The advice of pnathan, elsewhere in this thread, is good. This is a better article than what I've come to expect from Wired.
The main point of the article is that scientists have exhausted the low-hanging fruit of useful correlations and are now grasping at the more dubious correlations. The author claims that things are complicated by the concept of causation.
He cites David Hume: "...causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered -- they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a 'lively conception produced by habit.' When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity -- we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact -- it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts."
It's been a while since I've taken philosophy, but Hume's skepticism of causality is itself a story by its own criteria.
A slight amendment to your statements: in some fields of research, we've exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and "low-hanging" is defined differently for every field. In mathematics, for example, we ran out of obvious things in the 1700s, but there are still "low-hanging fruit" because the cost of investment is so low. My field, robotics, is currently new enough that we're still finding things that are obvious in hindsight. In pharmaceuticals, things are pretty easy to come up with, but really ridiculously expensive to test and verify the safety of. Making sweeping statements about "low-hanging fruit" doesn't work.
"Making sweeping statements about 'low-hanging fruit' doesn't work."
Sure it does! Extend the analogy a bit by letting the tree be a living thing. That today you picked some fruit doesn't mean that tomorrow a new pear (apple, guava, grapefruit, etc.) won't grow where you harvested.
And when the tree dies, there's always that "making lemonade from lemons" metaphor... (OK, so that's engineering, not science, but it will keep you busy and productive).
Thanks for the correction. I just have a minor wrinkle to add to your opinion of mathematics. Recreational mathematics itself could be seen as an avenue to further fields of low-hanging fruit.
Comments
The advice of pnathan, elsewhere in this thread, is good. This is a better article than what I've come to expect from Wired.
The main point of the article is that scientists have exhausted the low-hanging fruit of useful correlations and are now grasping at the more dubious correlations. The author claims that things are complicated by the concept of causation.
He cites David Hume: "...causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered -- they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a 'lively conception produced by habit.' When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity -- we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact -- it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts."
It's been a while since I've taken philosophy, but Hume's skepticism of causality is itself a story by its own criteria.
A slight amendment to your statements: in some fields of research, we've exhausted the low-hanging fruit, and "low-hanging" is defined differently for every field. In mathematics, for example, we ran out of obvious things in the 1700s, but there are still "low-hanging fruit" because the cost of investment is so low. My field, robotics, is currently new enough that we're still finding things that are obvious in hindsight. In pharmaceuticals, things are pretty easy to come up with, but really ridiculously expensive to test and verify the safety of. Making sweeping statements about "low-hanging fruit" doesn't work.
"Making sweeping statements about 'low-hanging fruit' doesn't work."
Sure it does! Extend the analogy a bit by letting the tree be a living thing. That today you picked some fruit doesn't mean that tomorrow a new pear (apple, guava, grapefruit, etc.) won't grow where you harvested.
And when the tree dies, there's always that "making lemonade from lemons" metaphor... (OK, so that's engineering, not science, but it will keep you busy and productive).
Thanks for the correction. I just have a minor wrinkle to add to your opinion of mathematics. Recreational mathematics itself could be seen as an avenue to further fields of low-hanging fruit.