Marcel Popescu

I've long used the expression "real science, so called because it can only be found in books and movies". From a talk at Pycon 2014 : The ideals reality of science: The pursuit of verifiable answers highly cited papers for your c.v. The validation of our results by reproduction convincing referees who did not see your code or data An altruistic, collective enterprise A race to outrun your colleagues in front of the giant bear of grant funding H.T to Daniel Lemire .

Assumptions Behind every indirect fact (like a calculation) there are a number of assumptions; some of them of minor import, some of them vital. Most people ignore this aspect so much that they don't even realize the assumptions are there. (To paraphrase Ayn Rand, not only don't they "check their premises", they don't even know what those premises are.) Here's an example: estimating the speed of a moving car. Let's say the car leaves town A at 3pm and reaches town B at 6pm. We can see on a map that the distance between the two towns is 150 miles, therefore we calculate that the car had an average speed of 50 miles per hour (150 miles divided by 3 hours). What assumptions have we made, and how do they impact our result? For one thing, it is unlikely that the car has moved at a constant speed. It might have slowed down when passing through populated areas and sped up when in between; it might have even stopped for refueling. The actual speed was almos...

I find myself searching for these two articles a lot, so I thought I'd save them here. I can't recommend them enough. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/ http://s8int.com/crichton.html

From http://freedomtwentyfive.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/why-im-leaving/ But, you ask, what about the glorious pursuit of knowledge? Won’t you be dedicating your life to advancing the state of human knowledge? If you’re asking that, I guess you’ve never actually been inside a Western University: They are cesspools of mediocrity and ideological cant. The contemporary university is quite possibly the worst place in the world to actually think freely and come up with new ideas. As a career academic, you will frequently have to choose between honesty and your career. And remember, if you aren’t willing to make the “right” choice, there are a thousand others lined up behind you who will.