The Scientific Method

Inspiration from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Scientific-Method_fig2_228980756

At the risk of sounding like a neck beard, I’m a pretty big fan of the overarching steps of the scientific method as a codified means of accreteing knowledge. While our execution of this process is underwhelming (e.g. reproducibility, publish or perish mentality, the publication racket in general), it’s as foundational and self-evident a method for sensemaking as we’ve come to. The process isn’t always linear, and the rigor of each stage may wax and wane, but for our efforts to truly add up, we must:

I clearly have my hangups with this (otherwise I wouldn’t be the world’s worst graduate student), but the largest breakdowns I’ve seen competent modelers manage to bridge include:

  1. The observation gap: We have several lifetimes worth of data and information at there fingertips but only a short window over which to observe the world, and that observation is heavily disincentivize/deemphasized within our current structure. A wise man once told me that you make the time for what you want, and open source tech can help bridge the capital divide: My attempt at a contribution - SFM from Drone
  2. Transform incremental progress into novel insight: developing novel results, particularly in application forward domains, is very hard. Part of that reason is that they lack a reproducible toolset: My attempt at a contribution - this atlas. This is compounded because there are a lot of very smart humans on this planet, and if you take the time to research and read you’ll find there’s not a lot that has changed through the cycles. So many of the “truths” are polarized by the lenses selected in seperating the immediate concerns of the wicked problem you’re detangling.