Elon Musk's 'Scientific Method' (rollingstone.com)

From a new wide-ranging interview of Elon Musk: An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific," Musk says. "There's this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that's really quite effective for figuring out the truth." The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here's how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.

Comments

OK so riddle me this:

[xevioso]

What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probability of truths would lead someone to conclude that drilling lots of tunnels without governmental oversight under major metropolitan areas is something that will reduce traffic, be good for the environment, etc?.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[orlanz]

People need to get from point A to B.
Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.
They need to traverse the space between.
Ground level is at a premium.
Above ground is too visible for peopleâ(TM)s tastes.
Air requires a lot of coordination.

So go below ground?

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Rei]

What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probabilities of truths would lead someone to conclude that anyone was talking about "drilling" tunnels without government permission?

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the environmental damage of making surface roads, the dirt runoff, disrupting wildlife migration, the pollution of the surface vehicles?

Subsurface can be quite superior if done correctly.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

The boring company is your go-to, and not the hyperloop boondoggle?

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting riddle. I like riddles more than smug Musk statements.
 
1. Propose something crazy.
2. Flaunt it in the most flamboyant way possible.
3. Demand lots of investor money.
4. Demand even more government money.
5. ?????
6. Success!

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[thinkwaitfast]

inefficient and congested.

I see railroad tracks all over.rarely see trains, maybe a few per day (~1 every 6 hours). I've read a number of papers and studies addressing just this. Solutions are rather involved and expensive, but not more so than digging underground tunnels,

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because government oversight is always a good thing...

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Safety Cap]

government oversight

I bet you miss the good old days, huh?

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot 'take massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs'.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Mr307]

Perfect response to the tunnel nonsense thanks.

Would trains not be the 'perfect' place to automate nearly the whole process? Seems like there are pretty well defined paths and controls at every stage of the operation already. Compared to roads, rails seem super defined and 'easy' for robotic expert systems to handle.

I wonder how high we could get the rail utilization if it was all RoboTrains

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[bobbied]

What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probability of truths would lead someone to conclude that drilling lots of tunnels without governmental oversight under major metropolitan areas is something that will reduce traffic, be good for the environment, etc?.

He's not building a tunnel that will leave his property, I'm nearly 100% sure of this.

This is another "Glomar Explorer" cover story (we are planning to mine the sea floor) for some black project that some three lettered organization realizes cannot be hidden from view. The Glomar Explorer really was built and used to raise a Russian nuclear sub. The tunnel to the airport story is to explain why some big holes are being dug on Space-X property. It's a cover story...

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

The tunnel isn't for you. It's for Elon and other multi-millionaires. Everything else he said was a calculated lie to get public approval. Once the tunnel is completed he will announced mass tunnels are not feasible and then he and his rich friends will use that tunnel.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

People need to get from point A to B.
Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.

Cull the heard and move on. Set up an international lottery and if you win you get lots of money but you have to spend it all in 30 days at which time you die.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Ichijo]

People need to get from point A to B. Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.

Non sequitur. The fact that current modes of travel are congested does not prove that people need to get from A to B:

Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).

What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.

A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution--because burgers are a highly-valued public good--is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers--eventually millions a day--to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers. The competing food markets crater, because who would pay $2/lb for apples when you can get as many free burgers as you want (although maybe you have to wait in a 30-minute line). Public health goes to hell, because everybody's eating six burgers a day. And yet, everybody likes their free burgers and the Hamburger Department is an untouchable political powerhouse. Proposals for a 10-cent hamburger fee to cover the huge costs of hamburger provision get shot down by public outrage.

What's the problem here? The problem is that food is indeed a necessity, and yes, people seem to like McDonald's hamburgers--but the fact that people will take free burgers does not prove that they are "highly valued" by the market. We are not seeing actual demand for burgers. We are seeing induced demand for a good which is being provided at artificially low prices.

But for some reason, replace hamburgers with roads and everybody goes nuts.

In short, the fact that a new lane or road immediately fills up with traffic does not "prove" that there was a high demand for that road--it proves that people will use way too much of something that's free.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I see railroad tracks all over.rarely see trains, maybe a few per day

Yes exactly, your backyard is no different than a port in a large city, there is no freight movement, no commuters, no need for transportation. There is plenty of open space everywhere in big cities so why would they need to dig or make overpasses?

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[eepok]

I will question the validity of the statement "Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested". Consider these modes that exist today:

- Walking, Bicycling (Transportation on demand, short distance, lowest cost)
- Bus, Bus Rapid Transit (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, short to medium distance, low cost per person)
- Commuter Rail, Passenger Rail (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, medium to long distance, medium cost per person)
- Carpool, Vanpool (Transportation by negotiated and variable routes and schedules, short to long distance, variable cost based on people per vehicle)
- Driving alone (Transportation on demand, short to long distance, high cost per person)

The only thing that's truly congested are roads/freeways (from personal automobiles) and rail lines (from freight and passenger/commuter rail having to share the same rails). Getting more people on buses for shorter trips would ease congestion on the roads which would make bus trips more convenient. Rail could be expanded to get passenger/commuter services off of freight lines, but as evidenced in California, the second you say you're going to build rail, speculators come buy up land and wait for their paydays.

Thus, current modes are not inefficient and congested. One particular mode (driving alone) is /congesting/ and the other modes are affected by said congestion. Get more people out of their cars and Musk's Boring Company disappears in a puff logic.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[thejeffwhite]

No, because trains are open-air, i.e., not in a vacuum, which is required to produce the pneumatic tube effect. That leads us back to orlanz's response, where we decide that above-ground pneumatic tubes are undesirable. I would offer that they're undesirable not only because they're unsightly but also because they take up space and will cause other kinds of pollution (light, sound, air, etc). Not to mention logistics of terrorism prevention... it's far better that a bomb on the Hyperloop go off underground than above (not that we want it to go off at all).

I agree with your other points though. Remember that we got here because Edison's electric company replaced Rockefeller's kerosene lamps, and Ford's automobile started to replace Rockefeller's trains. At the time there was a plan to connect all of America via passenger trolleys; you could ride from LA to NY, even though it would take you a couple weeks or so. So Rockefeller got Ford to replace his clean burning ethanol fuel with Rockefeller's own kerosene waste product: gasoline, and the nationwide trolley system was scrapped in favor of a highway system for cars. Now we're coming full circle with an electric powered train that can take passengers from LA to NY, in minutes not days.

The tunnel is hardly nonsense. Apart from passenger trains, it will become an effective way to move shipping containers and other large items quickly. Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way. We could also reduce the number of trucks on the road by shipping their contents via pneumatic tube.
There aren't a lot of trains in action because of several reasons. Not all goods that need to be shipped, or people waiting to receive them, can wait the duration of a cross-country train trip. Trains also need a lot more buffering to manage traffic, as they need more time/space to speed up and slow down. The system simply can't accommodate the level of traffic that an invention like the Hyperloop would fill.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Khyber]

"Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested."

You obviously do not live in the LA Metro area or Inland Empire. The Metrolink trains are very under-utilized. Every time I see one pass, I can usually count on one hand the amount of heads I see in 5 train cars total.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Tuidjy]

I know you are not serious, and I know you pay little attention to details. But how on Earth do you plan on enforcing this?

The way to realistically do this is not to have a lottery, but just to kill those least likely to be able to defend themselves, or at least those who have no one to defend them, and cannot afford to hire anyone to do so.

So basically, to do it right, the rich have to kill the poor. But it is too early to do it efficiently and risk free. First, drone technology has to advance some more, and gun owners have to be reduced, through gun confiscation, opiate use, drought and famines, etc. Judging from current news, things are progressing along nicely. In most areas of the world, at least one, if not more, of these mechanisms are operating.

It's just a matter of times to see whether the people of quality can pull it off before the canaile wakes up and rises in arms.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[thinkwaitfast]

Well, computer controlled cars promise to pack (platooning) a lot more on existing roads alleviating the need to build new roads and to eliminate stoplights as packets of vehicles can be timed at intersections to miss each other.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[thinkwaitfast]

No, I was thinking near downtown seattle next to the costco.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're trying to be clever, but regardless of how he gets there, he seems to make it to Step 6 more often than most of the other assholes who usually just do steps 1-5 and float away on their golden parachute.

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[thinkwaitfast]

Last I heard, it's actually mining the seafloor now, or at least exploring.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Vacuum is very expensive. More expensive then driving an aerodynamic electric bullet train. Train tracks are cheap, tunnels are expensive even before the tunnels are air-tight.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic, people don't need much of anything, so what's your point? Plug everyone into the matrix and they would never need to move at all!

Oh, and you left out the part where the general population owns McDonald's and voted for the people in charge who decided to give free burgers out to the people who were already paying for them. And how eating hamburgers is somehow required for most people's jobs, though they have the option to wait in line themselves or have one person wait in line in place of a group of them while the others wait somewhere else. Some can even get personalized hamburger delivery, but it will cost them either money or an additional delay and may only be available in certain locations. And you may need to eat a hamburger before you can go shopping in a physical store? I'm starting to think that hamburgers and roads are entirely different things with demand that can't be equated even in the most abstract sense.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[jedidiah]

Even tunnels without the vacuum are expensive. Although real estate in our most congested urban areas is equally expensive. Once you get out into open country subways don't make sense anymore. Doesn't matter what the underlying tech is.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[jedidiah]

Bus routes are NEVER convenient. They become LESS convenient the more crowded they become. Have you actually ridden a bus ever in your life? They're all the same. Doesn't matter if it's Moscow, Madrid, or Peoria.

Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

thejeffwhite claimed:

Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way.

You're talking through your hat.

In 1965, I traveled from L.A. to Honolulu on the Matson liner Lurline. It took 5 days.

If you're talking about the amount of time it takes for a given container to be offloaded from a freighter, cleared through customs, loaded onto a semi (or a train), and driven through the gates of the port facility, in addition to travel time from Hawaii to the West Coast, you're still probably wrong. (It depends on a bunch of things, including customs clearance.) If you're talking about strictly domestic goods - pineapples, say, or Kona coffee - you're definitely wrong, because those shipments aren't subject to customs inspection.

Your larger point - the use of "hyperloop" technology as a replacement for trans-oceanic surface shipment being somehow feasible, in addition to its use for transcontinental cargo transportation is also contra-factual. There are these things called "spreading zones" in both the mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific oceans where crustal plates are separating. The magma from the mantle is quite close to the seafloor in these zones (which stretch north and south for thousands of miles) - far too close to make a hyperloop-style, airtight tunnel either practical or safe. In addition, particularly in the Pacific, there are both strike-slip and thrust faults that will cause the crust to shear catastrophically (which would neatly and disastrously sever an airtight tunnel in the process) and unpredictably, within no more than a few decades. That makes the risk to a hyperloop transportation system uninsurably high.

Such faults exist within continental borders, as well, but they largely can be avoided, with proper planning. It's still going to be problematic, for a variety of reasons, however, including acquistion of rights of passage across vast stretches of privately-owned, and city-, county-, and state-owned property to name only the first of them. (Slant-drilling precedents aside, you've got to know that lawyers are going to line up in brigades to sue over the issue, because profit. To them.)

I'm actually a fan of Elon. Tesla has thus far both proven the car-guy doomsayers wrong and sparked the general conversion of automobile manufacturing to electric vehicles that appears to be inevitable now. That's a Good Thing for everyone except fossil fuel shills. And SpaceX has completely upset the defense-contractor monopoly on launch vehicles, sparked a whole wave of private industry competition in the space launch sector, and breathed incredible new life into the prospect of large-scale space colonization and industrialization in the relatively-near future. For those things alone, future-oriented thinkers already owe him an enormous debt of gratitude - and he's clearly not even close to done, yet.

But what he's dubbed "hyperloop" technology faces geotectical, legal, financing, and insurance barriers (not to mention regulatory ones) of daunting dimensions. In fact, I'm certain that those considerations are why Elon has wisely decided to let someone else tackle actually implementing the conceptual technology he proposed.

