I used to work in a building with a drosophila fly lab. From time to time, I'd visit the lab, use CO2 gas to knock a fly out, and then place it in my venus fly trap (you have to flick the little hairs in the trap a couple times to get it to close). The fly wakes up, and since it's alive and jiggling, the trap stays shut. About a month little the trap opens again, and a little husk of dessicated fly drops out. Afterwars, the plant grows nicely
> "I suspect," says Graham, "that there might be more carnivorous plants out there than we think"
This is a pretty interesting closing idea. From the article it seems they were originally flagged to this by a genomic commonality with other carnivorous plants. What percentage of plant genomes are sequenced that could be searched for this similar deletion?
Maybe I've just seen "Little Shop of Horrors" too many times but "interesting" seems a less accurate attitude for me towards these discoveries than kill it with fire!
Though as long as insects are the primary target I'm prepared to entertain the option of a cautious cold war rather than all-out destruction.
If what you want to read is a reddit kill it with fire joke thread you can just go to reddit. There's nothing wrong with wanting that, but there's no need to wish for it or encourage it here.
This clearly wasn't a reddit "Kill it with fire!!!" post.
There was a whole 2nd graph talking about consideration of how a kill-it-with-fire decision would affect other living things, non-human even. Clearly more thought than a reddit post would have given. Seeing how reddit is deem such low class on this esteemed and high class board.
Very true. We must never deviate from strict adherence to strict seriousness at all times on HN to avoid any appearance that we're a community of human beings that occasionally enjoy humour or meme-ish content. It's the only way to maximize our useless internet points.
Wow, yes. It's been too long since I've read that book. It was very formative for me when I read it in school long ago, and at least twice more since, but it has to have been nearly 20 years.
Have you happened to read the recent sequel, and if so how was it? I was kind of put off of Crichton by his later works after the original Jurassic Park (as usual, better than the movie)
I know the sequel was not completely Crighton's own work, but I did mostly enjoy Robopocalypse, so I'm wondering if it's worth my time ( and money: I mostly do audiobooks these days, which are a lot more expensive)
Sorry, never read that, but I've seen 2 different screen adaptations of Andromeda Strain, and neither of them would be considered "good". The most recent version was made for TV, so not as large of a budget as a true feature and more disappointing that it wasn't better than it was for being the redo.
However, since this is carneverous plant stuff, if they start getting too big for their britches, we can use dandruff shampoo according to sily scifi plot lines instead of fire. That way it won't get out of control. The lastly, since we're not sure the effect of fire, it might be best to just take off and nuke it from orbit.
The sequel also makes a good read. The human angle might be slightly overplayed, but it hits the Crichton style quite well with computer analysis, foreshadowing and the tech dread.
Of the later works, Dragon Teeth (posthumously published) is worth checking out - no high tech but more a scientific western story.
We might be seeing less of that subgenre these days because the general public is starting to realize that genetic engineering is sort of like AI/ML.
It takes a lot of effort and expense to achieve mildly promising results, and any given project is much more likely to break out in tumors or be outcompeted by existing strains than it is to evolve into something unexpectedly fit. Yes, poorly-engineered plants can grow tumors...or at least odd growths that sap their energy and nutrients.
some mutant blew its load into the wind and the mutant spawns survived, thats the whole story until we find a communication or same generation reaction mechanism that leads to different future adaptations
> Having looked into carnivorous plants for a while, I am so glad they never grew significantly bigger...
Considering that we believe prehistoric times were incredibly lush with vegetation you may be right. The plants of your nightmares are likely to thrive in the future though when we have depleted the nutrients from our soil. As someone else mentioned, nature finds a way. It’s easy to forget that being at the top of the food chain puts us at the mercy of everything beneath… and when it comes time for Mother Nature to choose, she will likely begin culling from the top.
When you think of climate change, think of all the habitats that are being altered and how that might lead to extinction of plants with unique and unknown characteristics.
One again showing that the Plants vs. Zombie developers were very prescient.
The question we must ask ourselves is who were the true heros of those games? The plants that had developed to the point of nearly nuclear destructive capabilities? Or humanity, which may have had few options except for adopting the resilience of the undead to have any chance at survival against the Green Menace?
As a canivorous plant enthusiast, this news today excites me! What a fascinating plant, maintaining a balance between consuming and allowing pollinators to move along.
