> anyone can learn to fix them at home with very few tools
Everytime I read comments like this I feel dumb. I'm fixing my own bikes, but it takes a lot of time and quite a few tools. Just learning how to properly adjust the derailleur took me quite a few hours. Youtube university forgot to mention that Shimano GRX 400 front derailleur has intermediate gears.
Many bike parts are not really standardized. It seems almost impossible to know in advance whether some part fits on my bike, I mostly have to try. Also, manufacturers keep changing how certain things work, and then Youtube university may be misleading because they show a previous generation.
Derailleur gears require more maintenance, and are IMO not worth the effort for city cycling. Get a bike with a hub gear (Shimano Nexus 8, which is more efficient than Nexus 7 or 3). If the terrain is flat enough, you could even opt for single gear. If you get a belt drive (instead of a chain), practically the only remaining maintenance are tires and brake pads.
+1 for hub gears - you just have to unlearn the habit of shifting gears while pedaling, because that can destroy your hub gear. And not lend your bike to anyone who might accidentally do that. Funnily enough, most bike sharing bicycles where I live have hub gears anyway, and many are in a pretty bad condition, I assume because they were used by people unaccustomed to hub gears...
Hub gears are simply amazing. Combined with a belt drive, they require almost no maintenance and they are completely silent. The best part is shifting gears while stopped. It's really useful in the city.
I'm building a gravel bike with drop bars, disc brakes, a steel frame and an Alfine 11 hub gear and a belt drive. I can't wait to ride it.
The rear derailleur on my cycle wasn't shifting as expected, and so I spent an afternoon following YouTube and adjusting its limit screw and barrel adjuster to no avail.
Finally gave up and took it to a shop, the mechanic took the cable out of the housing, wiped it down, greased and put it back in; the derailleur starts shifting normally.
"Easy to repair" doesn't necessarily mean you or I can repair it easy. It might mean someone, preferably a local, independent business, can repair it easy.
Depending on your city, there are ~~microworkshops~~ co-ops you can go visit full of troves of different second hand parts. You can rent some time there (~ 6 € for an hour) and they will give you all the tools you need to experiment and play with your own bike
Derailleur adjusting is hell. Even my preferred bike shop cannot adjust mine correctly. We've come to an agreement: as long as the front derailleur doesn't change gear and the higher gear on the rear one work, it's okay. No point spending time getting it perfect since it will not stick anyway.
I used to do my own maintenance, but considering how cheap the bike shop is, I prefer to give them my bike to have good service and advices. Note that it's not out of laziness or lack of tools since I repair cars as a hobby, which require much more tooling and time. And also since my bike is my daily vehicle, I'd rather have it serviced by a pro.
Parking where you want can be a problem. You won't have issues if you use a parking garage or park in the outskirts and then use public transportation.
If I understand your hypothesis correctly, the obvious counterexample is German. Germany had a very weak central authority for most of its history, a steady influx of non-native speakers, and still maintained its complexity.
That was due to the bad luck of inventing the printing press early on, and congealing a grammatical mess before it had a chance to chill out and simplify.
In Finland, ethnicity is fairly homogenous, and so is culture and language. The only exceptions are the Sami people (10,000 in Finland) and Finns of historically Swedish ethnicity. So in that sense, the white people of Finland are very homogenous.
I strongly believe that US-based categories of ethnicity do not work well in European contexts. We also try to avoide the term "race", that has a bit of historical baggage over here.
I had a quick look, because I know that immigration has definitely increased over recent years - both in terms of the acceptance of refugees, and those that chose to migrate here.
Wikipedia says:
As a result of recent immigration there are now also large groups of ethnic Russians, Estonians, Iraqis and Somalis in the country.
7.9% of the population is born abroad and 5.2% are foreign citizens.
I'll round up 7.9% to 10%, which basically says one in ten people in the country were born abroad. That's not a particularly homogeneous population - less than London, or other larger cities for sure, but given the small population of the country (5 million, ish) it's pretty impressive.
But yes, the whole American idea of "race" is weird as a European. Americans tend to mean "White" or "Black", but there's a lot of difference between a white Irish man, a white Scottish man, a white Italian man, and a white Bosnian man. Perhaps best not to really try to discuss that here, lest things get heated.
> But yes, the whole American idea of "race" is weird as a European. Americans tend to mean "White" or "Black", but there's a lot of difference between a white Irish man, a white Scottish man, a white Italian man, and a white Bosnian man.
But do "we" really ignore the tacit knowledge? I think you are wrong that "scientific literature" pretends those things.
The issue of "context of discovery" vs "context of justification" is a hundred years old. And modern accounts of measurement and modeling make it quite clear that there is much more going on than simply writing down numbers. Theories/hypotheses can come from anywhere, I don't think that is even disputed.
However, when doing science, maths, engineering, the question is often what people are even saying, and what counts as evidence that something works. You cannnot do this without abstractions, and at some point we'll have to agree what those abstractions are. Should we leave it to individual experience if LK-99 is a superconductor?
You don't need formal maths training to raise a barn or build a kayak because there is brutal feedback if you are wrong. You'll need maths training to learn how to be right about things that will not give you any feedback.
