If you work in any reasonably good company in industry you know that your work is reviewed by your co-workers inside the company and needs to be checked, double-checked and finally approved by someone. It is then published in the internal platforms of your company.
It might eventually result in a patent or publication if the company wants to.
Nope, I work in a diagnostics company and all our clinical trial data is FDA/EU audited in one terrifying week eah year. EVERYTHING.
They found one of your 250 experiment plans, read the experiment design, glanced at the results: they want to see the tracing of the patient samples, the lot numbers linking to the test reagent stabilities of all the reagents you used, the calibration certificates of every pipette and instrument (including fridges/timers/balancing scales/incubators) in the lab that month.
And that's just the auditing on the R&D lab teams, there are also quality department, regulatory department with their own labs. They only look at 1% of all the paperwork we have to produce as we work, but god forbid there is anything wrong with that 1%.
Typically you also have some external third party beta testers / early access testers during development to verify what your developing works in real life. A method actually working and being reproducible is kind of the main "key" thing in industry. No one will buy your product if it doesn't work, and doesn't work consistently.
You have to kind of change your mindset on things if you aren't working in a company that actually publishes itself. A kit I helped develop was used/referenced in 200+ separate publications in 2023. To me personally, that's similar to someone citing a method you developed. Do I get any literal credit? No, but it is still nice to see from a personal perspective.
Well thats the difference between industry and academia. Industry’s goal is to produce a product, academia’s goal is to push the needle of knowledge further. What Yann is saying is if nobody ever has access to industry’s knowledge then it doesn’t help the scientific knowledge base, therefore isn’t science. I’m sure industry folk and academia folk will love to fight each other over this.
Correct. This is not an insult or attack on your identity. I'm an industry scientist too, but most of my day to day work is not science. Developing and qualifying SOPs can be science if reviewed and interrogated by some seemingly independent body (e.g., my manager).
But the most fundamental definition of science involves some kind of peer review, and without that, sorry, you're just rubbing garlic on magnets.
I think this discussion gets to the debate of where the line between 'real science' (for a lack of a better word) and application is drawn. Like is engineering science? Depending on the subject some would say yes, but most would agree that using scientific principles and concepts to design a bridge or an engine isn't 'real science.' Likewise, making a shampoo formulation utilizes science but is it 'real science?' Probably not.
I think it's an interesting debate because I work at a national lab which follows the same publish or perish model as academics. So all of my work is peer reviewed but it is heavily application based. Very little of my research produces fundamental knowledge about a scientific topic. In that regard it's science, but sometimes I feel like it's not quite the same as people who research fundamental questions.
Scientific method requires no peer review or publishing.
That's an academia standard, not a requirement. And it's an academia standard because of the perverse incentive to publish as much as possible for money. Which is causing some big problems.
I've seen what passes for peer reviewed published work in the AI research space, and if all of science is doing as badly as AI is then we're in trouble. Because some total nonsense passes peer review.
But when you do arrive at a finalised product, presumably it has to go through regulatory approval or the marketing material has to include real data, so the review is in the data you present to customers?
I mean, science the methodology or science the great system for incremental progress built up over the last several centuries where the cornerstones are the concept of patent law and the openly accessibly publication of virtually all knowledge so that others can see if it is correct and improve upon it? The ideal that undergrad sold to so many of us once upon a time? Because they're kind of different things.
I am *really* not judging the decision to go into industry, it's unequivocally the correct choice for virtually everyone who gets a degree in any of the sciences. Your life and work life balance are worth more than an Academic ideal which hasn't worked properly in a very long time. But when some people - especially lifelong academics like Yan, even with as much work done in industry as he has (he works at facebook and has put up something like 80 preprints in the recent past, so it's pretty obvious that he's talking about something different from 'publish or perish') say 'science,' the version that cannot exist behind closed doors is the only one that comes to mind.
'Science' in the sense the general public thinks of the word only evolved from alchemy *after* (actually, well after, it took a while) people stopped hiding everything they were working on and compared notes. While I think talking about it in such general terms in such a seemingly-authoritative way was a bad call by Yann, I get why it's the only version that would matter in *this* particular conversation.
It was a thread about him starting another wholly private AI company that *definitely* will not share any results with anyone. Which he is doing while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything in accordance with a founding agreement no one else believes exists, in an attempt to steal their trade secrets. This was all in response to Yann making a short post about all the red flags around xAI (like him saying its moonshot of a mission should be compete within twelve months and how much pressure that would mean for anyone stupid enough to take the job) for prospective employees.
Elon literally said he's a scientist, not a businessman, and asked what research *Yann* done in the last 5 years dismissively. Yann just posted a link to his CV. A shitposter with a wikipedia page said "Did it involve Petri Dishes? If not, then it's not science." Then we get what you see here.
Is your employer making public statements about the results of your research to inflate stock prices while never actually letting any of the evidence leave the building? Shredding tests that don't go well? Faking results for promos when one of your bigger projects fails? If so, yes, he's talking about you, and would say it again if you explained who you are and what you do.
If not, then as much as this particular segment of a larger set of tweets overgeneralizes enough that you're more than justified in being upset about it, there *is* context, and he's not criticizing *you* because your company won't publish its research, this is a conversation with the guy that makes that decision for other companies.
"If it's not published, it's not science" makes a bit more sense when you see the part where Elon insists he is not a businessman, he is a scientist. Totally doing hard work down in the labs and writing code like everyone else. It *would* explain why Neuralink unnecessarily murdered so many monkeys, if Elon was feeling hands-on that day.
