The First Transmissions From Science House

Metadata

• Author: Adam Mastroianni
• Full Title: The First Transmissions From Science House
• Category: #articles
• Summary:: The Science House is a new concept for conducting basic research and sharing it online. Two aspiring scientists are part of the inaugural Science House, exploring topics like unconventional pasta cooking methods and variations in sleep needs. The goal is to challenge common beliefs with skepticism and empiricism in scientific training.

Highlights

• That’s what a Science House does. It’s like a hacker house for basic research, a freestanding lab that does science and posts it directly to the internet, like this. You could form a Science House around any niche—a Weird Biology House, a Speculative Physics House, etc. (View Highlight)
• The focus of this house is training. We’re bringing a couple of aspiring scientists together, sticking ‘em in a house, giving ‘em some money and mentorship, and letting ‘em set sail. It’s kind of like a PhD program except it doesn’t give you clinical depression. (View Highlight)

• My initial reaction to this was shock and dismay. How could a person break one of the cardinal rules of cooking pasta? This quickly turned to confusion. What if the person was right? What if all these years I had been following the conventional wisdom of “Big Pasta” and waiting for my water to boil, when all along I could have been making my pasta in a million different ways? Violet and I were about to throw a party, so we figured this was a chance to get to the bottom of things. (View Highlight)

  • Note: Wow. Curiosity in action. I love this.
• When people are like, “you must salt your pasta water, or else it will taste awful,” or “you must sleep eight hours a night, or else you will die,” and they don’t have any data to back themselves up—that’s bullshit. It’s just people saying stuff, a bit of ventriloquism where someone’s lips move while they are, in fact, talking out of their butt. (View Highlight)
• The best defense against bullshit is skepticism. When Martha Stewart is out here slinging claims like, “Scientifically speaking, there’s only one valid reason to salt your pasta water: it seasons each noodle evenly from the inside out,” your immediate reaction should be “What the hell are you talking about?”¹ (View Highlight)
• The best offense is empiricism. If sleep and pasta are as obvious as people claim, then you should be able to run a study in your kitchen or your bedroom and see the giant effects for yourself. (View Highlight)
• is the cornerstone of scientific training, and no offense, but a lot of people out there seem to have skipped Bullshit Day during their PhD, because the level of their confidence and the quality of their evidence are all out of whack. (View Highlight)
• Case in point: when I suggested that maybe the universal pre-publication peer review system doesn’t work so well, a lot of people said something like, “Well, it’s not a great system, but it’s better than all the others.” This is a bullshit claim: exactly zero of those people have ever tried any other system. What they’re really saying is, “When I imagine other ways of doing things, I imagine that they won’t work as well.” But the thing about science is that, whenever possible, we replace thoughtexperiments with actual experiments, and we must never confuse the two. (View Highlight)
• To succeed in science—or anything else, really—your distaste for bullshit has to be outmatched by your love for truth. (View Highlight)
• If you want to learn science, PhD programs are still the only game in town. That is, to join a shiny new scientific institution, you must first become a refugee from an old, decrepit scientific institution. (View Highlight)