[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.]
Very short one to start things off. I have a new twitter bio and I wanted to explain it.
Like everything else in my head it comes from mashing two things together and deciding that they are the same thing. First, here’s an alternative definition of ‘metascience’, from… whatever this game is:
I’m not sure ‘metascience’ has much of an agreed-on definition beyond the obvious ‘ideas that extend around or beyond science’, but the conference mentioned in the tweet expands on it with the following:
During this decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a new discipline called metascience, metaresearch, or the science of science. Most exciting was the fact that this is emerging as a truly interdisciplinary enterprise with contributors from every domain of research. This symposium served as a formative meeting for metascience as a discipline. The meeting brought together leading scholars that are investigating questions related to themes such as:
- How do scientists generate ideas?
- How are our statistics, methods, and measurement practices affecting our capacity to identify robust findings?
- Does the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory research matter
- What is replication and its impact and its value?
- How do scientists interpret and treat evidence?
- What are the cultures and norms of science?
I think that ‘synthesising foggy pearls’ is actually weirdly appropriate, especially for the first point about idea generation. You go into the fog — vague, contextual, disorienting swirls of untheorised confusing stuff — and try to condense out something more structured, durable and reusable. This process fascinates me more than almost anything. I want to understand how we do it, and I want to understand how to do it better.
A couple of months later I saw this tweet:
It turns out that there’s a beetle that synthesises pearls from fog already! Maybe it can teach us how to do metascience…
drossbucket 