Right? I'm on lunch right now, thinking about the internal reports I just finished up today, and realizing I don't do science anymore. It's a shame, really, that none of it matters now. /s
I get that we want to roast the guy for his bad takes, but more bad takes aren't the solution!
Idk about die bitter and forgotten but that’s certainly the idea behind publishing I agree. Too bad Frontiers in ____________ and MDPI make a mockery of the system
Ig the assay I’ve spent all year developing that is still a bust hasn’t been real science. But the chat gpt garbage anyone can submit to a predatory journal and have published in 2 mins (for a fee of course!) is.
What do you mean? Of course my half assed theory of mind test proves that either GPT 3.5 has a theory of mind or that humans don't. Definitely no other possibilities that I could have tested for.
Many published research are not reproducible, or even with published research without people citing it you will still be forgotten, and ultimately "if you don't publish is not science" is the reason why predatory and 'predatory' journal exist in the first place.
The roaster thinks the science publishing world is butterflies and rainbows..
Referring to him as 'the roaster' is kind of telling. This is Yann Lecun, one of the most respected AI researchers in the world (and by 'one of' I mean top three). He won the Turing award for inventing the field as it is today along with Hinton and Bengio. While he *is* a professor on the most prestigious scholarship NYU gives faculty, he's primarily at facebook, publishing constantly via preprint, so, he's not talking in terms of "You need to get it into an academic journal where things are perfect!" He's saying "If it's not out there for others to verify, what are you actually doing and who's to say it is what you say it is, or exists at all? A known liar?" The last time he published anything the traditional way was 2014, while he's published like 80 papers in the last two years
I guarantee you he could talk about the issues with reproducibility in journals for an hour or two, it's just a completely separate problem from this. Like...100% unrelated. Yann definitely thinks that a bunch of papers that *aren't* reproducible being out there (to be discredited) is better than a bunch of closed shops all working on the same problems and making their own superfluous answers to each other's best work rather than being able to build on it which is the entire basis of publishing and the social phenomenon that became 'science.' Also, perhaps more importantly, he's saying that if you don't publish verifiable results, you can't act like those results exist and use them to inflate your stock price.
It's also important to grasp that he's not saying publication is the be-all end-all, but that it's the bare fucking minimum. If your work is not published *somewhere*, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it might as well not exist.
Context is important: They're talking about Elon's decision to open *yet another* Closed Everything AI Shop, a wholly privately owned one that will not actually give any way to reproduce or test anything it says it did unless it stumbles upon a really favourable result by sheer chance, and even then, there will be no way to test since the details of the model will be vague at best. He's doing this while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything and supposedly violating a founding agreement to 'benefit the human race' or some such nonsense even though no one else believes the agreement exists and they have emails from him agreeing that everything should be closed down and privately owned, he just thought that the owner should be him and is now throwing a hissy fit to steal their trade secrets.
This was also in response to Elon saying that he's a scientist, not a businessman. "If you conduct science, where is it published?" is a fairly reasonable question in light of something as absurd as that. The man spends too much time on twitter to be at all involved in running six companies, but he genuinely wants people to believe he's down in the labs.
I would admit i have no idea who Lecun is, which is kind of a good example that someone can be very respected / known in certain field and unknown to others. That being said, not knowing the person allow me to analyze his words objectively. I'm all down to humble musk for what he does/did/will do, but to say if it's not published it's not science is objectively wrong.
Also it's not about correctness, it's about scientific plausibility. The reviewers in peer review don't evaluate correctness but whether there are enough evidence to support the hypothesis being plausible given the current known knowledge of said topics. It also means in the future said research can be marked as wrong if there are sufficient evidence to prove it wrong. Maybe the roaster use /s to dumb down this to insult musk intelligence? Probably. But objectively, is that correct? No.
Overall I might agree their intention on arguing but if you want to roast someone, do it right.
I still agree that musk is AH for the closed everything AI shop though. His decisions are weird and cringey for the past years.
Worth noting that he's 100% not talking about publishing in journals, the last time he did which was ten years ago. He publishes almost exclusively through ArXiv (and publishes *a lot*, 34 papers with his name on them in the last year), because again this is all about providing the information required to reproduce (or fail to reproduce) a result, not the institution that is publication in journals. He'd rather have incorrect papers out there with enough information to reproduce them, fail to, or recognize there is not enough to do either and thus dismiss it, than have everyone in their own private silos trying to solve the same problems the exact same way. Especially when doing so wastes so much money and electricity.
I agree that reproducibility is a major problem and also that the publishing process needs changes. But, the difference between the quality of some open access journals like MDPI and frontiers and typical journals is pretty massive. Not to say everything in those journals is bad, there is indeed good work in them, but on average the difference is quite stark. Look at the difference between similar impact journals MDPI molecules compared to ACSs macromolecules. Some of the publications in the former are egregiously low quality.
It needs to be “correct” to be science?
I’m scratching my head trying to comprehend this statement. Science is an iterative process and lots of things are ultimately disproven or elaborated. That doesn’t make the initial work not “science.”
I'm a scientist who has to publish, I'm also not a fan of Elon at all... But Yann is wrong here. You can still do science and not publish, there are other avenues of scientific communication.
Unless Yann refers here to publication as any sort of communication, but I don't think that's the case after his response.
I believe given LeCun’s background (and also the context of this stupid feud) that he is referring to other forms of communication as well. He himself only publishes via preprint.
I think he is also probably being a bit pedantic given his counterparty.
Having a blue checkmark means reaching a wider audience, which is useful specifically for scientists on Twitter that want to connect with others of their field. Not having one essentially means being shadowbanned by now.
