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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

This is a useful checklist, it reminded me of a recent topic of 'Whether AI is the end of Scientific Method' on Babbage from Economist Radio[1]

The arguments were that in ML/DL, experiments are run at large scale without hypothesis, with radical empiricism in a trial and error fashion which is against Scientific Method i.e. Hypothesis, Experiment, Observation, Theory.

[1]https://soundcloud.com/theeconomist/babbage-ai-the-end-of-th...

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I'd say that the scientific method is just a formal process taught to school kids and that most scientists don't follow it either. At least they don't in my field (physics).

It's more like "hypothesis" -> "experiment" -> "uh, this is kind of weird" -> "changes hypothesis to fit the data" -> "take some more data" -> "huh... here's this cool thing unrelated to any of my other hypotheses" -> "switches topic to something more viable".

You are absolutely right, but I don't think the philosophy of science demands that you actually follow the scientific method during discovery mode. What it says, though, is that if you discover any scientific knowledge, its discovery process must be castable in the way of the scientific method. Meaning, when someone else checks or replicates your result, they can actually follow the four step process, and recreate that same knowledge.

Science more than just a collection of facts, is a description of a set of experimental processes that recreate those facts. Which is where the authority-lessness power of it comes from.

for me the key lies in the experiment. only by generating new data through new experiments, do we receive robust theories. otherwise we overfit to whatever data is at hand. hence why we need cross validation when working with canned data.

I don't think reproducibility is about scientific method. It is about trust -- ie is the claim correct and stable. This is also why reproducibility is important in science.

I don't think the scientific method (in the sense of hypothesis->experiment->observation->theory) has anything to do with reproducibility. Frankly, I am not even sure it is necessary for good work, whether it is in ML/DL or in an established basic science. Scientific method is definitely not how most practitioners experience doing research.

The gold standard is h->e->o->t->p->o - you use the theory to create a new prediction that is confirmed by observation thus supporting the theory. This is what is so compelling about 20thC physics - so many insights and consequence from the theory that are then supported by subsequent observation and experiment.

is there an alternative to the scientific method that I don't know about? I don't think I've seen anyone question the basic framework before

Hypothesis generation is definitely also a common goal of scientific work. There are many situations in which you don't have a good prior to base an experiment on.

"the scientific method" is a somewhat nebulous concept in daily discussions, as evidenced by the guy above defining such that reproducibility is not part of it.

Personally, I would count reproducibility as a fairly important part of the scientific method, as it demonstrates you've achieved the fundamental requirement of understanding your experimental setup.

Without very detailed understanding of your experiment, the experiment isn't scientific, so by extension I would claim that the GP's "scientific method" isn't scientific.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a lot about (many things, including) refining the scientific method in Rationality [0]. IIRC, his point is that the scientific method puts no constraints on what hypotheses you test. He thinks a more orderly search of hypothesis space is preferable.

[0] https://www.readthesequences.com/

> with radical empiricism in a trial and error fashion which is against Scientific Method

There is a longer discussion of this issue, with references, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/#SciMet... It is especially worth reading if you believe that trial and error is against the scientific method.

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