Comment by lioeters
2 months ago
Not even wrong. Real scientists say "yes" to the genie with all the answers? And artists and crafts people don't? The entire statement is nonsense, and offers no insight into art or science. It's almost like a language model generated a plausible sentence that is grammatically correct but has no relation to the real world.
Perhaps if the analogy was between science and engineering.. A plumber would say "yes" to the genie that solves the problem immediately, if he/she got paid for the work instead of the genie (or the corporation providing the genie service). In that case the plumber is redundant and unnecessary, the customer can just ask the genie directly. A scientist would say "no" because the whole point of science is the knowledge and understanding, which is gained by the process of discovery and not given on a silver platter.
One should differentiate between "working in academia" and "doing science" here. Science is fundamentally about the curiosity, the desire to know, not the process of getting there.
If we can now know anything we want, we have an age of unimaginable abundance before us. I think it's more likely though that we will just be able to know more things than before and/or maybe learning new things faster - which is a good thing too, but there is still work for human scientists to do
No way. Science is not just about the desire to know. Almost all scientists I know (and I've met hundreds) care deeply about the joy of working out the problems themselves rather than just knowing the answers. The joy of finding that mental spark on your own to solve a problem - that's what makes it worthwhile. Just knowing everything right away is boring. If it were not, I'd just spend all the time in a library reading the work of others.
No, I think you're pretty overconfident here. A plumber is not in fact thrilled by the genie who permanently resolves all the world's plumbing problems.
I also kind of love the subtext in these responses that there is something suspect about crafts.
That thought experiment says more about your thoughts on plumbers than anything else.
I live in Chicagoland, which has the largest water reclamation facility on Earth in order to prevent the entire region's basements from flooding under storm water pressure. It doesn't work, and I have multiple times had the pleasure of watching from my basement stairs as plumbers waded through raw sewage to clear obstructions in the lines at my house. It's a tough job that requires a lot of skill and nobody is doing that for love.
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Their sentence makes perfect sense to me. Science is about knowledge, art is about the process of creation. Conflating the two is just doing a hobby at that point.
I think "being concerned with knowledge" and "being invested in the process of creation/discovery" can occur at the same time. There isn't a singular "scientific mindset" or set of values that differentiates what is and isn't science. It's just silly.