Headline is a bit spun. The plant is known and has been attested since the 19th century. That it was carnivorous is the new discovery. It has a sticky stem, and is (somehow, though it seems like they didn't identify a mechanism) digesting insects that get stuck to it.
"Spun" is a little harsh. It's not easy to say concisely and the shorter version wouldn't capture significantly more audience that the longer version (IMO).
"New carnivorous attribute of known plant discovered in Pacific Northwest", perhaps?
I actually think it's more exciting this way. Think about it if it wasn't just eating bugs. Which is more exciting: "We've discovered a new species of plant, and it's a man-eater" or "this well-known plant has secretly been eating people all along"?
I've got a specimen of one of these preserved in a photoalbum from a school project from 10 years ago or so. There was no idea at the time these were in any way carnivorous.
For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.
Agree. We tend to believe that most of the important stuff has already been discovered. What if it's the opposite? Hasn't it always been the opposite - Why should it be different now?
>For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.
Based on us routinely finding new organs within the human body, I would say there is a ton about our own biology that we just don't understand. I would go further and just accept that humans know or understand very few things indeed.
I like the technique of testing if it was carnivorous. For the lazy people, they put a nitrogen isotope inside fruitflies and then tested the plant later to see if it was absorbing the nitrogen, and it was.
They definitely do absorb nutrients from leaves (check out foliar feeding), so it's not far stretched to imagine that they also could do the same from flower stalks
By this definition (nutrient uptake from an animal the plant has killed), brambles should be counted as carnivorous.
Their spines all point towards the base of the plant, where, in a mature specimen, there’s usually a hollow without thorns.
Thing is, if you’re a furry or woolly animal, like a sheep, and you get caught in the thorns, your struggles bring you into the centre of the plant, where you’re thoroughly trapped, and you die of exhaustion.
Then you decompose, and the bramble gets fed.
I’ve seen this happen to sheep, and here, while clearing huge swathes of giant brambles, it’s not uncommon to find a skull or a few bits of bone around the bottom of a plant.
There is a case to be made that this should count as predation.
The plant in the article is less ambiguous: they detected a digestive enzyme in the sticky stalks which is common to other carnivorous plants, and means the plant digests the insects directly.
A bramble consumes unlucky mammals with the help of mycorrhisae in the soil, rather doing so directly. Is this more like the bacteria which help ruminants digest cellulose (no one would say that cows don't eat grass!) or is it more like saying that vegans are carnivores because organic fertilizers have blood and fish meal in them?
The article mentioned that they began to suspect the plant was carnivorous when they noticed it was missing a specific gene. I'd be curious to know what that gene is, and why it's linked to carnivorous plants.
Just speculating but it might have something to do with nutrient absorption. Much in the same way we lost the ability to synthesise vitamin C and now take it in from our diet, these plants may gain a nutrient from their prey that they no longer need to produce themselves.
Not a geneticist or a botanist here, but I would assume that because it is carnivorous, it gains a particular set of nutrients from the fruit flies and thus does not need to absorb these compounds through the root system. The gene or set of genes responsible for processing nutrients through the root would thus not be needed and would eventually be deactivated or disappear entirely over the evolution of the species.
Carnivorous plants turn carnivorous because they can't get enough nitrogen from the soil usually. Thus, in these populations, it's likely that the additional genes favoring carnivory evolved first and then, with that in place, the genes for nitrogen absorption would not confer any advantage or disadvantage so would be slowly lost by genetic drift.
Interesting that they started with data. Some of the most interesting discoveries I've made have started with me saying "that's weird" while looking at data. From the article:
"Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants.
"And then they have these sticky stems," Graham says. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."
I've long felt that the American school system's version of the scientific method (formulate hypothesis, run experiment, collect data, draw conclusions) is totally wrong and turns people off of science.
The real procedure that we should teach kids is: collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers, and only then do a experiment to test your theory. The question formulation, based on observational evidence, is where all of the interesting science really happens.
Both lead to common biases - the former in fraudulent experimentation, the latter (your suggestion) in fraudulent data snooping and anecdotal case-finding. Both have their merits done correctly, however, but the latter is only possible because of the former - the data has to come from somewhere, and experimentation was how it was historically done... since there wasn't a global database upon instantiation of the planet.
IANAPOSE (I am not a philosophy of science expert) but I think a happy medium is to observe, collect data, and look for things that are interesting, and then perform properly formulate experiments to test those hypotheses.