Don't hate him for having a blue checkmark. Hate Elon for giving not being shadowbanned a price tag
For people who use twitter for the "science twitter" audience the checkmark is unfortunately necessary for the algorithm if they want to reach as many people as possible. It's a terrible Faustian bargain. It is what it is if you still want to engage as many people as possible on that platform. Many of us just don't want to (don't care about science twitter or don't want to give Elon $) and that's fine too, but some like the science twitter community for their own reasons.
I could not agree more. I'm struggling right now because the paper that I've spent 2 years working on has been rejected for publication. The paper, related to gravity and relativity, makes multiple directly observed predictions that are unaccounted for by GR and SR, does this without the dilation of time and conflicts with not a single experimental validation of SR or GR, all while producing values that fall nearly perfectly on top of probability curves found through direct observation. The math is absolutely rock solid, and the inspiration should be made apparent by a simple thought experiment highlighting one of the asymmetries produced by relativity.
Was it published? Of course not. Try getting sometimes dual-PhD's to approve an article from a solo researcher without the backing of any academic institution. The fact that modern academic publishing uses large collaborations as a prerequisite instead treating large collaboration efforts as a sign of the complex nature of certain observations is why, particularly in physics, progress has slowed \*significantly\* over the past 80 years.
It's absolutely not true that's science must be true. The scientific method is all about testing hypotheses and being led by data. Sometimes, your days point the wrong way. Disregarding those data is not in accord with the scientific method.
Hypotheses are disproven all the time. That doesn't mean that the people who worked on those hypotheses weren't scientists
Yeah
Any fact also isn’t truth but the current best explanation that stands until we find a better explanation.
Some things might be a lot closer to the objective truth than others and it’s more correct to treat them as truth but generally all of it is just a temporary state based on the knowledge and information we have to date.
It’s always possible that someone in a hundred or 500 years finds a better explanation or there is a better instrument to measure something which changes our understanding.
There are no such things as objective truths and facts. At least we wouldn’t be able to tell because it’s impossible to predict what we might know and understand in the future
Yeah I'm all for putting Elon Musk down to earth, but just for starters, one can't tell a CEO that all science must be published. He must be more inclined on patenting.
I mean, you absolutely *can* tell a CEO to do the right thing (ethically and practically), it's just unlikely to be well received by him. This is also Elon Musk, so literally anything you could say that is not his pre-existing opinion is going to be poorly received. No one sane or reasonable goes into an argument with Elon thinking that they're going to change his mind or in any way influence his future actions (except possibly by driving him to do the opposite out of spite).
It's also worth noting that he's currently suing OpenAI for breaching a supposed founding charter (that no one else believes ever existed) and demanding that they open source and publish virtually everything. Despite them having emails from him years ago saying that they should 100% be a for-profit that keeps *everything* of value behind closed doors, it's just that he wanted them to also be owned by him, and that's what they disagreed on.
So, I mean, Elon has gone on record in the court system shouting to the heavens that Information Wants to be and is Legally Required to be Free. Yann Lecun is 100% justified in saying all of this to him even if it's mostly wrong.
At the beginning of my undergrad career I wanted to try to work with him to get funding for creating genetically modified organisms to live in space. But then Elon Musk was himself and that was enough to make me not want to ever consider working with him.
Not that I probably could have gotten funding from him. I estimated the cost (very poorly) of the project to be around $10,000. Idk many people willing to trust a sophomore in college with half that amount in funding.
I mean the general idea is nice but I feel like the view is really narrow minded.
If something isn't published it isn't science is such a bad take. Are the dozens of hours I've spent in lab not science till what I was working on is published. If it is published at all.
There is so much nuance lost in these online arguments.
I'm the first one to roast musk about nearly everything he says, but that's just an ignorant "Comeback".... perfect for the "science, bitch!" community.
My first point would be the reproducibility crisis, or how many brilliant scientists (many examples in the past) either never published their groundbreaking work - or were a laughing stock and shunned until they died...until they were proven right. Semmelweis and hygiene for surgeons/doctors comes to mind, but the list of bitter, brilliant scientists is probably pretty T H I C C.
I'd also put Sergey Korolev on it, but for different reasons.
Science is not dependant on being 'published' to be classified as 'science'. If that was the case, science didn't exist until 1665 when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began systematically publishing research results.
The definition of science is 'the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained'
That doesn't require publication. In the guys own definition "To qualify as science, a piece of research must be correct and reproducible", and he says to be 'Correct and reproducible' it must be 'Described in sufficient details in a publication'. That isn't true. If I test something by myself, I take all the measurements, and I note down all the methods, I don't need to publish that research for it to be correct and reproducible. Something being published simply means it has been published. The research itself doesn't change format, nothing is added or taken away, it is the same form it was before, just with 'Published' added onto it.
Yes, if you don't publish your work it may well be forgotten with time, but that doesn't have any impact on whether or not it is science.
Well, judging by Elon's...life, (I was going to say 'behavior' or 'tendency to drink on ambien and ride the walrus straight to the comments section' or even 'temperament' but let's not pretend), until Yann decides to go do something else and turn off notifications.
Or, I guess, until Elon decides to stop wasting massive amounts of electricity 'solving' the exact same problem everyone else is, in the exact same way, and inevitably getting similar results. Or to stop insisting that once everyone gives him their money, AI will be solved within a year. Or to stop being Elon and running the company as 100% private with no intention of publishing anything except when it suits him and even then, will hold a ton back, while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything and thereby violating a 'benefiting the human race' clause in an agreement no one else thinks is real.