Deep down the brain is 100% discrete: Neurons are either firing or not. To me, the brain's biggest mistery is how it goes from this to doing all the analogue stuff, and ends up with our capacity to deal with symbols.
Sorry, but this is untrue; action potentials in neurons have extremely complex interplay with each other, including residual “soft” periods and chemically-induced changes in how they fire. Neurons don’t just “fire” or “not fire”, they adaptively change the strength of their firing constantly, unpredictably and continuously.
Yes, and there's things like feedback / reflection, self-modifying like behaviour, lossy memory, emotional state, tiredness, aging, loads of drugs & hormones to influence the process, etc, etc.
Buuuttt... it's possible that few if any of those things are needed to capture the essence of a brains' functionality.
Maybe it's simply a matter of size. Maybe some configuration tweaks. Perhaps a different architecture.
You just described the majority of scientific papers. A "working set of instructions" is not really feasible in most cases. You can't include every piece of hard- and software required to replicate your own setup.
Then don't call it science, since it doesn't contribute anything to the body of human knowledge.
I think it's fascinating that we can at the same time hold things like "one is none" to be true, or that you should write tests first, but with science we already got so used to a lack of discipline that we just declare it fine.
It's not hard to not climb a tower you can't get down from. It's the default, actually. You start with something small where you can describe everything that goes into replicating it. Then you replicate it yourself, based on your own instructions. Before that, you don't bother anyone else with it. Once that is done, and others can replicate as well, it "actually exists".
And if that means the majority of stuff has to be thrown out, I'd suggest doing that sooner rather than later, instead of just accumulating scientific debt.
This is a very simplistic view. Why do believe QC departments exist? Even in an industrial setting, companies make the same thing at the same place on the same equipment after sometimes years of process optimisation of well understood technology. This is essentially a best case scenario and still results fail to reproduce. How are scientists who work at the cutting edge of technology with much smaller budgets supposed to give instructions that can be easily reproduced on first go? Moreover how are they supposed to easily reproduce other results?
That is not to say that scientist should not document the process to their best ability so it can be reproduced in principle. I'm just arguing that it is impossible to easily reproduce other people's results. Again when chemical/manufacturing companies open another location they often spend months to years to make the process work in the new factory.
> companies make the same thing at the same place on the same equipment after sometimes years of process optimisation of well understood technology. This is essentially a best case scenario and still results fail to reproduce.
We're not talking about 1 of 10 reproduction attempts failing, we're talking about 100%. And no, companies don't time and time again try to reproduce something that has never been reproduced and fail, to then try again, endlessly. That's just not a thing.
> it is impossible to easily reproduce other people's results
We're also not talking about "easily" reproducing something, but at all. And in principle doesn't cut it, it needs to be reproduced in practice.
Imagine two scientists, Bob and Alice. Bob has spent the last 5 years examining a theory thoroughly. Now he can explain down to the last detail why the theory does not hold water, and why generations of researchers have been wrong about the issue. Unfortunately, he cannot offer an alternative, and nobody else can follow his long winded arguments anyway.
Meanwhile, Alice has spent the last 5 years making the best possible use of the flawed theory, and published a lot of original research. Sure, many of her publications are rubbish, but a few contain interesting results. Contrary to Bob, Alice can show actual results and has publications.
Who do you believe will remain in academia? And, according to public perception, will seem more like an actual scientist?
Academic science isn’t just the doing science part but the articulation and presentation of your work to the broader community. If Bob knows this space so well, he should be able to clearly communicate the issue and, ideally, present an easily understandable counter example to the existing theory.
Technical folks undervalue presentation when writing articles and presenting at conferences. The burden of proof is on the presenter, and, unless there’s some incredible demonstration at the end, most researchers won’t have the time or attention to slog through your mess of a paper to decipher it. There’s only so much time in the day and too many papers to read.
In my experience, the best researchers are also the best presenters. I’ve been to great talks out of my domain that I left feeling like I understood the importance of their work despite not understanding the details. I’ve also seen many talks in my field that I thought were awful because the presentation was convoluted or they didn’t motivate the importance of their problem / why their work addressed it
I disagree that Bob doesn't produce actual results, or that something that is mostly rubbish, but partly "interesting" is an actual result. We know the current incentives are all sorts of broken, across the board. Goodhart's law and all that. To me the question isn't who remains in academia given the current broken model, but who would remain in academia in one that isn't as broken.
To put a point on it, if public distrust of science becomes big enough, it all can go away before you can say "cultural revolution" or "fascist strongman". Then there'd be no more academia, and its shell would be inhabited by party members, so to speak. I'd gladly sacrifice the ability of Alice and others like her to live off producing "mostly rubbish" to at least have a chance to save science itself.
Everytime I read comments like this I feel dumb. I'm fixing my own bikes, but it takes a lot of time and quite a few tools. Just learning how to properly adjust the derailleur took me quite a few hours. Youtube university forgot to mention that Shimano GRX 400 front derailleur has intermediate gears.
Many bike parts are not really standardized. It seems almost impossible to know in advance whether some part fits on my bike, I mostly have to try. Also, manufacturers keep changing how certain things work, and then Youtube university may be misleading because they show a previous generation.