Boring tunnels, by contrast, is a task area that's already pretty firmly taped down in all of those respects - and has been for donkey's years. Revisiting the technology involved, however, is still squarely within the wheelhouse of an innovator like Elon, and I applaud his efforts there ...

(Posting as AC so as not to undo existing upmods.)

--

Check out my novel ...

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot 'take massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs'.

That was implicit to step three... noob

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Space travel was also expensive before someone invented reusable rocket.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Ichijo]

Oh, and you left out the part where the general population owns McDonald's and voted for the people in charge who decided to give free burgers out to the people who were already paying for them.

Yes, like a timeshare!

And how eating hamburgers is somehow required for most people's jobs...

If you don't eat, your job performance will suffer, so yes, eating is pretty much required for most people's jobs.

And you may need to eat a hamburger before you can go shopping in a physical store?

I see, the only way to get to a store is to drive there.

There was a time long ago before cities started deciding that you can't live next door to a corner store, when you could easily buy a gallon of milk without carrying any form of government ID. But if you tried that today, you could be cited for driving without a license.

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Enigma2175]

He's not building a tunnel that will leave his property, I'm nearly 100% sure of this.

Obviously you didn't read the article:

"We're interrupted by Teller, Musk's chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking, the Hawthorne City Council ended an hours-long debate with a 4-to-1 vote allowing Musk to burrow his tunnel two miles into the city."

With the lag in publishing an article, he probably already has gone past the boundary of his property.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[CohibaVancouver]

Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.

Are you talking about the experience on-board the bus? Or the elapsed time?

Because if the latter, there are several bus routes here in Vancouver, Canada that are faster than driving that same route.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Jerry]

"3. Demand lots of investor money.
4. Demand even more government money.
5. ?????"

Investors are not forced to fund any project.
The government isn't forced to fund any project.
5 ????? == lots of hard work, which who think socialism is a free ride don't understand.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Space travel is still expensive. The Space Shuttlevwas designed as a reusable rocket. It failed, but due to practical things like cost. It was still invented, long before any PayPal dot.com guys ever existed.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at this another way, why are people going from A to B? Bring whatever is at B to A. No, this doesn't work for everything. But the bulk of travel is business or work. Musk should spend some time getting society to accept telecommuting. Invent a conferencing platform that works. That would benefit society more than magical tunnel.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[MoaDweeb]

Yes, regularly, and commuter train as well. With light rail coming soon-ish.

Nice double decker buses and comfortable train carriages for all, however this is subsidised (50%) by local government property rates i.e. taxes.
And with better vehicles, dedicated bus lanes, quicker train schedules more and more people are using public transport.

Then again long term investment in such infrastructure is probably anathema to many readers here and I am just another dirty, filthy pinko thinking that cheap urban transport is a social good.

Not everyone gets a free car park where they work or can afford to run a car.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[kaatochacha]

That's because LA's mass transit doesn't connect at all well. I have a job that until recently took TWO HOURS to drive to.
Mass transit, via Metrolink, would have gotten me 80% of the way there in only 1 hour.
The other 20%? a 1.5 hour bus ride followed by a ten minute train ride again.
And, as none of these were coordinated, each step needed at least 20 minutes between.
So my entire transit was something like three plus hours

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Smidge204]

Maybe you're just not there when the trains are? It typically takes a train all of 30 seconds to pass by. Do you really sit and stare at the tracks for 6 hours and keep count?

Maybe the tracks you DO manage to keep a constant eye on are not along major commuter corridors. In order for trains to be useful, they need to have endpoints at or near places people and things need to be. A lot of tracks (especially in urban areas) were build to support specific industries or functions that might no longer exist, or are used far less frequently.

If it's a particularly long length of track, then traffic might be restricted because trains can only run so close together, and two trains can't go in opposite directions on the same track at the same time unless there's room for a side track to let them pass each other.

(I'm sure you'll reply to this with some of these "papers and studies" you mentioned which probably say some very similar things...)
=Smidge=

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the deal with the probabilities in Musk's "physics is a scientific method" nonsense?

If we are trying something new how would we even have a probability of it being correct? Isn't that point of experimentation - to figure it out?

I think he has watched too many sci fi flicks.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it is possible to say that scientist X has a lot of crack pot ideas and so far he has been right Y% of the time so probability that the next theory is correct is only Y% because of his personal track record.

That doesn't seem useful in a field where most people are wrong most of the time and we need those unlikely brilliant sparks to move forward. Even if they come from someone who has been wrong 99% of the time while searching for the answer. It's always the last place you look...

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Immerman]

Unfortunately, that only works if we completely eliminate human drivers, which is going to be an *extremely* hard sell. For starters, we probably need to be approaching 100% adoption of fully autonomous vehicles before there's even a chance of banning human drivers.

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[bobbied]

Glomar explorer was sold, converted to a Oil Drilling rig, used for about 15 years and scrapped.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[angel'o'sphere]

There are plenty of "robot trains" already.
Some of the Paris Metro are, I believe in Toulouse all are, and in Bilbao I think they also are all robotic (not sure, a bit to long that I was there).

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[hackwrench]

Yes it does matter what the underlying tech is. Tech drives down costs.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[hackwrench]

Hamburgers aren't the only food available, and there are plenty of trees with food on them, and hunting and personal agriculture. All is one and one is all. The Elric brothers eat the ants on the island.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Obfuscant]

Are you talking about the experience on-board the bus? Or the elapsed time?

Both.

Because if the latter, there are several bus routes here in Vancouver, Canada that are faster than driving that same route.

They cannot be, since buses by definition must make stops at places other than stop signs and traffic lights. Each stop takes time. A car going the same route does not make those stops. Ergo, a car can go the same route faster than a bus. In terms of math: A +xB > A for all B,x > 0. For the bus to be faster it must make fewer than zero stops or the average stop time must be less than 0. Both are physically impossible. The best the bus can do is break even when there are 0 stops.

But you've forgotten to include the wait time for that bus before you can get on it. If a bus comes just once an hour, then on average you will spend 30 minutes waiting for the bus to come by. My commute to work is 10 minutes by car, going a shorter route and without stopping every block or so to pick up or disgorge passengers. My commute by car will always be faster than taking the bus. Even assuming the same route and zero wait time, I do not stop to pick people up or drop them off, so my commute will still always be faster by car.

In fact, it takes about three minutes to walk to the closest bus stop, and two minutes from the closest stop to work. The bus would have to make the same trip I make in my car in just five minutes instead of the ten it takes me for it to break even. To do that, the bus would have to average 60MPH on city streets, when I manage 30MPH.

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Obfuscant]

"We're interrupted by Teller, Musk's chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking,

It's a shame he changed jobs. He and Penn were very good together. Did he slip Musk a note or text him? But then, Penn was good by himself, back when he played Spicoli. Dude.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Khyber]

Your mistake is getting into LA and expecting to go anywhere quickly via vehicle.

Ever hear the song "Nobody Walks in L.A." or "Driving in the Metroplex" (John Mammoser parody of "Living in America"?)

If not, perhaps you should. They pretty much highlight why you aren't going anywhere in a vehicle in Los Angeles.

The 4 hour Dearly Departed tour is that long precisely because of traffic and parking restrictions in LA. You can walk the entire route in about an hour and a half.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the initial "observations" are flawed here. It's not an observation but more of a conclusion, so a lot of steps have already been skipped. "People need to go from A to B, so they cause congestion". A more correct set of observations might be:

People need to get from A to B.
There is congestion on existing modes of transportation.

Now, you can think about how you want to solve this. Perhaps we address the "need". Bring whatever is at B to A. Perhaps we make it some that people at A don't need to commute to B (like telecommuting). Perhaps inventing a new mode of transport is a solution. Perhaps we fix an existing mode. You can't draw conclusions from your observations that would rule out solutions.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[donaldm]

In Sydney Australia (population about 4 million) and in most of the major cities we do have bus lanes which predominately follow the major roads however normal drivers are banned from these lanes except in an emergency or turning left (we drive on the left-hand side) otherwise you risk a fine. In addition, some bus lanes have corridors which can bypass more potentially congested roads. So yes a bus can get to a particular destination faster than cars can even though it may have to stop every two to three kilometers to pick up and set down passengers.

We also have what is called transit lanes such as T2 (one or more passengers) and T3 (two or more passengers) which allows cars that meet the appropriate criteria to use at certain times of the day. In addition, we have clearways where no one is allowed to park at certain times of the day. It's not perfect but it does improve the traffic flow.

We also have a train system (underground through the city center) that is not as elaborate as cities like New York, London, Paris, etc but I have found that it is far cheaper, faster and less stress full than taking a car if I wish to travel to any major city centers.

Of course, we also have expressways and toll roads although it is very galling when you have had a toll free expressway for years and then the government decides to upgrade (debatable) it and then slap on a toll. Then they wonder why commuters bypass it by doing what is commonly called "rat running" which is a means of avoiding the toll road by driving through suburban streets.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[plopez]

Check the price tag on the F35 lately?

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[hackwrench]

And how well does it protect people and what new features does it have?

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[plopez]

or vagrancy

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[freudigst]

And the government is riddled with morons, especially in the modern day.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[freudigst]

Tech drives down costs.

Not when it is completely lacking in practicality.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. Near my house is a rail line I thought was abandoned. Nope it's just seldom used but it is used by a few industrial concerns that each only need it to bring in and out just a few rail cars a month. You can watch that track for days with no activity observed, but evidently the original cost of the line has long since been paid for even with this minimal but specialized traffic.

Meanwhile a mile to the west is the mainline which between freight, Amtrak and commuter rail rarely goes 10 minutes without a train going by in one direction or the other.

Re:OK so riddle me this:

[Rei]

My favorite part of the article (which also mentions Teller) is this one:

When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings – Kimbal and Tosca – stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, "I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all three kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, 'I can be company.'" He pauses while a movie's worth of images seem to flicker through his mind.

He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, "It was not a good idea."

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ – "brilliant at engineering, brilliant" – and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer's qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining –at times so much that he claims he couldn't close his safe.

___

But there was another side to Musk's father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. "He was such a terrible human being," Musk shares. "You have no idea." His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesn't go into specifics. "My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil," he says. "He will plan evil."

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

"My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young." (Errol countered via email that he only "smacked" Elon once, "on the bottom.")

Elon's eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. "You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um..."

There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can't bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. "It's so terrible, you can't believe it."

The tears run silently down his face. "I can't remember the last time I cried." He turns to Teller to confirm this. "You've never seen me cry."

"No," Teller says. "I've never seen you cry."

The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Seriously, that's like the backstory of a supervillain.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I see, the only way to get to a store is to drive there.

You see, there are these places outside of cities. And, shocking as it may be, people live there.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Obfuscant]

In Sydney Australia (population about 4 million) and in most of the major cities we do have bus lanes

Thus not the same route. A special route for buses alone. Yes, if you don't follow the same route the bus can beat the car. If they go the same route, then the bus cannot beat the car.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[minstrelmike]

Tech drives down costs.

Not when it is completely lacking in practicality.

Practicality: assume an infinitely fast city bus. How much faster does it get from one side of the city to the other with a normally full complement of passengers embarking and disembarking?

If a town is 8 hours away driving time, it takes the same amount of time to drive as it does to fly and get door to door (getting thru security and dealing with additional ground transportation.

Hyperloops might be good as replacements for long distance buses and trains, but not inner city stuff, and even then, it's only going to/from one point in a town which requires taxis, busses, etc, and the density could be an issue if the route is popular.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[CohibaVancouver]

Thus not the same route. A special route for buses alone. Yes, if you don't follow the same route the bus can beat the car. If they go the same route, then the bus cannot beat the car.

The original thesis made no mention of the route:

Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.

Plainly not true in many cities with dedicated bus lanes. You can 'fight traffic' all you want at a snail's pace while the bus merrily zooms by right next to you in the bus / carpool lane.