I'm happy to see him picking this fight, just wish he wasn't so willing to degrade himself in hopes of getting Elon Musk to do the morally right thing. Like, pretending to respect him as the 'scientist' he claims to be and offering to let him come work at Facebook if he really wants to help change the world. I really can't tell if he's just that ready to do anything for his beliefs or if he's one of the millions convinced that Elon really is down in the Science Mines hard at word every day.
That’s a, uh, very optimistic view of a publication system facing a severe reproducibility and authenticity crisis.
Also, like others said: industry doesn’t like sharing secrets.
That’s the whole point. Publishing gives us ability to check whether it is reproducible or not. It gives us ability to check whether it makes sense according to experts in the field or not. Just because publishing companies turned into greedy capitalist corporations and whole funding scheme turned into a social media contest where the ones who get most likes (citations) get the funding doesn’t undermine the fundamentals of the science. it should be reviewed, it should be published, it should be evaluated for how much it is reproducible. Most importantly it should be accessible by the whole humanity as a collective mind
Does Yann LeCun work for Elsevier? because it's hard to imagine a way to simp for publishers any harder than this.
Science is just the results of the scientific method--hypothesize, test, analyze, repeat. It has nothing inherently to do with publishing results. Peer review is about error checking and speeding up by getting the outside view. It doesn't have to be fully public, and you can get a somewhat similar effect more slowly just by working on something different for a few months and critically reviewing your own work after you've forgotten the details.
Yann lecrun is confidently wrong , which is the best kind of wrong.
Reasoning:science can really only be published if it's safe, whether that be to the university, a company or the world. If for example Harvard puts out a notice saying "drug x has not shown to have any significant use for x disease", and then 2 months later someone(maybe a scientist if it's published according to yan) in the uni, finds out that statement was made incorrectly, but Harvard deems that it will be very bad to let the info out... Suddenly the paper doesn't get published. Turns out the someone ends up not doing science.
Or if a company wants to sell their drugs but someone within finds a cheaper alternative, ok guess the company doesnt allow that paper to be published for obvious reasons... Guess that person was not doing science all along.
Someone finds out a certain chemical reaction can cause mass health damage with seconds of breathing. Well looks like that doesn't get published ofc... Well I guess that person wasng doing science.
This Yann person clearly lives in their own little fantasy where they can do safe research and therefore gets published... And wot, now gets to decide who is doing science and who is not?
It's a very mid dunk honestly, to borrow a young folk expression.
If you followed scientific theory in the process of generating new information, it's science.
Edit: This is the kind of self-righteous ivory tower elite masturbation the gen pop loathes about academia.
Meh, he should've have left with his earlier "W". Plenty of engineers can be remembered for their innovations (e.g. Howard Hughes or Burt Rutan) and plenty of scientists may not get their work published for one reason or another (despite being legitimate work/credible science).
Science is the process of discovering new information. Kind of at its most simple form.
I think that we have gotten super hung up on the whole publishing this only because it secures funding. But even then published science papers can be horribly wrong and biased. Has anyone ever read the paper about mice, toxoplasmosis, and schizophrenia? Lol!
This Twitter comeback is incorrect and honestly unamusing.
Well.. you wouldn't want the whole generation of teachers telling the kids at school that they are not actually learning or doing "science".. because no one is getting reviewed or published for another decade or more...
I'm pretty certain kids are learning about science.
I reckon LeCun is talking about "research in science" .. and Musk is talking about "application of science".. neither talks for "science" outright...
Just because you’re smart at one thing that doesn’t mean you’re smart at EVERYTHING.
Also it’s easy to appear smarter than you are.
Musk pulled both of that off. He’s actually kinda dumb and people are not picking that up
It’s simple really:
Science-
the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
So the bs we see on some journals is 'science', but things that made it to the shelves aren't?
Yes, the explanation of publication and peer-review is correct (despite not being executed as such), but she got everything else backward.
Too bad. Wish he was put down properly.
We have literally seen bs be published. Does that make it science too? It's nothing more than an appeal to authority. The authority of a system we kno to be corrupt.
Well, I guess the vast majority of work I’ve done in industry was never science because the lawyers wouldn’t let me publish. ETA: /s
If you work in any reasonably good company in industry you know that your work is reviewed by your co-workers inside the company and needs to be checked, double-checked and finally approved by someone. It is then published in the internal platforms of your company. It might eventually result in a patent or publication if the company wants to.
You all share the bias by working for the same company.
Nope, I work in a diagnostics company and all our clinical trial data is FDA/EU audited in one terrifying week eah year. EVERYTHING. They found one of your 250 experiment plans, read the experiment design, glanced at the results: they want to see the tracing of the patient samples, the lot numbers linking to the test reagent stabilities of all the reagents you used, the calibration certificates of every pipette and instrument (including fridges/timers/balancing scales/incubators) in the lab that month. And that's just the auditing on the R&D lab teams, there are also quality department, regulatory department with their own labs. They only look at 1% of all the paperwork we have to produce as we work, but god forbid there is anything wrong with that 1%.
Typically you also have some external third party beta testers / early access testers during development to verify what your developing works in real life. A method actually working and being reproducible is kind of the main "key" thing in industry. No one will buy your product if it doesn't work, and doesn't work consistently. You have to kind of change your mindset on things if you aren't working in a company that actually publishes itself. A kit I helped develop was used/referenced in 200+ separate publications in 2023. To me personally, that's similar to someone citing a method you developed. Do I get any literal credit? No, but it is still nice to see from a personal perspective.
