anyone from outside the academia who is questioning whatever currently published results are is a quack, a luddite and has a psychosis. It does not matter how sus the process leading to those results is, only scientists are allowed to call out scientists

I didn't finish my PhD, but when I was doing it, it was upsetting how easy it was to come up with a conclusion first, and then find a paper to support it.

It was like finding out Santa Claus wasn't real to me.

Creating metrics for code quality is about as reliable as doing it for essay quality

> The "garbage pile" of papers is not a new problem. It's been plaguing the science world for quite a long time. And it's only going to get worse because the metric and the target are the same (Goodhart's Law).

I don't think this observation is valid. Papers are not expected to be infallible truth-makers. They are literally a somewhat standardized way for anyone to address a community of their peers and say "hey guys, check out this neat thing I noticed".

Papers are subject to a review because of editorial bars from each publication (that is, you can't just write a few sentences with a crayon and expect it to be published) and the paper should not just clone whatever people already wrote before. Other than this, unless you are committing academic fraud, you can still post something you found your conclusions were off or you missed something.

The "garbage pile" of papers is not a problem, they are deliverables, representing completed work for which people have been payed.

If we stop paying for those "garbages", the problem might disappear. But what about the researchers or scientists who depend on that funding to live?

What needs to change is the very way academic work is organized, but nothing comes for free.

Oh come on. They're obviously using the word "science" in this context as a shorthand for the institutions and processes we've set up to do research. Mostly because that's too many words for a title and nobody has come up with a catchy name that's not politically coded. It's also pretty normal usage of the word out in the wild.

We can't come up with anything better because we're using a term that would include anything better we come up with. There are religious studies in science! And if you suddenly had most of discoveries from revelation, that'd still be part of some old or new scientific discipline. So you're mostly amazed by your own vocabulary papering over all the nonsense it includes

Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.

Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.

So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"

Think about what science offers corporal hudson.