Obviously with bus and a car sitting in the same gridlock the car is faster

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

They cannot be, since buses by definition must make stops at places other than stop signs and traffic lights. Each stop takes time. A car going the same route does not make those stops.

Busses can have dedicated lanes, that cars can't use, in heavy traffic this can make all the difference. They are sometimes also allowed to take routes that cars aren't, which can also save time on the journey.

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the Pacific Rim also has huge alien monsters...

Re: OK so riddle me this:

[suutar]

for stoplights you're right. Some of the benefits of platooning can come gradually, though; as platoon-capable vehicles increase in number and find themselves in a group in the left-most lane, they can go ahead and start clustering, saving a few car lengths of empty space. Of course, until folks get used to it the later cars may get pulled over for tailgating :)

I'm not sure that's the scientific method

[Anonymous Coward]

It reeks of a frosty pith.

Re:I'm not sure that's the scientific method

[Layzej]

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific,"

Or maybe they're just not unbelievable pussies! “You know, I think I’ve come around to your way of seeing things,” the weakling said, reportedly reassessing his viewpoint to accommodate new information like an unbelievable pussy instead of doubling down on his previously held belief like a real man."

The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

We use "scientific consensus" now.

1. Ask a question.
2. Find a group of people who give the answer you want.
3. Misconstrue their statements to remove nuance and ambiguity
4. Package them all together into a "meta study"
5. Tell everyone "the science is settled".

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

You sound just like those feminists who say science is a white male conspiracy to keep oppressed people down. Only in your case, I'm guessing the oppressed "people" are big energy corporations. And I'm guessing you are only saying that because your tribe taught you that parroting certain phrases was a requirement for membership.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, shut up snowflake. Waah! Waah! Do you need someone to protect you from those mean, nasty women and their differing worldview?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations are evil and selfish, except when they sell energy (but only the good kind) and have handsome CEOs. Then they're altruistic and should always be taken at their word and never questioned. Except when they're discriminating against female engineers, during a horrible talent shortage, who they would get away with paying less while receiving the same work if they wanted to hire them (which they don't). Also they're selfish and only motivated by money. Except when they're not.

Did I get everything?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Aboroth]

More like:

1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[ClickOnThis]

You sound just like those feminists who say science is a white male conspiracy to keep oppressed people down.

Kindly cite these supposed feminists.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[gnick]

You sound just like those feminists who say science is a white male conspiracy to keep oppressed people down.

Congratulations on that impressive stretch; pulling gender & race from all the way in left field.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

This makes no sense whatsoever, your trolling brings dishonor to Mother Russia. Report to the gulag for reeducation, comrade.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Is this nonsense supposed to represent something intelligible? Your trolling is so bad I can't even tell what you're trying to do. Are you trying to troll right wingers, or left wingers, or are you doing one of those trolls where you act like an idiot so people correct you?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[ClickOnThis]

We use "scientific consensus" now.

1. Ask a question.
2. Find a group of people who give the answer you want.
3. Misconstrue their statements to remove nuance and ambiguity
4. Package them all together into a "meta study"
5. Tell everyone "the science is settled".

More like:

1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.

Wrong on both. Scientific consensus is not science. Any scientist will tell you that.

Science proposes hypotheses and then proceeds to test them with experiments, observations, and analyses. A consensus, if any, occurs after such studies produce consistent conclusions. But the consensus is not the science. It is the collective opinion on the current state of knowledge.

The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

You find it mostly in post modern literary criticism. I'm not dissing feminists though. It just felt like it would hit the stupid anti-science troll harder if his shit was compared to something feminists say. Personally, barring the TERFs I've got nothing against feminists.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trying to troll right wingers, or left wingers

I'm trolling retarded ideologues who can only view politics through Euclidean spacial metaphors. Is it working?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Thanks! Anti science types piss me off. As this was obviously a right wing, climate change denying anti-science type troll, I thought the gender and race bit would add insult to injury. That's the thing with tribalists, they really hate being compared to the other tribe.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-scientism and anti-science are not the same thing, and the only tribalist I see here is the one who cares what "wing" he's arguing against.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[lgw]

I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.

Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[lgw]

The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.

There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, it looked exactly like what many in the scientific community have been doing. Ignoring data that doesn't fit their theory and then saying no new data will be accepted as the conclusion cannot be changed.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[ArhcAngel]

Outdated should have been inconvenient. Today's researchers survive by getting funding and they tend to get funding from groups with a preconceived agenda. The scientific method tends to conflict with those agendas frequently. As long as people are involved there will be deception

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Literary criticism in general is well known to be full of shit. I wouldn't take it as an authoritative source on what anyone actually thinks about anything.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[thinkwaitfast]

Science must fall

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[ClickOnThis]

While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.

Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' -- Isaac Asimov

There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.

I don't think it's fair to say that "no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results". First of all, many studies overlap with others, so some repetition of investigations does occur, and rightly. Second, it would not be wise for a scientist to submit a proposal to a granting agency that calls for an exact repetition of someone else's study. Rather, it would be better to spend money and effort trying to find whether the same conclusions hold if a different approach is taken, or better experimental techniques or instruments are developed and employed. And finally, publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.

Re: The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you are confusing science with politics.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[orgelspieler]

I see now. You were meta-trolling. Well done! Had me confused for a while, though.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the thing with tribalists, they really hate being compared to the other tribe.

I know you are but what am I?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

You think?!? +5 insightful right there bud.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Yeah, but those guys were paid by big oil to do that.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Nope, you just sound retarded. Maybe practice at home before trying that stuff out in public. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[DNS-and-BIND]

You don't know the arguments, do you? You call yourself educated? The Enlightenment legacy can be seen all around us: individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise, and on and on. All of these are bogeymen to the Left and they wish to free our society from their oppression.

The concept of "race" was birthed by the Enlightenment. Before that, there wasn't any racism, just Christians and heathens. But the white man came up with the idea there is "objective truth" and used it to oppress peoples of color. The Enlightenment's ontology, rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment.

The entire idea behind today's Left-wing thought is that there is no objective truth, only differing points of view, all equally valid. For example, there is no valid genetic basis for human intelligence, there are merely different kinds of intelligence. Native Americans do poorly at intelligence tests designed for whites, but excel at tests designed to measure storytelling intelligence. White supremacy as enabled by the Enlightenment is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower-class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds. More important, though, white supremacy is a tried-and-tested means for upper class whites to grow their wealth and power. This thought is all over the place on the Left and I am astonished that you are not familiar with it.

Truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position - or lack thereof - of persons or groups in society. Not some white male-invented "science".

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

This is some A+ level conspiracy bullshit right here. I mean, it's not original or anything, yes, I've heard it before.

This imaginary left you've invented sounds like a right frightful boogyman. You'll mostly find it in the minds of crazed right wingers rather than in objective reality. I challenge you to prove that this mindset is commonplace in any group of real, existing humans.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they'll die with their "differing worldviews" to measles, mumps, and/or rubella.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[DNS-and-BIND]

It's not imaginary - WTF? It's mainstream. It's everywhere. Reason is Eurocentric and has been used to dominate other people, so we must go away from reason in a more subjective direction.

Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question, especially the sort of rationalist worldview that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is especially true among left-leaning, postmodern, and post-structuralist thinkers.

"Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of 'subjectivity vs. objectivity' as a means of silencing oppressed peoples," the writers opined. "The idea that there is a single truth - 'the Truth' - is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain."

"This construction is a myth fand white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny," the students maintained. "The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples."

An essay you need to read to be brought up to date: Exiting the Vampire Castle.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[DNS-and-BIND]

Academic philosophers have finally found a line they're willing to hold against the discipline's social justice contingent.

They hadn't reached the line yet when bloggers started brigading against conferences where only male invitees had accepted invitations.

They hadn't reached the line yet when critical theorists derided top programs as "hostile to women" while making excuses for covering up sexual harassment in purportedly more progressive departments.

They hadn't reached the line yet when the American Philosophical Association advised professors at the University of Colorado not to criticize feminist philosophy on campus or at off-campus department events. They hadn't reached the line yet when academic "advocates" cowed prominent philosophers into writing struggle-session apologies or including phrases like "I think I am a good ally" â" in papers about fundamental metaphysics.

But now Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy with explicitly activist goals, has seemingly disavowed a paper comparing claims about racial identity to claims about gender identity, and philosophers seem to have had enough.

http://quillette.com/2017/05/09/line-sand-academic-philosophy/

1.We have compelling reasons to accept the identity claims of transgender individuals.
Transracial identification is relevantly similar or analogous to transgender identification.
The reasons commonly given for not accepting transracial identification are either not compelling or not relevant.
From 1, 2, and 3, the balance of reasons compels us to accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.
If the balance of reasons compels us to accept something, we should accept it.
From 4 and 5, we should accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.

Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir's dictum that "gender is the social meaning of sex." Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT. Tuvel's article does not just jeopardize someone's career, but entire industries.

The utter reasonableness of race self-identification highlights the insanity of gender self-identity and thus simultaneously destroys both the race industry and the gender industry. This is why the reaction was so strong, and why no argument may be permitted.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[rtb61]

A bit as missed out, a very subtle bit. How much effort should be put into converting the question into understanding. For some low risk, non actionable question, consensus is enough, for higher risk actionable question, you should be more effort into generating an understanding. Think of it like, wanting to select the most tasty peanut from a bowl of peanuts, consensus is a particularly appearance will define better taste, logically it is not true, you would have to individually test each peanut in the bowl of peanuts to make the proper scientific choice, so the effort is not worth it. This versus climate change, choosing how to manage industry and environment, in that case the risk is enormous our survival and basing that on conjecture and consensus would be nuts, every possible scientific test imaginable should be carried out to ensure the right choice are made, to prevent more damage and to correct the damage that has already occurred.

Risk assessment is an important element in applying the scientific method because you only have so much time to make decisions and some require far more focus than others. So 1.5 Assess risk (you kind of have to do it early in order to effectively decide how much effort to put into the rest of the steps).

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[donaldm]

I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.

Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.

If you look at history serious science (not pseudo-science) has been at best tolerated and worst condemned usually with loss of life since science has a tendency to find out how things actually work in the real world. This, of course, makes many religions very uncomfortable since the God of the gaps is shrinking.

You only have to look at the Theory of Evolution (not to be confused with Abiogenesis ) and Astronomy which is not to be confused with the so-called psudo science of Astrology.

Even today you have smart (I am being polite here) people who deny the evidence preferring to believe some "old" books that were purportedly written by their deity of choice but strangely all have earthbound writers and publishers.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[donaldm]

Yeah, but those guys were paid by big oil to do that.

You forgot about big tobacco and big pharma.

An interesting article on pot taxes has come to light which will upset many of the "holy than though" (sorry I find it pointless alluding to the "left' or "right"). Still, $85 million USD is not to be sneezed at especially when that money can be spent responsibly. Of course, I do think that the "don't drive when under the influence" rule still applies.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[donaldm]

Outdated should have been inconvenient. Today's researchers survive by getting funding and they tend to get funding from groups with a preconceived agenda. The scientific method tends to conflict with those agendas frequently. As long as people are involved there will be deception

Interesting article. Thanks for that.

It's very risky to pull a deception in science since peer review will eventually (if not immediately) pick this up and the people who were involved in the deception will be totally discredited. It is far more honest to put forward a hypothesis and present your findings with an appropriate methodology for peer review knowing that if your hypothesis is proven wrong then to gracefully admit and learn from it.

It is also possible that while a particular hypothesis may be wrong parts of it may have some valid points which can be expanded on or provide different trains of thought and can therefore still be used for valid citing purposes. In the case of the article, the person concerned was totally discredited and while it may have been possible that some of what he said had valid points why would any member of the Scientific and Engineering community believe him?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

er... weren't they sarcastic?

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped reading at patriarchy.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Nah, I am not going to pollute my mind with garbage you recommend, After all, look what it's done to you. No thank!