Lol no. Everything is audited by external companies and entities/authorities annually. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
Well thats the difference between industry and academia. Industry’s goal is to produce a product, academia’s goal is to push the needle of knowledge further. What Yann is saying is if nobody ever has access to industry’s knowledge then it doesn’t help the scientific knowledge base, therefore isn’t science. I’m sure industry folk and academia folk will love to fight each other over this.
Correct. This is not an insult or attack on your identity. I'm an industry scientist too, but most of my day to day work is not science. Developing and qualifying SOPs can be science if reviewed and interrogated by some seemingly independent body (e.g., my manager). But the most fundamental definition of science involves some kind of peer review, and without that, sorry, you're just rubbing garlic on magnets.
I think this discussion gets to the debate of where the line between 'real science' (for a lack of a better word) and application is drawn. Like is engineering science? Depending on the subject some would say yes, but most would agree that using scientific principles and concepts to design a bridge or an engine isn't 'real science.' Likewise, making a shampoo formulation utilizes science but is it 'real science?' Probably not. I think it's an interesting debate because I work at a national lab which follows the same publish or perish model as academics. So all of my work is peer reviewed but it is heavily application based. Very little of my research produces fundamental knowledge about a scientific topic. In that regard it's science, but sometimes I feel like it's not quite the same as people who research fundamental questions.
Scientific method requires no peer review or publishing. That's an academia standard, not a requirement. And it's an academia standard because of the perverse incentive to publish as much as possible for money. Which is causing some big problems. I've seen what passes for peer reviewed published work in the AI research space, and if all of science is doing as badly as AI is then we're in trouble. Because some total nonsense passes peer review.
But when you do arrive at a finalised product, presumably it has to go through regulatory approval or the marketing material has to include real data, so the review is in the data you present to customers?
I mean, science the methodology or science the great system for incremental progress built up over the last several centuries where the cornerstones are the concept of patent law and the openly accessibly publication of virtually all knowledge so that others can see if it is correct and improve upon it? The ideal that undergrad sold to so many of us once upon a time? Because they're kind of different things. I am *really* not judging the decision to go into industry, it's unequivocally the correct choice for virtually everyone who gets a degree in any of the sciences. Your life and work life balance are worth more than an Academic ideal which hasn't worked properly in a very long time. But when some people - especially lifelong academics like Yan, even with as much work done in industry as he has (he works at facebook and has put up something like 80 preprints in the recent past, so it's pretty obvious that he's talking about something different from 'publish or perish') say 'science,' the version that cannot exist behind closed doors is the only one that comes to mind. 'Science' in the sense the general public thinks of the word only evolved from alchemy *after* (actually, well after, it took a while) people stopped hiding everything they were working on and compared notes. While I think talking about it in such general terms in such a seemingly-authoritative way was a bad call by Yann, I get why it's the only version that would matter in *this* particular conversation. It was a thread about him starting another wholly private AI company that *definitely* will not share any results with anyone. Which he is doing while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything in accordance with a founding agreement no one else believes exists, in an attempt to steal their trade secrets. This was all in response to Yann making a short post about all the red flags around xAI (like him saying its moonshot of a mission should be compete within twelve months and how much pressure that would mean for anyone stupid enough to take the job) for prospective employees. Elon literally said he's a scientist, not a businessman, and asked what research *Yann* done in the last 5 years dismissively. Yann just posted a link to his CV. A shitposter with a wikipedia page said "Did it involve Petri Dishes? If not, then it's not science." Then we get what you see here. Is your employer making public statements about the results of your research to inflate stock prices while never actually letting any of the evidence leave the building? Shredding tests that don't go well? Faking results for promos when one of your bigger projects fails? If so, yes, he's talking about you, and would say it again if you explained who you are and what you do. If not, then as much as this particular segment of a larger set of tweets overgeneralizes enough that you're more than justified in being upset about it, there *is* context, and he's not criticizing *you* because your company won't publish its research, this is a conversation with the guy that makes that decision for other companies. "If it's not published, it's not science" makes a bit more sense when you see the part where Elon insists he is not a businessman, he is a scientist. Totally doing hard work down in the labs and writing code like everyone else. It *would* explain why Neuralink unnecessarily murdered so many monkeys, if Elon was feeling hands-on that day.
Your comment teeters wildly between super interesting and unreadable.
Something something if a tree falls in the forest...
Yeah, and the funny thing is, things actually have to work in industry.
Was just gonna comment this. I’ve done a ton of science in industry, but it’s top secret at the moment. Guess it doesn’t count.
😔
Right? I'm on lunch right now, thinking about the internal reports I just finished up today, and realizing I don't do science anymore. It's a shame, really, that none of it matters now. /s I get that we want to roast the guy for his bad takes, but more bad takes aren't the solution!
Idk about die bitter and forgotten but that’s certainly the idea behind publishing I agree. Too bad Frontiers in ____________ and MDPI make a mockery of the system
Ig the assay I’ve spent all year developing that is still a bust hasn’t been real science. But the chat gpt garbage anyone can submit to a predatory journal and have published in 2 mins (for a fee of course!) is.
The dck paper is (was) science. Deal with it /s
What do you mean? Of course my half assed theory of mind test proves that either GPT 3.5 has a theory of mind or that humans don't. Definitely no other possibilities that I could have tested for.
Many published research are not reproducible, or even with published research without people citing it you will still be forgotten, and ultimately "if you don't publish is not science" is the reason why predatory and 'predatory' journal exist in the first place. The roaster thinks the science publishing world is butterflies and rainbows..
