OT: science, technology engineering, mathematic and medical thinking skills have arty-crafty components

I'm not sure what the topic was.

For that you'd need to read the paper, all eight pages of it, but the abstr act does clue you in.

It has been argued here that electronic circuit design is an art, although it does exploit a lot of scientific knowledge - a point of view that is ref lected in the title of your textbook.

My superficial impression is that authors argue for the existence of an int ellectual tool-kit consisting of 13 distinguishable items. Not everybody ha s all thirteen tools, but if you do well you nave most of them, and the sub sidiary point is that a number of the tools can be acquired in art and craf t courses, rather than regular STEMM training.

And you might think these authors would have proof-read their paper prior to sending it our for peer review':

-------------(quote)------------ A study of 38 male scientists found significant correlations between the range of thinking tools used by a scientist and measures of achievement, such as how many high-impact papers he or she published, and...

-------------(end quote)----------

"he or she"? when it was a part of the study that examined "38 male scientists".

Was this peer reviewed? No one READ it before it was published, this is on the front page.

This is a paper for the anal retentive folks who have to know the measure of everything...

John

Cerebral-type engineers tend to find the arts and humanities deeply terrifying; they've examined the various artifacts those disciplines produce and can't determine their function. why anyone would expend so much effort to produce useless things is deeply mysterious and inscrutable.

Perhaps some fashion of physical mind-virus, designed to gum up the pure, harmonious mechanics of their clockwork-like pedigreed Aryan brains.

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bstract does clue you in.

ugh it does exploit a lot of scientific knowledge - a point of view that is reflected in the title of your textbook.

intellectual tool-kit consisting of 13 distinguishable items. Not everybod y has all thirteen tools, but if you do well you nave most of them, and the subsidiary point is that a number of the tools can be acquired in art and craft courses, rather than regular STEMM training.

Of course it was peer-reviewed, and the paper will have been proof-read by the authors before it was published.

Professional proof-readers find about 95% of the typos in the stuff they ch eck.

The rest of us find about 30% ...

The only anal-retentive individual involved here would appear to be you.

Speak for yourself,

A bizarre misconception. There are engineers who have never read a novel, but even John Larkin likes Jane Austen and P.G.Wodehouse. I do like Thomas Love Peacock, but he is a minority taste.

Books and plays are written because they are entertaining, and can be sold for money. Nothing mysterious or inscrutable about that.

Einstein was non-Aryan, and played the violin. Feynman preferred bongo drums.

Didn't seem to gum up either of their brains.

Their choice of 13 factors seems highly arbitrary to me. I reckon that there are roughly 8 key factors that make someone a good scientist or engineer (the latter also need good drawing skills):

Observation, Verbalisation, Listening, Visualisation Logic, Intuition, Abstraction, Pattern Matching

In no particular order though the top line are mostly sensory and the bottom line more abstract. I suspect it is pattern matching across a wide range of experience and knowledge that facilitates creativity.

I can think of one genetically male scientist who is now a leading female scientist and has taken on feminist Germaine Greer and won.

Peer reviewed doesn't guarantee quality. I recall one classic where the Nature editor accidentally inverted the meaning of a sentence trying to make it clearer in one of the major breakthrough papers in the field.

It was a standing joke and the authors agreed never to use a double negative in any future scientific paper.

Very possibly.

understatement of the century there.

NT

Actually peer review delivers better quality than any other approach we know about, but NT doesn't like it because it tends to reject his favourite silly ideas.

Peer review doesn't deliver perfection, but it delivers sufficient quality for science as a whole to have made a great deal of progress since it was widely adopted.

NT will doubtless tell us that he knows a better approach, but that he isn't going to waste his time telling us about it.

So if you have a better scheme, and the research to support it, do write it up and submit it the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It is a fairly high impact journal and the refereeing tends to be thorough.

The paper was one of a bunch from the "Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity"

It did happen to catch my attention.

Peer review doesn't guarantee perfection. It does seem to be the best proce dure around for getting adequate quality.

You are *way* too cynical and paranoid.

It has always been the case that about 10% of everything in the peer reviewed literature is not to put to fine a point on it wrong.

The whole purpose of the scientific publication process is that once something is published other researchers can repeat the same experiment and either confirm or refute the claims made by the first group.

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In the one medical subject I have some in-depth knowledge of, 99.9% is wron g. In medicine generally, the figure is 90 something percent.

I assumed we all knew what peer review is. It's a nice idea but there are s ome issues with it in practice:

1. Research is routinely done for profit, and sponsoring companies inevitab ly pay researchers that give them the best results. It takes no genius to w ork out how that goes.
2. Others can redo the experiment but seldom do unless paid to, which in mo st cases they aren't. When they are paid to they're under the profit motive , which encourages an awful lot of overlooking & more.
3. IRL when people spot problems, the normal response is not to publish a c riticism. This occurs for a few reasons, including a) I have plenty other things to do b) Criticising others is likely to get what I publish criticised c) people working in the field but not having phd qualifications usually th ink their voice won't be heard etc etc

Great idea, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope.

What works best? Studies of very large numbers of people over many years wh ere the author has no connection with their treatment and is not sponsored by interested parties. You've got much higher sample numbers, much longer s tudy lengths & as much as practical of the money motive is removed. Imho su ch data gathering should be automatic across the board for any developed na tion's health service. It doesn't solve all the problems but it's a lot bet ter.

Ultimately one needs to be realistic about medical research. It's an inhere ntly shall we say messy field, and believing what one is told is generally naive.

NT

They usually do it for fame and money. Nothing inscrutable about that. What's interesting (but not mysterious) is why they sometimes get fame and money.

My concern about "art" is that anyone can call himself an "artist", and that no art critic ever dares to say "that's bad and ugly."

So, art becomes basically meaningless, random neural activity. But the "artists" still demand respect and cheap rent.

There has been some great art, but 1000x more junk.

Why would an artist make art for fame and money? It's about the hardest way to get fame and money there is! Is everyone who decides to make art as a discipline a dullard who doesn't realize that financial or social success for a particular individual in those fields is lottery-winning rare? Might as well play the lottery!

Hahahahaha well I can see you've never read much art or music critique

To whom are the vast majority of artists so empowered over that they'd be in any position to demand anything? The artists union has that much clout? Hah

That's true

Not random neural activity. This is art:

Of a very primitive sort but it's still art, to demonstrate a very primitive reason for it: because all you take with you is what you leave behind, and few people wish to be forgotten.

Refutation of claims, or confirmation by repeating observations, IS peer review, just like the first-cut oversight of editors and reviewers before publication. We've seen modern reviews of Gregor Mendel's statistics, for instance... Peer review is open-ended, continuous, and perhaps eternal.

Every description of reality is wrong. Some are just less wrong. Peer review is one way to start sorting out which.

I just wish it were effective in practice. The world would be a better place.

NT

NT isn't all that cynical, if a trifle paranoid. He does seem to be a gullible twit who has fallen for a number of well-known health scams. Amygdalin seems to be one of them, but he's got just enough sense not to admit to the others.

Not so much wrong as unhelpful.

If anybody can be bothered. It takes a fairly highly cited misleading paper to motivate a confirmation experiment, which is going to be hard to publish unless it fails to confirm some part of the original work.

Final year undergraduates do get stuck with running this kind of experiment - they don't really need the publication, and they do need the practice in running experiments.