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Jesus Christ you live in a fucked up fantaasy world. It's like you're trapped in the upside-down, where good is bad and left is right. I pity you but I fear nothing can be done, the rot's gone too deep.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[DNS-and-BIND]

Exiting the Vampre Castle is an extremely influential essay, written by a leftist. It's a must-read. Even if you disagree with it, which is likely, you need to be aware of its arguments so you can counter them. Does any of this sound familiar?

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires' Castle. The Vampires' Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires' Castle is that it can look as if - and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought - that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires' Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires' Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have 'identities' recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires' Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[lgw]

Ah, I see you got modded to +5 for saying "scientists are smart". Truly brilliant insight, that.

Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.

A better system wouldn't require so much training, creativity, perseverance, prepared minds, patience, and luck.

Right now an important data point that can't be explained produces a vast array of hypotheses (sometimes a whole "ecosystem" or subfield devoted to such speculation, as is often the case in cosmology), all but one of which are discarded when new data eventually comes. Sure, that works, but a more efficient system certainly seems possible.

publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.

Eventually is a long time.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

Well shit. That might not be as dumb as I thought. In fact I agree with the basic premise: identity politics is a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of oppressed people's liberation movements. It sounds a lot like situationist thought about the self-regenerating, all-co-opting nature of The Spectacle.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[DNS-and-BIND]

And you have the nerve to say blinkered stupidity and refusal to learn are right wing, and here you are doing the exact same thing. I suppose we all learned something today about being prejudiced.

Re:The Scientific Method is outdated

[spun]

What? I was agreeing with you. Blinkered and stupid is most of humanity, political leaning has little to do with it.

#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.

#5's "refutation" seems to diminish with wealth and power. Ask anyone done in by a chorus of "yes men" afraid to challenge their meal ticket...

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[networkBoy]

True, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try... you just need to be mindful that you may be in an echo chamber and attempt to break out of it.

I have found that anyone I've worked for I have been blunt and not a yes man and it has mostly gone well for me. The two times it really didn't I was saved by being shoved out because not long after I found that said team / company had severe issues and was disbanded / closed up.

Now, there is a difference between being honest and being obstructionist and that's where a lot of people screw up. My old employer had a policy of "Disagree and commit" and it makes for an awesome workplace when management and team embrace it. Management/tech leadership gets feedback, yes's and no's and the reasoning behind them. They take this information and act based on it. If you were a "no" and the decision was to move forward anyway then you commit to seeing it through, even if you don't think it's the best idea... same the other way, if you were a "yes" and it's decided to change directions you drop it and change directions.

When done correctly and with trust it can make for a great team and stupendous levels of output, plus it builds trust even deeper between leadership and team.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah but you can easily identify the sycophants.

The optimal political process is a bit more complex. I'm finding that a lot of things make economic sense, yet raise human issues: a strictly sub-optimal path to address the complexities of political issues is often required.

Take the economies of trade, for example. Because of things like wage differential or cost of resources (e.g. is the climate better for cotton in China?), importing pants is cheaper than making them here. Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American). When the differential is big enough, you actually lose jobs by moving manufacture to America. That "big enough" is only slightly above minimum-wage today.

Okay, so what about outsourcing then?

Well... when you outsource, somebody's job goes away. It's very bad for some .01% of the population, and very good for the other 99.99%.

Here's the thing: a rising tide lifts all boats, and yet it's obviously barbaric for the folks spread across a million boats to torpedo your boat so as to lift the tide a fraction of an inch. Maybe that's net-positive in a big way; maybe it all works out for you in the end (after you abandon ship and somehow manage to get yourself a new boat); but you just lost a boat, dammit, and that puts you at huge risk and places the burden of all our success on your shoulders.

In faster transitions, lots of people's boats get sunk. So maybe, even though it's not as great for everyone else, maybe we slow down that transition. Maybe we have a stronger safety net--we all pay into it, and we still keep a large part of the profit of this new trade deal--so you don't get torpedoed so bad. We crew you on our boats so you can sleep and eat, and you at least have a secure place in life until you can get back on your feet.

Trade, technology, things that create lay-offs. I look at the hard economic facts. When I talk to unions about these things, I push back on globalism rhetoric: I tell them we need to focus on protecting labor, and that global trade and new technologies are coming and we're not going to outright halt progress. Near as I can tell, they like that: it's uncomfortable, and yet it's facing a problem head-on and taking ownership of and responsibility for the impact on working Americans. We're looking for ways to not simply hurl people into the streets, but rather to carry them securely to their next place in life.

I'm frequently surprised by what people will accept when they think you're being honest, when you won't compromise your position, and when you start incorporating their needs into your position. Politicians who waffle based on with whom they're talking seem to take a hell of a lot of flack--as do politicians who have their mind set and don't care what you think.

This is more-complex than mere science. Well, it is if you actually care about doing your job right.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[thinkwaitfast]

"Disagree and commit" works until you get blamed for the failures, especially when something fails exactly like you said it would, but were forced to agree. Luckily, keeping good notes is a life saver here.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American).

This is an incomplete analysis. When the pants are being made in the US, the minimum wage unskilled worker has a job and isn't on welfare and food stamps indefinitely. Welfare and food stamps are paid through taxes. Those taxes could instead go towards tax credits for electric cars, which would reduce pollution, which would reduce medical costs.

This is all moot though. We should eliminate the minimum wage (a tax on businesses for employing labor / creating opportunities in the US), and create a basic income funded through a progressive sales tax (a tax on businesses for mining US markets / US wealth).

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[BronsCon]

If you were forced to agree, then "disagree and commit" wasn't done correctly. You should only be forced to commit, not to agree. I mean... it's right there in the name.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[networkBoy]

You are *absolutely* correct which is why I had:

When done correctly and with trust it can make for a great team and stupendous levels of output, plus it builds trust even deeper between leadership and team.

I have seen the flipside (in fact I was the one who said "No because of Foo which will likely cause Bar and will cause Baz and if Fizz also happens then we're going to have issues"). Said manager actually did try to toss my ass under the bus for "not being clearer about my reservations". My response was the 5 page document I initially developed that was if anything over verbose.
Interestingly that manager left the company within 6 months of that kerfluffle.

In fact I believe paraphrasing Regan's "Trust but verify" into "play by the rules but keep your ass covered" is apt for any job.

I keep a "Pearl Harbor File" at home that has full documentation on everything I think may be needed. I use a portable apps install at the office to manage the live copy. The one time that there was the potential of legal action said file had my ass so neatly covered that while I still left the company and was flagged non rehirable (over my then current boss's strenuous objections) I was handed a slightly larger than normal severance package to simply go quietly into the night. My lawyer and their lawyer agreed it was best for both, my wallet agreed as well. The best part is that the line staff all knew why and I walked out of there a martyr... having already been offered employment by one of said line staff that moved to another company.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[lgw]

At (most likely) the same employer, I was nearly fired for disagreeing with my boss in the first place. "Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected. But then, that guy would yell at me for disagreeing with him, then yell at me for not raising concerns early enough.

Yeah, "disagree and commit" looks great on paper, but assholes gonna asshole.

Re: #5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, heard that line before. It's funny because managers who say that are worthless... if they don't want to hear problems, then why do they need solutions to problems they don't know about?

If the staff is already finding the problem and the solution they don't need to say anything to that kind of manager except "I need you to approve this purchase order / hiring requirement / whatever".

If he says no you need to remind him to disagree and commit.

When he says disagree and commit only flows downward, tell him you need solutions not problems.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Maxo-Texas]

Management fads are almost never done correctly.

You should have seen the way they rolled out agile at my old place.

Fixed features, fixed delivery dates.

Agile became "work 80 hours or more per week to meet targets set by management".

I also loved their implementation of CMP.
"People who write their own goals tend to meet them" became "management will write and assign your "own" goals to you". You will meet them if you want a raise. But wait... let's lay "stack ranking" over the top of that just for shits and giggles.

Every software methodology degraded to waterfall except RUP. And that wasn't because RUP was fantastic but because RUP had support from its direct upper management and the team using it got formal training and the team using it believed in RUP.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Maxo-Texas]

When you remove a person's job from the local economy, you actually remove about 7x their salary from the local economy.

Moving that job to china or destroying a job in china affects the global economy but a fraction of the amount that local economies are devastated by job loss.

And it's even more than that because when you know someone laid off, you also cut back on your spending.

As long as wages are so different, offshoring is inevitable.

If prices were allowed to drop in the 1st world, then we'd be okay. But we pay up to 50x for the same products because prices are set locally not globally. We pay $20 for a Tshirt that cost $1 to make which sells for $1.50 in china.

So the lower wages in china have greater buying power than you realize. It's only for things like automobiles and air conditioners that the world price is close to the lowest price.

Inflation is higher in 3rd world countries but their educational systems are pretty terrible so that limits their possible productivity. As their education improves and inflation slowly increases wages, things will even out.

But it's going to be a long time. And it could get really ugly. And it absolutely doesn't have to be as ugly as republicans are making it. Reasonable taxes, retraining, and protection for those who become unemployable are antithetical to republican values.

So.. probably going to be pretty ugly.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[thinkwaitfast]

Sorry, that's what I meant. The exact quote was "agree to disagree". I am the boss, do it my way. I heard this person were fired after I quit for doing similar things to others.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly free trade. When you outsource one job, you outsource a skim of every job & IP within that klad of tasks. And you abort a skim of new tasks and new-IP using those old-ones as precursors. How thick are those skim and how deep the IP ? Roll dem bones, pad're and hope daddy got lots of money. Kinda like the (lost) pine forests west of Reno . What pine forests you say its all bareass hi-desert below 4000 feet. HaHaHa! Lincolns silver mines needed timber in 1863 ... oh. Land is too dry to regenerate trees. Get the drift pad're ?

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[im_thatoneguy]

"Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected.

We operate on this philosophy. It's a good philosophy when it's embraced correctly. What it should mean is that you should be actively looking for solutions not just problems. It's useful to point out problems, but you're 10x more valuable if you can also quickly or on the spot start working alternatives.

"No, that will fail because of XYZ, but if we do UVW it will accomplish the same goal."

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[networkBoy]

Yeah, "disagree and commit" looks great on paper, but assholes gonna asshole.

And there ain't no system that can stop them. My exit was a railroad job for taking one of said assholes to HR for ethics violations. Like I said, I walked out a martyr, because while I no longer am employed there, about 50 other people are, and are no longer being abused.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just management CYA and lazy wishful thinking.

It is wishful thinking because not everyone understands every parts of the company. Often when someone spots a problem in one part of the company, the solution would need change in another part of the company which that someone did not have understanding. That is where upper management is supposed to do their job which they are too lazy to do.

So they use this "philosophy" to CYA -- when management isn't aware of a problem, they can just blame downwards when the problem caused things to break.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[angel'o'sphere]

There is actually no big difference between RUP and XP/Scrum etc.

XP and Scrum basically say: the developers should pick from RUP what helps them to deliver robust software and omit stuff they don't need.

However: formal training is basically required all the time. E.g. which university student has used a version control system in a team? Most haven't ... so they are used to commit without merging, and when they see a merge conflict they like to try "commit and overwrite"

A formal training for Scrum or other Agile methods etc. would be nice, too. As that can basically done in 2h - 3h.

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[bluefoxlucid]

If prices were allowed to drop in the 1st world, then we'd be okay. But we pay up to 50x for the same products because prices are set locally not globally. We pay $20 for a Tshirt that cost $1 to make which sells for $1.50 in china.

Actually, around half the price is domestic shipping. It's cheap to ship it (pants: 6.5 cents per pair) overseas, but trucking it from the dock to a warehouse, to a local warehouse, to a distribution center, then to a retailer? That's costly as hell.

The average cost of men and boys's cotton pants and trousers (not t-shirts; don't care to look up the trade data right now) coming from China in 2015 was $6.12, with 20,000 coming on a 40-foot shipping container imported for less than $1,300.