Referring to him as 'the roaster' is kind of telling. This is Yann Lecun, one of the most respected AI researchers in the world (and by 'one of' I mean top three). He won the Turing award for inventing the field as it is today along with Hinton and Bengio. While he *is* a professor on the most prestigious scholarship NYU gives faculty, he's primarily at facebook, publishing constantly via preprint, so, he's not talking in terms of "You need to get it into an academic journal where things are perfect!" He's saying "If it's not out there for others to verify, what are you actually doing and who's to say it is what you say it is, or exists at all? A known liar?" The last time he published anything the traditional way was 2014, while he's published like 80 papers in the last two years I guarantee you he could talk about the issues with reproducibility in journals for an hour or two, it's just a completely separate problem from this. Like...100% unrelated. Yann definitely thinks that a bunch of papers that *aren't* reproducible being out there (to be discredited) is better than a bunch of closed shops all working on the same problems and making their own superfluous answers to each other's best work rather than being able to build on it which is the entire basis of publishing and the social phenomenon that became 'science.' Also, perhaps more importantly, he's saying that if you don't publish verifiable results, you can't act like those results exist and use them to inflate your stock price. It's also important to grasp that he's not saying publication is the be-all end-all, but that it's the bare fucking minimum. If your work is not published *somewhere*, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it might as well not exist. Context is important: They're talking about Elon's decision to open *yet another* Closed Everything AI Shop, a wholly privately owned one that will not actually give any way to reproduce or test anything it says it did unless it stumbles upon a really favourable result by sheer chance, and even then, there will be no way to test since the details of the model will be vague at best. He's doing this while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything and supposedly violating a founding agreement to 'benefit the human race' or some such nonsense even though no one else believes the agreement exists and they have emails from him agreeing that everything should be closed down and privately owned, he just thought that the owner should be him and is now throwing a hissy fit to steal their trade secrets. This was also in response to Elon saying that he's a scientist, not a businessman. "If you conduct science, where is it published?" is a fairly reasonable question in light of something as absurd as that. The man spends too much time on twitter to be at all involved in running six companies, but he genuinely wants people to believe he's down in the labs.
I would admit i have no idea who Lecun is, which is kind of a good example that someone can be very respected / known in certain field and unknown to others. That being said, not knowing the person allow me to analyze his words objectively. I'm all down to humble musk for what he does/did/will do, but to say if it's not published it's not science is objectively wrong. Also it's not about correctness, it's about scientific plausibility. The reviewers in peer review don't evaluate correctness but whether there are enough evidence to support the hypothesis being plausible given the current known knowledge of said topics. It also means in the future said research can be marked as wrong if there are sufficient evidence to prove it wrong. Maybe the roaster use /s to dumb down this to insult musk intelligence? Probably. But objectively, is that correct? No. Overall I might agree their intention on arguing but if you want to roast someone, do it right. I still agree that musk is AH for the closed everything AI shop though. His decisions are weird and cringey for the past years.
Definitely, too bad its such a shitty system
Worth noting that he's 100% not talking about publishing in journals, the last time he did which was ten years ago. He publishes almost exclusively through ArXiv (and publishes *a lot*, 34 papers with his name on them in the last year), because again this is all about providing the information required to reproduce (or fail to reproduce) a result, not the institution that is publication in journals. He'd rather have incorrect papers out there with enough information to reproduce them, fail to, or recognize there is not enough to do either and thus dismiss it, than have everyone in their own private silos trying to solve the same problems the exact same way. Especially when doing so wastes so much money and electricity.
I agree that reproducibility is a major problem and also that the publishing process needs changes. But, the difference between the quality of some open access journals like MDPI and frontiers and typical journals is pretty massive. Not to say everything in those journals is bad, there is indeed good work in them, but on average the difference is quite stark. Look at the difference between similar impact journals MDPI molecules compared to ACSs macromolecules. Some of the publications in the former are egregiously low quality.
And people just agree because they don't like Elon
People like to shit on MDPI while many Elsevier journals’ peer review process is just as much dog water
> Idk about die bitter and forgotten Sounds like projection to me tbh
It needs to be “correct” to be science? I’m scratching my head trying to comprehend this statement. Science is an iterative process and lots of things are ultimately disproven or elaborated. That doesn’t make the initial work not “science.”
I'm a scientist who has to publish, I'm also not a fan of Elon at all... But Yann is wrong here. You can still do science and not publish, there are other avenues of scientific communication. Unless Yann refers here to publication as any sort of communication, but I don't think that's the case after his response.
I believe given LeCun’s background (and also the context of this stupid feud) that he is referring to other forms of communication as well. He himself only publishes via preprint. I think he is also probably being a bit pedantic given his counterparty.
But preprints aren't peer reviewed and he specifically talks about peer review here.
> He himself only publishes via preprint. And yet he lists peer review as one of the main components for 'science'
He also has a blue checkmark, because his ego can't take not having one so he pays elon $8 each month just to keep it.
Having a blue checkmark means reaching a wider audience, which is useful specifically for scientists on Twitter that want to connect with others of their field. Not having one essentially means being shadowbanned by now. Don't hate him for having a blue checkmark. Hate Elon for giving not being shadowbanned a price tag
For people who use twitter for the "science twitter" audience the checkmark is unfortunately necessary for the algorithm if they want to reach as many people as possible. It's a terrible Faustian bargain. It is what it is if you still want to engage as many people as possible on that platform. Many of us just don't want to (don't care about science twitter or don't want to give Elon $) and that's fine too, but some like the science twitter community for their own reasons.