I think that focusing on either side alone can lead to biases and problematic science, and focusing on both is actually the most "fun"
Both center around observation for all definitions of the word. Before we had microscopes or MRI machines, we still have those but we now have powerful statistical machines called ML models. In all cases though, we need perceive the world.
I argue that there is no such thing as formulating a hypothesis with no prior knowledge. We all have prior observations - hypotheses don't appear out of nowhere.
In this respect I think GP's comment is admirable - it means teaching kids to use their experiences to formulate hypotheses, rather than forcing them to guess what you want them to formulate.
(As an aside, I set out to comment here because I tire of the point that XYZ can be done incorrectly... Everything can be - it's not very interesting - I wish we could discuss less about that, more about new things to do correctly.)
Formulating hypothesis first, even with little knowledge, is fine as long as the point is to invalidate them (basically you assume they are wrong and you’re fine spending time to prove it).
It can help focus the data gathering phase, and you get two results: you can ignore your first hypothesis from now on, and you have further data to look at to formulate a decent hypothesis to expand on.
I agree in practice, but I think my point is to resist the dichotomy you are implying - that there is a "first hypothesis with little data"... vs ... the other ones..?
Isn't all our knowledge little knowledge - even if it seems like a lot? Wouldn't your advice apply equally as well to your most knowledgable topic?
The hard part isn't having knowledge, it's finding the hypothesis to show how your knowledge is little knowledge.
(Aside: I would love to hear the experiences you are forming your comment around! I'm sure there's a lot of interesting stuff there.)
I think we fundamentally agree, and probably have the same approach, with just a different “marketing”.
For the background of these, on a professional level I try to sell the experiments with some angle, whatever it is, even if it is intuitively wrong.
An exemple of that was a discussion around wording for a relatively delicate part of our site. We didn’t know how to approach it, and it hasn’t been touch for a very long time. So, the random hypothesis taken was that nobody reads the text anyway. We set hooks and tracking in and out of the sections to have a decent view of what’s happening, and we got enough data to come with new insights and propositions; Next phase was AB testing two changes, with expectations to have positive effect, and the tracking we set in place was to validate it went as planned. This also didn’t go fully as expected, but not that far from the mark, and we iterated.
In hindsight we could surely have just done the data collection and make hypothesis from it, but I feel the data would have been more vague and less exploitable. I don‘t trust “let’s just collect data” approaches much.
This model is especially valuable when paired with a teacher who can mentor the students in expanding the horizons of kids during the "ask questions about it" step, because you'll end up with a class full of people who reflexively cross-pollinate problems and solutions across multiple domains.
Isn't that exactly how we teach the scientific method? I've been out of school for a good while, but I'm pretty sure I learned "Observe, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion, Tri-Fold Poster Session."
I'm sure it's taught differently in different places, but what I want to see is: the science fair projects that everyone does should consist mostly of data-gathering _before_ the hypothesis step. Instead of mostly being about verifying a hypothesis, it should mostly be about _constructing_ an interesting hypothesis (and then verifying it afterwards).
>The real procedure that we should teach kids is: collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers, and only then do a experiment to test your theory.
Apparently lots of interesting discoveries have followed the formula of "get drunk with other PhD students, wait for someone to ask "what if...", do experiment, pretend idea wasn't suggested in a bar at conference"
I went to school in America. When we learned the scientific method, formulating a hypothesis was the fourth or fifth step. I believe the first step we were taught was to make an observation.
I think this depends on the field. In physics and engineering, there is a body of underlying theory from which one can derive a hypothesis, based on some causal mechanism, before seeing any data. You can then go out and collect some data to confirm - in many cases this is basically just a sanity check, occasionally the data is in conflict with the underlying theory and you learn something big.
Outside of the hard sciences, your procedure could make more sense. We do this in business consulting (not always a science but it can be if you do it well) by looking through financial, operational and HR data and asking questions or trying to draw out interesting relationships that can lead to hypothesis for deeper examination. I would expect the same is true in lots of health science as well or any empirical field where we have data on outcomes and the characteristics that may influence then. Even in these fields though, it doesn't preclude starting with a causal mechanism based on underlying theory and then devising data collection and experiments to go out and conform or refute your hypothesis.
Personally, I've seen lots of cases where people are quick to rely on statistics and empirical studies, without looking for the mechanism that must exist behind the relationship they're claiming. Such findings are much weaker than results that may have less data or a bigger p-value but are grounded in actual theory and not just reporting a model-free relationship.