Be careful about what you hear about profits and prices. A lot of folks like to talk about the gross profits of things, such as hamburgers. A Wendy's franchise makes a gross profit of 50% on a hamburger, and it's really frigging high on fries and sodas. They've got like 80% gross profit margins overall. Their net operating profits are 8%, because gross profit margins don't count management overhead, lighting, building rent, property taxes, or anything that's not directly necessary in the process of making a thing. A lot of folks like to call out e.g. Comcast for having ludicrous profits on their Internet service, when they average about 11.7% net operating profits.

When you get to healthcare, the narrative changes: some healthcare suppliers have 48% net operating profits... in individual years. They average 12%-20% over 5-year spans (yes, those are high profits), with near-50%-profit years and with near-25%-loss years. The huge cash grab is, in part, because their industry is unstable as hell (the other part is because they can make a shitload of money in that industry, being that the barriers to entry are high).

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[lgw]

When the project scope is based on false assumptions, and can't possibly fly because of the problems you see (or have seen for years, and that's why the project has historically not been worth doing), when do you raise objections? Before or after your manager commits you to crunch time on that impossible schedule?

Re:#5 diminishes with wealth and power

[Anonymous Coward]

Take the economies of trade, for example. Because of things like wage differential or cost of resources (e.g. is the climate better for cotton in China?), importing pants is cheaper than making them here. Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American). When the differential is big enough, you actually lose jobs by moving manufacture to America. That "big enough" is only slightly above minimum-wage today.

Congratulations. You have fallen right into the trap of being obsessed with jobs, not incomes or making a living. But by all means, enjoy your race to the bottom where all employees gets paid peanuts. I'm sure the economy won't have any problems at all when nobody has money to buy those pants.

Wow

[Nexion]

Yeah, that really isn't the scientific method.

"Attempt to disprove the conclusion."

This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete. I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as analytic methodologies go, I think it's fair. Attempting to disprove, and failing, and assumption if done in a rigorous manner often comes to a logical conclusion barring the presence of all facts.

I wouldn't call it a scientific method necessarily, but one needs to be cautious about 'proving' a hypothesis, particularly when using duplicitous or irrelevant information, and being satisfied with it.

Re:Wow

[ClickOnThis]

Yeah, that really isn't the scientific method.

"Attempt to disprove the conclusion."

This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete.

"Attempt to disprove the conclusion" is most definitely part of the scientific method. It is the discipline of intellectual honesty that makes you ask yourself the question "Can I be wrong?"

Also, note that there is a well-established method of scientific inquiry known as "disproving the null hypothesis" that embraces this principle elegantly.

I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.

Nobody is saying that an inability to disprove is an argument for proof. Except you.

Re:Wow

[Obfuscant]

This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete.

No, that is not the scientific method. You cannot prove a hypothesis. You can only disprove the null hypothesis.

What? Let me expand on that. Let's use an old example. Galileo at one time hypothesized, based on observations and thought, that gravity should cause two objects of different masses to accelerate at the same rate and go the same distance in the same time. But clearly, dropping a feather and a bowling ball shows that this cannot be true. Ahhh, if the hypothesis was true, then there must be a reason why feathers take so long to fall. Hypothesis: air resistance. Let's design an experiment to prove this. Well, you can't actually prove that air resistance is the cause. You can only disprove the null hypothesis, which in this case is "air resistance has nothing to do with the result." That one is easy to disprove. Simply remove air from a long tube and drop the objects without air. Since the feather and bowling ball now reach the bottom at close to the same time, the null hypothesis has been disproven. Air resistance does have an effect, and we now have support for the original hypothesis. But not proof. "Close to" or "as close as we can measure" is not "the same time." If our original hypothesis is true, then there must be some other cause for the difference. For more recent, more complicated things, scientific lifetimes are spent in both hypothesizing about the remaining causes or improving measurement techniques to make the measurement error so small that "close" starts to approach "same". (And there are lots of things we learn as we start to account for what we thought was "measurement error" and really wasn't.)

More complicated systems create more interactions, and experiments must be more carefully designed. For example, not too long ago some radio astronomers were seeing signals that looked too regular to be random. They removed all known hypothesized causes other than true alien signals. Did this prove the hypothesis that they were alien signals? Sorry, no. They finally found the cause: the microwave oven in the snack area in the building next door.

But Musk is not anywhere close to the scientific process, either. His step 3 is: "3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one."

What? An axiom is defined as " a self-evident truth that requires no proof." Some dictionaries include "cannot be proven" as part of the definition, with the example "For every two points P and Q there is a unique line that contains both P and Q".

So, creating axioms from evidence is not science. Creating HYPOTHESES is science. Hypotheses are statements that require, even beg for, attempts to be disproven. Axioms are what are used to build universes, like the five axioms of Euclidean geometry. You cannot prove any of the five, they are the assumed truths. In fact, there are two other geometric systems (elliptic and hyperbolic) that are based on changing the axiom regarding parallel lines that Euclidean geometry assumes.

If Musk assumes the truth he seeks to prove, then he's failing at science.

I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.

No, it is neither lazy nor dishonest. You're trying to apply scientific method to religion, which is like comparing apples and oranges. You cannot prove God exists, and you cannot prove He does not. This puts the question well outside the scope of the scientific method. The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.

Re:Wow

[im_thatoneguy]

This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete. I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.

You're looking at the wrong aspect of testing. Yes you set a hypothesis, but you also have to actively look for "potential sources of error" when designing your experiment. If you're testing whether a ball of a greater mass will fall faster than a ball of lesser mass you need to identify what confounding variables might exist. If you drop a feather and drop a bowling ball but the feather drops slower you need to "attempt to disprove the conclusion" by rigorously soliciting potential confounding variables.

Elon's 'First Principles' is to start from physics.
"1) How many newtons does it take to put a rocket into orbit? 2) What's the average conversion ratio of kerosene -> newtons force?
3) What's the volume of that many tons of kerosene and oxygen?
4) How many kgs of aluminum would be necessary to make a tank that can hold that volume?"

With $X of Kerosene, $Y Oxygen, $Z aluminum the minimum bound price of a rocket = $(X+Y+Z) = $minPrice. If you then "attempt to disprove the conclusion" then someone experienced in rocket motors will say "there are exotic materials $U that are also necessary and will substantially impact price." Someone else experienced in air frame design will say "You need to account for carbon fiber manufacturing which costs $V per kg of carbon fiber." etc...

You aren't attempting to prove a negative, you are attempting to isolate ignored confounding variables.

Re:Wow

[Maxo-Texas]

science is not about proving or disproving.

It is about measuring and collecting data in a repeatable way.

Then it is about developing theories which fit the available data which have predictive value.

Then it is about testing if those predictions can be tested successfully.

But nothing is ever proved.

Gravity could reverse tomorrow-- and the survivors would need to find a new theory that fit the repeatable, observable data that gravity occasionally reversed.

Re:Wow

[Maxo-Texas]

Here is a better more formal writeup from the school of dragons.

Home > How to Train Your Dragon > The Scientific Method > Scientific Method Steps
Scientific Method Steps
The âscientific methodâ(TM) merely refers to a broad framework for studying and learning more about the world around us in a scientific manner. It is not so much a series of absolute, unchangeable steps as a guideline to the method that must be used when trying to reach a scientifically acceptable theory about a subject matter. Therefore, it is not possible to provide a finite number of steps or an exact procedure for following the scientific method. However, the scientific method steps detailed below describe the main steps that scientists commonly take when conducting a scientific inquiry.

Steps of the Scientific Method
Make an Observation
Scientists are naturally curious about the world. While many people may pass by a curious phenomenon without sparing much thought for it, a scientific mind will take note of it as something worth further thought and investigation.

Form a Question
After making an interesting observation, a scientific mind itches to find out more about it. This is in fact a natural phenomenon. If you have ever wondered why or how something occurs, you have been listening to the scientist in you. In the scientific method, a question converts general wonder and interest to a channelled line of thinking and inquiry.

Form a Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an informed guess as to the possible answer of the question. The hypothesis may be formed as soon as the question is posed, or it may require a great deal of background research and inquiry. The purpose of the hypothesis is not to arrive at the perfect answer to the question but to provide a direction to further scientific investigation.

Conduct an Experiment
Once a hypothesis has been formed, it must be tested. This is done by conducting a carefully designed and controlled experiment. The experiment is one of the most important steps in the scientific method, as it is used to prove a hypothesis right or wrong, and to formulate scientific theories. In order to be accepted as scientific proof for a theory, an experiment must meet certain conditions â" it must be controlled, i.e. it must test a single variable by keeping all other variables under control. The experiment must also be reproducible so that it can be tested for errors.

Analyse the Data and Draw a Conclusion
As the experiment is conducted, it is important to note down the results. In any experiment, it is necessary to conduct several trials to ensure that the results are constant. The experimenter then analyses all the data and uses it to draw a conclusion regarding the strength of the hypothesis. If the data proves the hypothesis correct, the original question is answered. On the other hand, if the data disproves the hypothesis, the scientific inquiry continues by doing research to form a new hypothesis and then conducting an experiment to test it. This process goes on until a hypothesis can be proven correct by a scientific experiment.

The whole process is collaborative and is conducted in a clearly documented manner to help other scientists who are doing research in the same field. Throughout history, there are instances where scientists have stopped their research before completing all the steps of the scientific method, only to have the inquiry taken up and solved by another scientist interested in answering the same question.

Re:Wow

[Chuck Messenger]

If something exists, then I think it is reasonable to say there is a way to prove that it exists. If we accept the idea that things can exist, which cannot be proven to exist, then what does it mean to "exist"? How does the concept of "exist" differ from the concept of "doesn't exist"?

Re:Wow

[Kjella]

The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.

He's pointing out that because science doesn't prove that horses exist some will claim that believing in unicorns is an equally valid position. Ex facto that might be true, like if you grew up in a Fritzl basement and have only seen western and fantasy movies then horses and unicorns might seem equally real. But if you get out in the real world you'll find a ton of knowledge on horses and none on real unicorns. And if you don't believe in anyone else, you can go meet actual horses. Of course that doesn't disprove that somewhere in the universe there are unicorns or that someone has made an elaborate ruse where they've amputated the unicorn horns to make you believe in horses. But the more evidence there is, the more credible it is as a scientific opinion backed by observation, experimentation and models. A whole lot of hearsay from some guys who said they saw a guy walk on water 2000 years ago? Not so much.

Re:Wow

[calf83]

I think Musk was espousing some Popperian scientific method, because 5) refers to falsifiability, while other the steps include newer things like probability/credence. So by "axiom" he sounds like he simply didn't know the standard scientific meaning of the term, but rather had in mind the idea of hypotheses/model/assumptions, etc., and do you think reading his explanation that way might help make more sense?

Re:Wow

[UnknownSoldier]

Incorrect.

Science is a Subtractive system: It removes falsehoods.

There is a corresponding Additive system but the arrogance of the male ego is too blind to recognize it.

Re:Wow

[Obfuscant]

science is not about proving or disproving. It is about measuring and collecting data in a repeatable way.

Thank you for proving true my comment later where I say a refresher is required even here every so often.

You can collect all the data you want in a "repeatable way" and still not be a scientist. It's only when you decide what data you need to collect and what it means, based on hypotheses and experiments to disprove a hypothesis, does it become science.

For example, I can collect the outside temperature at noon every day for ten years and it will mean nothing, despite being "repeatable". It is only when I look at the trends or patterns and create a testable hypothesis about "why" does it become "science". Until then, it's "technology" at best. Imagine all the people who saw apples falling from trees before Newton hypothesized the theory of gravity. Were they all "scientists" because they were collecting the same data in a repeatable way?

Then it is about testing if those predictions can be tested successfully.

What does testing a prediction successfully mean? I predict the moon will disappear at midnight tonight. I can test that prediction successfully by waiting until midnight and looking up (if there are no clouds here.) I've tested my prediction successfully, but what does it mean?