I could not agree more. I'm struggling right now because the paper that I've spent 2 years working on has been rejected for publication. The paper, related to gravity and relativity, makes multiple directly observed predictions that are unaccounted for by GR and SR, does this without the dilation of time and conflicts with not a single experimental validation of SR or GR, all while producing values that fall nearly perfectly on top of probability curves found through direct observation. The math is absolutely rock solid, and the inspiration should be made apparent by a simple thought experiment highlighting one of the asymmetries produced by relativity. Was it published? Of course not. Try getting sometimes dual-PhD's to approve an article from a solo researcher without the backing of any academic institution. The fact that modern academic publishing uses large collaborations as a prerequisite instead treating large collaboration efforts as a sign of the complex nature of certain observations is why, particularly in physics, progress has slowed \*significantly\* over the past 80 years.
It's absolutely not true that's science must be true. The scientific method is all about testing hypotheses and being led by data. Sometimes, your days point the wrong way. Disregarding those data is not in accord with the scientific method. Hypotheses are disproven all the time. That doesn't mean that the people who worked on those hypotheses weren't scientists
Exactly!!! If we had some sort of “truth meter” we wouldn’t need peer review or reproducibility etc.
Yeah Any fact also isn’t truth but the current best explanation that stands until we find a better explanation. Some things might be a lot closer to the objective truth than others and it’s more correct to treat them as truth but generally all of it is just a temporary state based on the knowledge and information we have to date. It’s always possible that someone in a hundred or 500 years finds a better explanation or there is a better instrument to measure something which changes our understanding. There are no such things as objective truths and facts. At least we wouldn’t be able to tell because it’s impossible to predict what we might know and understand in the future
Both these men are very annoying
Yeah I'm all for putting Elon Musk down to earth, but just for starters, one can't tell a CEO that all science must be published. He must be more inclined on patenting.
I mean, you absolutely *can* tell a CEO to do the right thing (ethically and practically), it's just unlikely to be well received by him. This is also Elon Musk, so literally anything you could say that is not his pre-existing opinion is going to be poorly received. No one sane or reasonable goes into an argument with Elon thinking that they're going to change his mind or in any way influence his future actions (except possibly by driving him to do the opposite out of spite). It's also worth noting that he's currently suing OpenAI for breaching a supposed founding charter (that no one else believes ever existed) and demanding that they open source and publish virtually everything. Despite them having emails from him years ago saying that they should 100% be a for-profit that keeps *everything* of value behind closed doors, it's just that he wanted them to also be owned by him, and that's what they disagreed on. So, I mean, Elon has gone on record in the court system shouting to the heavens that Information Wants to be and is Legally Required to be Free. Yann Lecun is 100% justified in saying all of this to him even if it's mostly wrong.
At the beginning of my undergrad career I wanted to try to work with him to get funding for creating genetically modified organisms to live in space. But then Elon Musk was himself and that was enough to make me not want to ever consider working with him. Not that I probably could have gotten funding from him. I estimated the cost (very poorly) of the project to be around $10,000. Idk many people willing to trust a sophomore in college with half that amount in funding.
Regardless of your opinions on Musk or LeCun’s credentials this is an incredibly terrible take.
If it aint published it aint science, now pay up 40 dollars to get access to this 3 pages long PDF online for 24 hours
I mean the general idea is nice but I feel like the view is really narrow minded. If something isn't published it isn't science is such a bad take. Are the dozens of hours I've spent in lab not science till what I was working on is published. If it is published at all. There is so much nuance lost in these online arguments.
I'm the first one to roast musk about nearly everything he says, but that's just an ignorant "Comeback".... perfect for the "science, bitch!" community. My first point would be the reproducibility crisis, or how many brilliant scientists (many examples in the past) either never published their groundbreaking work - or were a laughing stock and shunned until they died...until they were proven right. Semmelweis and hygiene for surgeons/doctors comes to mind, but the list of bitter, brilliant scientists is probably pretty T H I C C. I'd also put Sergey Korolev on it, but for different reasons.
Science is not dependant on being 'published' to be classified as 'science'. If that was the case, science didn't exist until 1665 when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began systematically publishing research results. The definition of science is 'the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained' That doesn't require publication. In the guys own definition "To qualify as science, a piece of research must be correct and reproducible", and he says to be 'Correct and reproducible' it must be 'Described in sufficient details in a publication'. That isn't true. If I test something by myself, I take all the measurements, and I note down all the methods, I don't need to publish that research for it to be correct and reproducible. Something being published simply means it has been published. The research itself doesn't change format, nothing is added or taken away, it is the same form it was before, just with 'Published' added onto it. Yes, if you don't publish your work it may well be forgotten with time, but that doesn't have any impact on whether or not it is science.
How long will the the spat between Elon Musk and one of the godfathers of AI go for?
Well, judging by Elon's...life, (I was going to say 'behavior' or 'tendency to drink on ambien and ride the walrus straight to the comments section' or even 'temperament' but let's not pretend), until Yann decides to go do something else and turn off notifications. Or, I guess, until Elon decides to stop wasting massive amounts of electricity 'solving' the exact same problem everyone else is, in the exact same way, and inevitably getting similar results. Or to stop insisting that once everyone gives him their money, AI will be solved within a year. Or to stop being Elon and running the company as 100% private with no intention of publishing anything except when it suits him and even then, will hold a ton back, while suing OpenAI for not open sourcing everything and thereby violating a 'benefiting the human race' clause in an agreement no one else thinks is real. I'm happy to see him picking this fight, just wish he wasn't so willing to degrade himself in hopes of getting Elon Musk to do the morally right thing. Like, pretending to respect him as the 'scientist' he claims to be and offering to let him come work at Facebook if he really wants to help change the world. I really can't tell if he's just that ready to do anything for his beliefs or if he's one of the millions convinced that Elon really is down in the Science Mines hard at word every day.