So to summarize, there is certainly a place for the order you suggest, but if done right, a stronger formulation can be made based on what you call the American school system method.
Physics and engineering though are absolutely full of interesting effects we observed first though, then hypothesized as to why. University level physics labs are almost wall to wall "observe the original effect that was weird" as a result.
General scientific education should be focused on methodological scrutiny and skepticism.
Our biggest issue in general scientific literacy is in people being convinced by quacks, charlatans, and well intentioned incompetence.
I'll use examples to demonstrate the fix.
Let's start with a recent bogus claim: "vaccine causes biomagnetism"
The experiment people use is to stick a smooth magnetic object on their oily skin.
Let's see if this works using what we teach people
"collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers"
Those could lead people to conclude the biomagnetism theory. That's the problem.
Instead, scientific literacy needs to focus on scrutiny. Karl Popper style testing, verifying, falsifying, validating.
For example: trying to stick magnets to unvaccinated people or similar shaped non-magnets to either group, see if they respond to a compass, or use a piece of paper in between the skin and the magnet, or some talc to smooth the skin (Randi debunked human magnetism with this).
But instead, there's hundreds of videos of the smooth object on oily skin test followed by the conclusion that vaccines cause biomagnetism.
A friend of mine showed me an hour compilation of countless people repeating the same flawed experiment as if a larger quantity was a valid refutation of my methodological objections.
I watched it regardless. The same flawed experiment repeated. A large stream of commenters claimed this is what convinced them.
Why? What we teach in school won't help us identify how this is wrong. In fact, they're taught that repeatability is good, and it is, but it doesn't necessarily support a hypothesis without sufficient variation. That's Robert Boyle, 1600s.
That's why instead students should poke holes (or support) in increasingly difficult arguments as they progress through school.
---
Second example, let's stick with vaccines because why not.
The hogwash: vaccines cause X.
The graphs are pretty convincing until you ask how things are defined, detected and the frequency of testing. Then everything is easily explained.
---
Third example: homoeopaths. They pass all the current methods taught in school.
If students learned valid scrutiny and real scientific skepticism (not the sloppy hand waving nonsense that climate denying propagandists put out for instance) we'd have addressed climate change.
We'd have more effective social programs, better economic policy, not be wasteful as a society and not have half the people getting boondoggled by grifters and charlatans.
---
Let me belabor the point with one final example. The extremely dangerous advice given by Norman Vincent Peale in his famous 1952 text, "The power of positive thinking". He uses the word "scientific" 40 times and produces exactly zero science beyond unverifiable anecdotes.
Some of his uses of "scientific" include "scientific use of prayer" and "spiritually scientific principles (used 3 times)".
He makes remarkable and totally unsubstantiated claims throughout the book on things such as clairvoyance, ESP, and just straight up magic such as miraculous healings and physically impossible events.
His techniques have actually led to severe psychological illness and many suicides. Translated into 42 languages, sold 15 million copies.
People seem to be on board, just like they kill their children with homeopaths and themselves because they refuse to take a vaccine that will supposedly make them magnetic.
What they've been taught is science backs them up on every one o...
To me the observe step is implied. The scientific method is just meant to say it's okay to be wrong by prioritizing hypothesis over the conclusion. It allows you to be wrong and still fact-based in a world where people naturally don't want to be wrong.
It's okay to prefix this with an explicit "observe" step but the absence of that step in teaching doesn't mean we haven't already spent time observing.
people don't make a hypothesis in a vacuum though, they should always coming from a starting point of observations. I think the real problem is motivation to critically think about a hypothesis and follow through with investigating it. People are too lazy to find out random truths
> It is often said that science rests on two pillars, experiment and theory. Which has lead some to propose one or two additional pillars for the computing age: simulation and data analysis. However, the real two pillars of science are observations and models. Observations are the input to science, in the form of numerous but incomplete and imperfect views on reality. Models are the inner state of science. They represent our current understanding of reality, which is necessarily incomplete and imperfect, but understandable and applicable. Simulation and data analysis are tools for interfacing and thus comparing observations and models. They don’t add new pillars, but transforms both of them.
This is where Western and Japanese linguistics show their biggest difference. The former has a tendency to try making heavy generalizations (finding the universal properties of language/s) and prove it by crafting a few examples fitted for the task (peak armchair linguistics). In the latter, a huge amount of data is collected. I've seen at library a book with hundred maps, relatively precise, about the fine variation in Japanese dialect. It's however sometimes lacking explanation. So both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses and I think that more ground breaking word can be done if relying on works from the two traditions.