But nothing is ever proved.

Yes, that's what I said.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit is an Additive system: It adds falsehoods.

Re:Wow

[angel'o'sphere]

If something exists, then I think it is reasonable to say there is a way to prove that it exists.
No, there is no such way.
The only objective proof would be to find it and show it to others.

You can search for ever and never find the thing you want to prove to be existing. However, not finding it does not make a proof that it does not exist.

Re:Wow

[angel'o'sphere]

A whole lot of hearsay from some guys who said they saw a guy walk on water 2000 years ago?
That is a mistranslation from aramaic via greek into latin. "Walking on the water" is an aramaic idiom for "strolling at the beach".

Re:Wow

[Chuck Messenger]

Not finding something does not prove it does not exist - true. However, if you accept that things can exist, which cannot in principle be measured, then there is no gating function to your credulity.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you prove a thing exists?

Suppose you have seen it before or touched it or whatever, and offer that as evidence. How do you know that it can still be seen and touched? How can you prove that because you have seen it existing every one of the million times that you made an observation, that you will observe the same results at the next observation, and the one after that? I don't think you can, you need to make an assumption, for which you can merely increase your certainty that the assumption is true.

It's similar to gravity, we can be nearly absolutely certain that things will still fall downward, tomorrow. But can you prove it? How do you know it won't change? For nearly absolute certainty to qualify as a proof, we would have to accept that "Something that has never been seen before and is not expected to happen, is not possible," and that's something we know is false.

I think the only way to prove something exists, is to define it as existing, and the proof is vacuous.

Re:Wow

[UnknownSoldier]

/whoosh

Hello, McFly. That doesn't help us get closer to the truth.

The point is: Science is not the only way to reach Truth.

Re:Wow

[Obfuscant]

However, if you accept that things can exist, which cannot in principle be measured,

I accept that lots of things exist, and I can in principle and in practice measure the existence of those things.

If you claim that you cannot prove the existence of a horse, then explain why you scream in pain when one kicks you.

If you wish to use the scientific method to prove the existence of a horse, here you go:

1. I hypothesize the existence of horses.
2. My null hypothesis is therefore that horses do not exist.
3. I go to a horse ranch and see a horse. This disproves the null hypothesis.
4. I refine my "experiment" (field trip to horse ranch) to try to eliminate errors in measurement. I find none. A horse is much larger than can be accounted for by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, much larger than the smallest marking on my measuring tape.

This brings up the old joke. Two hillbillies were talking about their farms. The first one tells the other that he's got two horses and he's having a hard time telling them apart. He says that first he tried cutting off the mane of one, but it grew back. Then he tried cutting off the tail, but it, too, grew back. Then he found the solution. He measured both and found out that the black one was two hands taller than the white one.

Re:Wow

[angel'o'sphere]

Heisenberg and Schroedinger are driving in a car, Schroedinger is driving.
On the highway they get stopped by a cop, he tells them: "The speed limit is 65, you are 5 above it!"
Heisenberg freaks out: "now we are lost!"
While the physicists argue the cop opens the trunk and then asks: "Why do you have a dead cat in your trunk?"
Schroedinger shouts: "Oh noes! Now he has killed the cat, too!"

largest vacuum chamber in history =

[Anonymous Coward]

cheap / profitable transportation. . . ha!

Re:largest vacuum chamber in history =

[bobbied]

Sucks when you open that door eh?

Step 0

[taustin]

Get billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies for something that nobody in their right mind would invest their own money in.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Get billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies for something that nobody in their right mind would invest their own money in.

Fuck you for not looking up the fact that Musk has a ton of money in his businesses.
Fuck you for bothering to post your wrong information.

le love,
anon

p.s.
Fuck you again for the rule of 3s.

Re:Step 0

[Mr307]

I'm sure to be in the minority but I have yet to see any 'genius inventions' from Elon, all 'his ideas' seem to be things thought up over the years (some 100s of years old) and deemed to be too difficult to achieve at the time.

So your point of getting billions to throw at some problems seems to be right on the mark. If I wanted to complement Elon it would not be for his various projects that people are attributing to him to have thought up where he really has not, but instead that he has the balls to take some of those well known ideas and actually try to make them work, sometimes with the brute force of money, other times with some hard work.

I dont see a genius idea person there, 'just' a motivated business person attempting some ideas thought in the past to be too hard, heck many of them may still be too hard but if you can get the money and give it a shot we may still learn alot.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there are currently about 500,000 or so "nobodies" that have invested at least $1k...not including any stock owners.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally ironic that you're sending a message using tools where the foundation of the technology was built with billions of taxpayer funded subsidies in the form of defense contracts and research grants.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, he's Thomas Edison.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure to be in the minority but I have yet to see any 'genius inventions' from Elon, all 'his ideas' seem to be things thought up over the years (some 100s of years old)

Kinda like Edison who just used a piece of hot metal in a glass vacuum, both common place at the time. Or Marconi and Tesla who basically just optimized sparks which have been around since the atmosphere coalesced. And did so called "geniuses" like Maxwell, Plank, Einstein, etc actually "invent" anything besides some scribbles on paper?

Just a thought: your definition of genius may a little off there, Mr True Scotsman....

Re:Step 0

[GuB-42]

It is not step 0 but it is definitely part of the process.
1. Oh, it would be great if....
2. Uhm... it looks like it can be subsidized...
3. Ok, so I can expect that much from the state...
4. Uhm... considering the political climate and other attempts by other companies, chances are good...
5. Is is possible that I don't get the subsidies I want? Can I do without it?
6. Ok, I think it will work.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

This would only be true if Edison had duped billions of dollars from the public via tax subsidies and billions more from investors.

If Musk had used scarce resources to create what he has created then I would be impressed. Anyone can look smart when they are given unlimited access to money that isn't theirs. His company still isn't profitable so the jury is still out on if he will go down in history as a "smart" person or a person that duped taxpayers, investors and customers out of billions.

Re:Step 0

[pr0t0]

Yeah! I mean, it's not like we give billions of dollars to other industries like oil. Or have paid trillions of dollars in protecting those same interest abroad.

But it's not just oil. How about the $5.3 billion in improper subsidies for Boeing for the Dreamliner? Or that Boeing and Lockheed get billion dollar subsidies for launching absolutely nothing into space. Pork-barrel spending is never truer than in aerospace. How about the $20 billion we give to farmers to NOT GROW CROPS.

Do you know what Big Oil, Big Aerospace, and Big Agriculture all have in common? They are predominantly located in red states. Not that all subsidies are republican-related of course. $1T goes to medicare, medicaid, and ACA. $366B goes to safety net programs. Hell, $1.5B goes to the entertainment industry every year.

Personally, I'm very interested in the coming electrification of the auto industry and have invested my own money into it. It was a smart move. Anyone with half a head could see it coming a decade ago.

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://nation.time.com/2011/04...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
https://www.economist.com/news...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/...

Re:Step 0

[thegarbz]

Get billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies for something that nobody in their right mind would invest their own money in.

That is precisely how subsidies work and why they exist. I don't know what people are so upset about. The whole point of creating a subsidy is to entice entrants into the market.

Re:Step 0

[taustin]

And billions in taxpayer subsidies. The only thing he's ever done without subsidies was PayPal, and even that required a certain flexibility on the part of financial regulators.

Re:Step 0

[taustin]

His genius is in securing the subsidies, which does require some serious smarts to keep it going as long as he has across as many industries as he has, and money from investors, which requires little more than a glib smile and a firm handshake.

Re:Step 0

[lgw]

This would only be true if Edison had duped billions of dollars from the public via tax subsidies and billions more from investors.

You might want to read more about Edison.

Anyone can look smart when they are given unlimited access to money that isn't theirs.

And yet others didn't. Funny old world.

Re:Step 0

[thinkwaitfast]

Maxwell is taught extensively in university (required multi-year courses). Tesla is barely mentioned.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Get billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies for something that nobody in their right mind would invest their own money in.

Yeah. Like the internet. Who would have funded that crazy idea?

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

As Edison is reported to have said, "Genius is ... 99% perspiration."

So maybe Musk is only 99% genius.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idiot can come up with complex ideas. Only a genius can simplify the complex.

We use Tesla's work every day without a second thought. That is how pervasive his impact is.

Tesla is Dennis Richie to Maxwell's Bill Gates.

Re:Step 0

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say his genius is even that! lets face it. Tesla's tech was done by many, many people before. And where are they today? Their inventions stolen. Or "Debunked" by media. Some had their lives destroyed while some even vanished off the face of the earth.

What Elon M did was he was able to get passed big oil. And the way he did that? You tell me. My guess is he's got them raking in profits. Certainly getting the Government on board is also a part of it.

Re:Step 0

[jabuzz]

Er, you seem to have it back to front there I am afraid. Leaving aside that Maxwell did more that just those EM equations. Tesla stood directly on Maxwell's shoulders. That is Maxwell provided the unification of electricity and magnetism that the likes of Tesla relied upon in their work.

The other massive thing Maxwell did was to deduced the RGB nature of vision. So basically anything you see in colour on a screen down to him.

But lets go with Einstein's thoughts who described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton".

Tesla is not remotely in the same league as Maxwell, he is so far removed it is not even funny.

Sounds like critical thinking

[thinkwaitfast]

Which is discouraged in education these days.

"evidence"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you get all "evidence" from liberal mainstream media then you would know that global warming and evolution are proved, when they are really just shitty unscientific and unprovenable theories. The problem with the science today is that it is allways infected by liberal SJW political correctness.

Re:"evidence"

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how the right finds facts "allways unprovenable" in favor of their unsubstantiated opinions.

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

This script is how all of us Trump supporters made up our minds. Dug up my old notes, here they are:

1. Ask a question:
Would Donald J Trump be an excellent president, better than any other?

2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
Scan bookmarked news sources for articles supporting this claim. Breitbart? Check. Fox News? Check. Infowars? Check.

3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
Businessman? 100% per Wikipedia. He sells buildings and stuff, ergo a businessman.
Smart? Yes 100%, per his Twitter feed he confirmed it himself. No better source than the source itself so don't need to look further.
Good looking with excellent hair? Yes, 100%. See entry for 'smart' above.

4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
Donald J Trump would be an excellent president. All axioms were correct and relevant. Since all axioms were 100% the conclusion must be 100%.

5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
Scanned my Twitter feed. Nope, no dissenting views among those I follow. Nor on Facebook. Therefore p=0.00.

6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
Nobody invalidated my views so my choice is 100% certainly right. Further, the opponent is evil and 100% wrong so my conclusion cannot be wrong.

sorta

[Anonymous Coward]

It's similar to the scientific method philosophically.

But the scientific method is about _empirical_ inquiry. You need to conduct experiments with defined methodology and measure hard data for each of these "axioms".

Slashdot vs. RollingStone

[mi]

Who, among Slashdot's esteemed editorial board, decided, the publication's audience needs a refresher on what scientific method is?

And who, subsequently, chose the Rolling Stone — whoever it is they are interviewing — as the best fount of this illumination?

Re:Slashdot vs. RollingStone

[Obfuscant]

Who, among Slashdot's esteemed editorial board, decided, the publication's audience needs a refresher on what scientific method is?

Well, anyone who thinks the Rolling Stone/Elon Musk got it right does need a refresher. And other comments here also show that it is important every so often.

Re:Slashdot vs. RollingStone

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look around at social media and the news it is quite clear that people could use regular reminders about the scientific method.

So how come

[Anonymous Coward]

there's still so many Space Nutters given that science and math pretty trivially demonstrate that none of the sci-fi fantasies will ever happen?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Amber Heard

[Anonymous Coward]

So, has he figured out why Amber Heard really dumped him?

That may work for rockets

[Anonymous Coward]

But not in the world of people. Remember what matters mostly when you are interviewed for a job? Soft skills. The list of things that really matter in life, when living among human beings, is long and doesn't include any scientific method.