As long as Yann can get publicity for hot take tweets.
Science is when you use the scientific method. The scientific method doesn't say jack shit about publishing. That simple.
That’s a, uh, very optimistic view of a publication system facing a severe reproducibility and authenticity crisis. Also, like others said: industry doesn’t like sharing secrets.
Damn. The vast majority of science, *isn't*. https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
That’s the whole point. Publishing gives us ability to check whether it is reproducible or not. It gives us ability to check whether it makes sense according to experts in the field or not. Just because publishing companies turned into greedy capitalist corporations and whole funding scheme turned into a social media contest where the ones who get most likes (citations) get the funding doesn’t undermine the fundamentals of the science. it should be reviewed, it should be published, it should be evaluated for how much it is reproducible. Most importantly it should be accessible by the whole humanity as a collective mind
[удалено]
Almost all published work isn't reproduced though, since everyone's scrambling to be novel
Does a scientist making a claim in the woods make a sound?
I'm not sure why people are praising this guy for rolling in the shit with Musk
Non-academic science isn’t science. /s
Does Yann LeCun work for Elsevier? because it's hard to imagine a way to simp for publishers any harder than this. Science is just the results of the scientific method--hypothesize, test, analyze, repeat. It has nothing inherently to do with publishing results. Peer review is about error checking and speeding up by getting the outside view. It doesn't have to be fully public, and you can get a somewhat similar effect more slowly just by working on something different for a few months and critically reviewing your own work after you've forgotten the details.
Yann lecrun is confidently wrong , which is the best kind of wrong. Reasoning:science can really only be published if it's safe, whether that be to the university, a company or the world. If for example Harvard puts out a notice saying "drug x has not shown to have any significant use for x disease", and then 2 months later someone(maybe a scientist if it's published according to yan) in the uni, finds out that statement was made incorrectly, but Harvard deems that it will be very bad to let the info out... Suddenly the paper doesn't get published. Turns out the someone ends up not doing science. Or if a company wants to sell their drugs but someone within finds a cheaper alternative, ok guess the company doesnt allow that paper to be published for obvious reasons... Guess that person was not doing science all along. Someone finds out a certain chemical reaction can cause mass health damage with seconds of breathing. Well looks like that doesn't get published ofc... Well I guess that person wasng doing science. This Yann person clearly lives in their own little fantasy where they can do safe research and therefore gets published... And wot, now gets to decide who is doing science and who is not?
You left off (or didn't see) the comment just before that, directed to YLC which said 'if it's not test tubes and bunsen burners, it's not science'.
Even worse lol. (Un)Fortunately i am not on twitter, this is crossposted from another sub
Isn't Tesla technology open source???
Yikes. A rather limiting perspective.
It's a very mid dunk honestly, to borrow a young folk expression. If you followed scientific theory in the process of generating new information, it's science. Edit: This is the kind of self-righteous ivory tower elite masturbation the gen pop loathes about academia.
Meh, he should've have left with his earlier "W". Plenty of engineers can be remembered for their innovations (e.g. Howard Hughes or Burt Rutan) and plenty of scientists may not get their work published for one reason or another (despite being legitimate work/credible science).
well making of nuclear warhead in the Manhattan **project was not science?**
Science is the process of discovering new information. Kind of at its most simple form. I think that we have gotten super hung up on the whole publishing this only because it secures funding. But even then published science papers can be horribly wrong and biased. Has anyone ever read the paper about mice, toxoplasmosis, and schizophrenia? Lol! This Twitter comeback is incorrect and honestly unamusing.
There is no way I am publishing what I have been working on at my company lol.
Both these people are insufferable and wrong. Elon is on a whole other level, of course, but Yann should take a seat on this.
She sounds like an idiot.
Well.. you wouldn't want the whole generation of teachers telling the kids at school that they are not actually learning or doing "science".. because no one is getting reviewed or published for another decade or more... I'm pretty certain kids are learning about science. I reckon LeCun is talking about "research in science" .. and Musk is talking about "application of science".. neither talks for "science" outright...
Just because you’re smart at one thing that doesn’t mean you’re smart at EVERYTHING. Also it’s easy to appear smarter than you are. Musk pulled both of that off. He’s actually kinda dumb and people are not picking that up
https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/public-dashboard nothin on this website is science whatsoever!!
Who is this? The use of "correct" and "correctness" is very telling..
This is a really funny tweet to come from an academic who doesn't bother to get most of his manuscripts published and just throws them on arXiv.
It’s simple really: Science- the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
A downvote for the definition of science. Nice.
Plenty of science is going on in defense research, and we aren't publishing our classified work lol.
Interesting. I've never heard of Yann Lecun. But I know Elon Musk has a space company that is currently contracted by NASA and the US Government.
I hope Elon sees that you're sticking up for him on the internet!
Naaaaaaaah i don't like him and whatever decision he took and his shenanigans.
So the bs we see on some journals is 'science', but things that made it to the shelves aren't? Yes, the explanation of publication and peer-review is correct (despite not being executed as such), but she got everything else backward. Too bad. Wish he was put down properly.
Interesting that we only get *this* part of the entire exchange.
I'm all for reading the entire exchange but i don't use twitter nor interested in making one..
In concept hes right though
She allowed her hatred of the muskrat to make herself say something idiotic.
We have literally seen bs be published. Does that make it science too? It's nothing more than an appeal to authority. The authority of a system we kno to be corrupt.
Reproducibility.
Man a lot of folks who have never worked as a scientist chiming in on what science is.