Difficult for most people

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Sounds nice in theory. But in practice, it is not easy. No body has that much time. And we are evolved to make a quick decision on the side of caution. "There is rustling behind the bushes. Assume there is a tiger and run away. Your descendants after 1000 generations can sit comfortably in a upholstered chair by the fire and talk about the Scientific Method, nursing a goblet of fine vintage wine".

But there is one thing people can try to develop and inculcate, as they rise in the hierarchy. Try to find the subordinates who disagree with you, and try not to punish them for it and try to develop an atmosphere your subordinates feel comfortable in challenging you, seriously, even after they know what you deeply believe. If enough counter arguments flow into your thought process and mind set you are less likely to be led down the garden path by a bunch of yes men, sycophants brown nosing their way up the ladder.

Re:Difficult for most people

[Anonymous Coward]

If enough counter arguments flow into your thought process and mind set you are less likely to be led down the garden path by a bunch of yes men, sycophants brown nosing their way up the ladder.

How dare those yes men insist that water only flows downhill! Why with enough counter arguments that water will eventually flow anywhere you want it to, it only takes the power of your mind.

Goods and services need to get from A to B?

[najajomo]

@orlanz: "People need to get from point A to B."

Goods and services need to get from A to B. Given the cost on the environment, moving people from A to B is something we're going to look on as a a luxury.

Re:Goods and services need to get from A to B?

[donaldm]

@orlanz: "People need to get from point A to B." Goods and services need to get from A to B. Given the cost on the environment, moving people from A to B is something we're going to look on as a a luxury.

Err no. Goods and services need to get from A to B, C, D, E, F. G ... etc and it does not help if {name your subset here} are not on the main transport line. This is where efficient city/town planning comes in which can work well in newly planned cities/towns but for older environments planning can be a logistical nightmare. This is not to say don't do it but unfortunately, the solutions can be expensive and disruptive.

Elon should start a church

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Elon should start a church.

Church of Christ Science, or something like that.

He could be their leader.

I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it, but no one really has the time to do all the work themselves.

Electric cars=Fad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Elon persists...

Musk no common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with people like Musk is no common sense. Just because your very smart at one thing, doesn't mean your smart at everything. Musk fails at mass production, has no clue that creating a mass production product first gives you leverage for more unique products. Musk did Tesla ass backwards in business development. The Model 3 could very well end up a Delorean of EV cars.

Fairly Close

[Slicker]

He has rigor, peer review, refutational intent, and falsification or confirmation (i.e. proof of falsehood but never proof of truth). It's better than most people. And he is correct about most people's tendency to not change their thinking. The firmly a belief is held, the more one tends to accept all new information as it fits in with the existing belief... often snowballing one's confidence in a falsehood.

Wealthy celebrity

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon Musk is a celebrity, not a scientist. So far, his wealth has depended on getting investors to give him money for unprofitable businesses. Ponzi had a similar business model he thought was successful. The real test of Elon Musk will be if we have an economic downturn and he can't simply sustain the cash flow by attracting more investments.

Re:Wealthy celebrity

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the Bezos shill

Re:This is how we ended up in this mess...

[avandesande]

The converse of that is when they apply 'arts' to something that shouldn't. I saw a dental office offering 'Dental Arts'. Really? Who wants somebody to do a Francis Bacon inside of their mouth?

Good insights there, IMO ....

[King_TJ]

I was just talking to a few union folks (bus drivers and truck drivers) the other day about the fears they have with the driver-less vehicle revolution. In every case, their first reaction was that "the automation must be stopped"! As soon as I argued that there's just no historical case of people successfully putting those genies back into bottles once new technologies emerge, they quieted down and seemed to listen.

The thing is? I don't have any definite solutions for all the disruptive job loss it will create. But I do know that trying to fight the future is a losing strategy.

The worst case scenarios around all of this stuff seem to hinge on a few big corporations owning the entire thing, though. People don't want to live in a future where "Megacorp, Inc" owns every single self-driving car or truck and now collects 100% of all additional profits to be made by eliminating human labor as a cost of doing business.

Perhaps one way to prevent that is by passing legislation that says any business that operates with automation completely replacing human labor as part of the business model MUST be treated as a co-op? If a trucking company uses all driver-less trucks, require it be structured so each business wishing to use its services does so by buying into it with a fraction of ownership.

It may not stop the truck drivers from losing their jobs driving trucks ... but at least it ensures the extra wealth generated by taking human employees out of the equation gets spread around - benefiting dozens, hundreds or even thousands of businesses who use the services. That, in turn, means greater opportunities for a variety of other new jobs to pop up.

Re:Good insights there, IMO ....

[bluefoxlucid]

That's creative. It's still just playing a shell game.

Let's take a step back for a second. You're looking at the end result: buses are self-driving, there's less human labor, the business is basically accounting and maintenance. You're trying to fix the end result.

The end result is fine.

There's nothing wrong with the complete revolution of an industry, as an endpoint. It's basically-optimal at that point in time, and not fundamentally-different from the business of today, such as bus drivers operating buses.

The problem is we have roughly 3.5 million people whose jobs depend on driving trucks, buses, and taxis. If they lose their jobs all at once (or over a year), we get a massive recession. If they lose their jobs slowly over a few short years, America and its economy is fine; the damned bus drivers are not fine.

The slower the transition, the easier. We need social safety nets to carry these people to the next opportunity, because getting laid off severely disrupts your life and it's not your fault we found a way to do it better without you. With a slower transition, you send some people to retirement instead of the unemployment line--they'd like to retire at 72, but they'll retire at 68 if they lose their job, rather than job hunting--and you have more people shifting their careers. Potential truckers look more into becoming mechanics; mechanics look into becoming engineers; and the inflow of new workers for that industry slows as people start to think that's a bad career to get into.

You can retrain a bus driver to be a freight driver. You can retrain a freight driver to be a mechanic because many of them know a thing or two about how the rig works. They can't all become mechanics if we throw them all off the buses today; but they can bleed over into these near-fit industries if the demand changes slowly.

In freight, there's a particular opportunity with the reduced cost of shipping. Domestic shipping is big: it accounts for half the cost of many products today. Chinese pants land at the dock for 6.5 cents per pair of shipping cost, and have $10 or $15 of shipping costs on them by the time they're trucked around the country. An independent trucker gets around $140k/year, while the average for someone who doesn't own his rig is $40k: it costs $100k to operate (maintain, fuel) that rig.

You're cutting more than a quarter of the cost off by eliminating the driver. If you can get electric trucks to work well enough--and they will for the local distribution trucks which drive less than 300 miles per day--you're cutting off a hell of a lot of maintenance (no, batteries don't destroy themselves constantly). The costs come down, WalMart starts doing the price rollback thing again, and the price competition brings us to higher consumer purchasing power as usual.

More buying means more trucking, which means fleet expansion: the trucking companies spend CapEx on a new self-driving truck, but they need two; so they keep a driver in his seat because they still need him... for now.

Technological maturity, prices of the trucks, cash flow to the shippers and thus their ability to make CapEx to expand or transition, ROI, risk appetite, and the like will control the rate of change. If it starts happening too fast, maybe we need to slow it down--either by trucker's unions (market solution--the Republicans seem to hate this part of the market) or by regulations (Government solution).

So you get to that endpoint without destroying peoples's lives. You carry them to the next job--a trucker, an Uber driver, a mechanic--as the market shifts around. If it's slow enough, people stop getting into trucking and bus driving because that's a dying career, and you have a mild labor shortage while you slowly demolish the whole industry.

That's how you protect the laborer.

Smarter people rationalize better.

[Maxo-Texas]

Really smart people are much better at rationalizing.

It's partially a problem that they are right a lot. Over 80%- maybe over 90%. When they are wrong- they just can't see it.

It sounds like Musk actively tries to avoid this. Good for him.

Applied Pseduoscience

[Roger W Moore]

Well, I don't know who did it but I suspect they may have applied the pseudo-scientific method the article outlines to decide that it was a good idea.

Musk's stupider than you think...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like Musk has just read Karl Popper's Wikipedia page. Doesn't he know that anyone with basic knowledge about the scientific method has most probably already read that? It just makes him sound stupid or like he's got so used to everyone around him kissing his arse and telling him he's so smart that he's forgotten how to self edit.

Overly recusive model of science

[Anonymous Coward]

Better iterative science:
1 Predict
2 measure
3 compare
4 extend-prediction
5 new less-noisy measurement
6 clever compare ...etc

What Musk Said is Sound Bite version of Sci. M.

[Maxo-Texas]

What Musk said is a pretty accurate sound bite method.
It takes a lot of words to actually lay out the scientific method. No one would have quoted the text below if Musk had taken the time to say them...

From school for dragons...

Home > How to Train Your Dragon > The Scientific Method > Scientific Method Steps
Scientific Method Steps
The âscientific methodâ(TM) merely refers to a broad framework for studying and learning more about the world around us in a scientific manner. It is not so much a series of absolute, unchangeable steps as a guideline to the method that must be used when trying to reach a scientifically acceptable theory about a subject matter. Therefore, it is not possible to provide a finite number of steps or an exact procedure for following the scientific method. However, the scientific method steps detailed below describe the main steps that scientists commonly take when conducting a scientific inquiry.

Steps of the Scientific Method
Make an Observation
Scientists are naturally curious about the world. While many people may pass by a curious phenomenon without sparing much thought for it, a scientific mind will take note of it as something worth further thought and investigation.

Form a Question
After making an interesting observation, a scientific mind itches to find out more about it. This is in fact a natural phenomenon. If you have ever wondered why or how something occurs, you have been listening to the scientist in you. In the scientific method, a question converts general wonder and interest to a channelled line of thinking and inquiry.

Form a Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an informed guess as to the possible answer of the question. The hypothesis may be formed as soon as the question is posed, or it may require a great deal of background research and inquiry. The purpose of the hypothesis is not to arrive at the perfect answer to the question but to provide a direction to further scientific investigation.

Conduct an Experiment
Once a hypothesis has been formed, it must be tested. This is done by conducting a carefully designed and controlled experiment. The experiment is one of the most important steps in the scientific method, as it is used to prove a hypothesis right or wrong, and to formulate scientific theories. In order to be accepted as scientific proof for a theory, an experiment must meet certain conditions â" it must be controlled, i.e. it must test a single variable by keeping all other variables under control. The experiment must also be reproducible so that it can be tested for errors.

Analyse the Data and Draw a Conclusion
As the experiment is conducted, it is important to note down the results. In any experiment, it is necessary to conduct several trials to ensure that the results are constant. The experimenter then analyses all the data and uses it to draw a conclusion regarding the strength of the hypothesis. If the data proves the hypothesis correct, the original question is answered. On the other hand, if the data disproves the hypothesis, the scientific inquiry continues by doing research to form a new hypothesis and then conducting an experiment to test it. This process goes on until a hypothesis can be proven correct by a scientific experiment.

The whole process is collaborative and is conducted in a clearly documented manner to help other scientists who are doing research in the same field. Throughout history, there are instances where scientists have stopped their research before completing all the steps of the scientific method, only to have the inquiry taken up and solved by another scientist interested in answering the same question.

Citation needed

[VeryFluffyBunny]

[citation needed] Did Elon learn anything from his BA in physics? There's this thing already called the scientific method that you're supposed to learn. Now he'll get credited with inventing that, like Al Gore did for inventing the internet. The interwebs are definitely living in a post-fact bubble.

A bit naive?

[srijon]

Am I the only one who find's Musk's version of scientism worryingly naive?

Musk says other folks "engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and aren't doing." But then in advocating for his version of the scientific method, he repeats these same errors. He talks about "truth", "probability", "axioms", "correctness", "objectivity", and what's "right," sliding casually between epistemology, naturalism, metaphysics, and ethics, but without pausing to define terms, examine what is given and what has presupposed, or consider the counterarguments those presuppositions have already silenced... surely a case of wishful thinking.

Musk identifies AI as the "biggest threat that humanity faces this century," AI is a product of "the scientific method" he advocates. So how to reconcile the poison and the cure? Shouldn't folks like Musk cogitate on that with a bit more critical depth, before spouting stuff like "It's really helpful for figuring out the tricky things," which sounds like a page from Zuckerberg's playbook, before Russia and Fake News turned up and proved that the world is a lot more complex than that.

Maybe my sense of ire is raised because I've been spending time reading Alfred Whitehead's books (Science and the Modern World, The Concept of Nature, Process and Reality). Whitehead was the co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, so a major figure in logic. His discussion of the narrow-band thinking that takes place under the name of the scientific method is almost 100 years old, but still just as damning. In Whitehead's view, inductive and axiomatic methods are specialist modes of thought, useful in certain parts of science, but easily prone to fallacies and dogmatism in wider discussions. To pull up a random quote:

"In its use of [methods of induction] natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dogmatic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought."

Here's hoping that industry figures like Zuckerberg and Musk find a way to up their game - I don't expect them to be Whitehead readers, but can we at least move away from disappointing and disingenuous dogma?

Sinking boats

[Anonymous Coward]

A rising tide only lifts boats that aren't anchored to something. Those boats just get pulled under water. And most people are anchored by a whole lot of different things.

The theoretical argument about "efficiency" has never actually been tested because the people making the decisions aren't considering what is best for everyone, only themselves. In order to "outsource" you need capital and that has to be produced by taking some of the productivity of workers as profit. Then, instead of investing it in making those workers more productive, it is invested in China making Chinese workers more productive. This is good for the Chinese workers, good for the person who owns the capital, its not good for the people who created the capital. Especially if they are anchored by the value they place on their home, family and friends.

What's wrong here is the belief that money is the only value and that people don't care more about their neighbors than they do about people on the other side of the world.
 

axioms are overrated

[epine]

By coincidence, I just watched this a couple of days ago:

Feynman: 'Greek' versus 'Babylonian' mathematics

This excerpt is possibly from the 1964 Messenger Lecture series at Cornell University, collectively titled The Character of Physical Law.

"The method of starting with the axioms is not efficient."

AKA "axioms are overrated".

Re:axioms are overrated

[Obfuscant]

AKA "axioms are overrated".

On the other hand, axioms when appropriately applied save a lot of time trying to prove useful things that cannot be proven. Like the five Euclidean geometry axioms. If you waste your life trying to prove that "parallel lines never intersect", then you've lost all the cooler and useful stuff that Euclid et.al. developed out of those five.

Not the inventor of Paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk didn't invent Paypal, he founded a company that merged with the company that created Paypal. He ended up owning a lot of the stock and made a lot of money when Paypal was sold to Ebay.

Catastrophic failure

[Jerry]

If a large vacuum tunnel suddenly ruptured the in rushing air would strike passengers with a force of 15 lbs/sqin. On an average person's chest that would be 6,000 lbs of force, crushing them.

Re:Catastrophic failure

[Anonymous Coward]

In the above scenario, that would have meant that the person's lungs were empty to start with. I.e., dead already.

Re:Catastrophic failure

[angel'o'sphere]

You forget that the passengers are siting in an air tight capsule.

How did you come to those numbers? They make no sense to me. Why should there be a force higher than the atmospheric pressure?

Re:Catastrophic failure

[Obfuscant]

How did you come to those numbers? They make no sense to me. Why should there be a force higher than the atmospheric pressure?

It isn't higher than atmospheric pressure. One number is expressed as a force per unit area, the other as a total force. Both are "atmospheric pressure". That's why unit analysis is a critical part of any calculation.

What you just asked is like asking how a box of jelly beans can weigh more than one bean, since the "jelly bean" is 10gm/bean and a box of 100 would be 1kg/100 beans. One kg is much more than 10gm, isn't it?

Re:Catastrophic failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me the air would rush out of the rupture, and into the evacuated volume. Like a leak in a spacecraft's skin.

Re:Catastrophic failure

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, it would have been easier to explain how he came to that idiotic numbers.
Why should I ask why a box of beans is heavier than one bean? I don't get your analogon, it has nothing to do with the original post.

False

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon Musk's scientific theory is:

1. Ask a question
2. Hire a lobbyist
3. Secure government funding
4. Hire another lobbyist
5. More taxpayer funding.

This is always true

[tezbobobo]

I always find it ironic when scientists say they don't believe there is a God when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence from physics that there is one.

Re:This is always true

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find it ironic when scientists say they don't believe there is a God when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence from physics that there is one.

No, there is zero evidence of a god.

You've made an unfounded claim about there being evidence for a god. Really you should give some examples, then someone could explain to you why whatever you think is evidence for a god actually isn't.

I would be willing to change my mind if I saw incontrovertible evidence for a god, but I've not come across any yet, and seriously doubt some random dude on slashdot has anything.

In two words:

[Pezbian]

"Question Everything." -- Elon Musk

are we posting...

[mapkinase]

... obvious things now? Just because they are said by poster boys?

Re:are we posting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, it probably is news to the editors.

Main reason we don't cooperate

[Anonymous Coward]

Most conservatives have the underlying assumption (probably correct) that liberals are out to either control them, take their money, or otherwise harm their bottom line. If they cooperate with liberals on climate matters, then people with no connection to them (or far less connection) will be making decisions that impact them very personally, and they WILL take advantage of that far beyond what can be justified. Therefore, it's not a matter of science in politics, but a matter of trust.

That's what the axioms are for

[raymorris]

> If we are trying something new how would we even have a probability of it being correct? Isn't that point of experimentation - to figure it out?

I've never tried knocking this computer off of this table. We can, however, make some reasonable predictions about what would likely happen based on some axioms:

Things knocked off tables tend to fall down
Tile floors are typically hard
Delicate electronics tend to break about 70% of the time.when they hit hard surfaces

Based on what we know, we can predict that there is about a 70% chance that this computer would break if I knocked it off this table.

Using other axioms, we can further say that we'll almost certainly break a computer if we knock 20 randomly chosen computers off of 20 randomly chosen tables.

That's why he said "gather all the evidence you can, develop axioms based on the evidence, then examine if the axioms are likely true, and how likely". That way, when you spend $20 million on an experiment you can use the experiment to test something that will probably work.

Re: That's what the axioms are for

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks like deductive reasoning.

How do you "assign a probability of truth to each [axiom]"? Things fall down. 100% in normal Earth circumstances? Tile floors are hard. 100? Delicate electronics break 70% of the time when falling on. Hard surface. 100% true? Or is it delicate electronics break when they hit a hard surface, but only 70% true?

An axiom is a statement or proposition that is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true. If you have to assign a probability of truth to it, then it's not an axiom. You accept it or not, but you don't accept it with some probability.

It's also normal to question if an axiom is relevant to the problem at hand, and to question the logic that leads from the axioms to some conclusion. But how do you assign a probability of correctness to your logic without experimentation? It's either correct or its not. It might not be correct all the time because of other variables that were not included. But how would you know that in advance of testing it, well enough to assign a probability?

That's part of one definition. Swims like a duck

[raymorris]

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

If it only looks a bit like a duck and swims like a duck, it might well be a young swan. But if it matches all three characteristics *strongly*, it's PROBABLY a duck. (But not certainly).

You did a great job of quoting just part of one of the three definitions Merriam Webster's gives for "axiom".

> If you have to assign a probability of truth to it, then it's not an axiom. You accept it or not, but you don't accept it with some probability.

I see you studied Socratic reasoning; there have been a few advances in the last 2,400 years. Over 99% of all email sent is spam. 99.99% of spam is identified and automatically filtered using reasoning like this:

Emails mentioning V1agra are spam with 98% likelihood
Emails mentioning "win" or "free" are spam with 92% likelihood
Emails mentioning the name of the product you sell are only 1% likely to be spam
Emails from registered .gov servers are spam with 7% likelihood (93% likely not spam)
Emails that make it to this filter in the first place are 30% likely to be spam

From those rules, one can calculate the total probability using something called Bayes formula. It's also called "Bayesian probability". With the formula, you can determine the probability if it includes both the word "free" AND the name of your product. It works rather well. It's used all over the place these days. When you log into a porn site, most sites do that calculation to see if you're likely to be using a stolen shared password or just guessing passwords to see if you get one that works. It's based on each part of your IP address (whether you're on the same IP or same network as the last few times that user logged in) , your browser and installed plugins, and other bits of data the server can detect.

An advanced application of this that is in the headlines lately is self-driving cars. The car doesn't know for sure that what it is seeing is a stop sign. It sees something reddish (might be a stop sign), it seems to be on the side of the road (might be a sign), seems to be about 8 feet tall (might be a sign), is roughly round or perhaps an octagon (could be a stop sign), has some whitish marks on it ...
It figures the thing is probably a stop sign if it has several characteristics strongly similar to stop signs, and few characteristics that are strongly different from stop signs.

Surely he *meant* "hypotheses"

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly Elon simply mistakenly used the word "axiom" when he actually meant "hypothesis" -- and this is clear by the way he *used* the word.

Or use Feynman's method...

[wallstprog]

Thought this was pretty funny -- I recently (re-) read "I Think You Must Be Joking", where Feynman described his problem-solving approach:

1. Write down problem
2. Think real hard
3. Write down solution

An honest question for parent's with young kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do elementary schools even teach the "Scientific Method" any more? Or, is that now considered racist?

Same method I used to burn naysayers vs.

[Anonymous Coward]

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Why is this Musk's scientific method?

[whitroth]

This is what the scientific method has been for the last couple hundred years. It most certainly doesn't "belong" to someone who's just pointing that out, as any teacher does.

Oft ignored part of Eisenhower's farewell address

[Anonymous Coward]

People love to recite the bit that warned about a "military industrial complex", which was a warning that has certainly come true particularly in the post-cold-war era of mergers between defense contractors, but they ignore the other half of his wise warning:

"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself be come the captive of a scientific-technological elite." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

He was warning that science was becoming increasingly intertwined with government because of the necessary involvement of government funding and that just as in the defense contractor case, this could cause problems in both directions with government influencing the science and those funded scientists gaining policy influence - that policies could be driven under the slogan "SCIENCE SAYS!" just as other policies could be driven by the slogan "Boeing/Lockheed/the Pentagon SAYS!" and that these trends needed to be kept in check.

We have arrived at a point where huge slices of public policy are being influenced by cries of SCIENCE! and arguments about public policy in vast areas of society are being affected by people tossing about claims of science and the scientific method, often where science and the scientific method are not applicable, or are being applied improperly.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

oops, correction

[Anonymous Coward]

that last line was also Eisenhower and should have been in italics inside the quotes but for some reason it pasted oddly

The irony

[thisisauniqueid]

This is highly ironic, given Elon musk's completely baseless claims that humanity is facing an existential risk from the threat of AI superintelligence. Literally all that we are building today, even using deep learning, amounts to nothing more than fancy statistical regression.

Re: That's part of one definition. Swims like a d

[Anonymous Coward]

These are not axioms, they are indicators.
If there is an axiom in your example, its the one that makes bayesian filtering work - with limits on timing and % effectiveness given that the opponent is a creative human and our dataset only grows when false negatives get through.

If you accept that it works, you don't assign a probability to the truth of the axiom. It's meaningless to do that. You do the experiment, you find out it does, and now the "probability of truth" is 1 because you proved it, at least under certain conditions.

If you were there when that particular invention was conceived, you might have a level of confidence about the result but you wouldnt be able to assign a probability of the "truth" of it. Ironic that you brought up spams email filtering because... you wouldn't have the training data to come up with any number.

When faced with something new, we cannot know the probability of it being true. We can only assign probabilities to something that we experience enough to create a model of it, like a fair coin toss.

Karl Popper

[Anonymous Coward]

So Elon Musk rehashes some old ideas of Karl Popper and this is revolutionary and newsworthy?