I don't think this is a difference between "Western" linguistics and Japanese linguistics. Collecting examples with relatively little explanation is traditional linguistics as it was practiced academically in Europe and Japan and probably most other places as well. You had etymology, and grammar, and many many examples for each.
However, modern/computational linguistics has started asking new questions that were simply not considered in traditional linguistics: why and how do the rules of grammar arise? How are they learned by infants? Why do human beings use language at all? How are human languages different from animal communication?
For many such questions, looking at hundreds of regional variations of certain words or grammar rules is not particularly helpful, unfortunately, though there is some work that was done based on that as well.
did anybody ask the plant if it was okay with its genes being sequenced?!
isn't this, like, what we all have feared regarding genomic data falling into the government's hands?
people paid by the government stole this poor innocent plant's genomes and then ran it through their fancy machines that claimed dubious statistical similarity with the genes of murderers, then...
people paid by the government then showed up, radioinfused some fruitflies, stuck them on this poor innocent plant, denied it food and water, waited for the flies to die and decompose, dug up traces in the plant and then declared it a MURDERER for fame and fortune.
this is way scarier than apple checking hashes of images to see if they're evidence of exploitation of children in their icloud photo uploader... wake up sheeple!!!
> "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site."
Fun fact: Venus fly traps are native to the Carolinas. Carnivorous plants are everywhere!
> "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site."
It seems strange not a mention of Darlingtonia californica (cobra lily), which also grows in the PNW albeit further south, but still not exotic and tropical.
107 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadIf you enjoy learning more about carnivorous plants, I highly recommend 'Plants Behaving Badly' on PBS[1].
1. https://www.pbs.org/show/plants-behaving-badly/
This is a pretty interesting closing idea. From the article it seems they were originally flagged to this by a genomic commonality with other carnivorous plants. What percentage of plant genomes are sequenced that could be searched for this similar deletion?
Though as long as insects are the primary target I'm prepared to entertain the option of a cautious cold war rather than all-out destruction.
There was a whole 2nd graph talking about consideration of how a kill-it-with-fire decision would affect other living things, non-human even. Clearly more thought than a reddit post would have given. Seeing how reddit is deem such low class on this esteemed and high class board.
Have you happened to read the recent sequel, and if so how was it? I was kind of put off of Crichton by his later works after the original Jurassic Park (as usual, better than the movie)
I know the sequel was not completely Crighton's own work, but I did mostly enjoy Robopocalypse, so I'm wondering if it's worth my time ( and money: I mostly do audiobooks these days, which are a lot more expensive)
However, since this is carneverous plant stuff, if they start getting too big for their britches, we can use dandruff shampoo according to sily scifi plot lines instead of fire. That way it won't get out of control. The lastly, since we're not sure the effect of fire, it might be best to just take off and nuke it from orbit.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Of the later works, Dragon Teeth (posthumously published) is worth checking out - no high tech but more a scientific western story.
Now we just need to bio-engineer them to ...
Somehow I'm sensing the onset of something that might have once been the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster.... or an episode of Doctor Who.
It takes a lot of effort and expense to achieve mildly promising results, and any given project is much more likely to break out in tumors or be outcompeted by existing strains than it is to evolve into something unexpectedly fit. Yes, poorly-engineered plants can grow tumors...or at least odd growths that sap their energy and nutrients.
This is probably exactly what the plant is betting on. It's a nice perceptive check on our own individual intelligence as humans.
I'll think twice whenever I encounter a sticky plant part from now on.
Edit - obligatory:
Feed me, Seymour. Feed me all night long.
> intelligence
thats not how natural selection works
some mutant blew its load into the wind and the mutant spawns survived, thats the whole story until we find a communication or same generation reaction mechanism that leads to different future adaptations
> mutant spawn survived
>leads to different future adaptations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylidium
Having looked into carnivorous plants for a while, I am so glad they never grew significantly bigger...
Considering that we believe prehistoric times were incredibly lush with vegetation you may be right. The plants of your nightmares are likely to thrive in the future though when we have depleted the nutrients from our soil. As someone else mentioned, nature finds a way. It’s easy to forget that being at the top of the food chain puts us at the mercy of everything beneath… and when it comes time for Mother Nature to choose, she will likely begin culling from the top.
The question we must ask ourselves is who were the true heros of those games? The plants that had developed to the point of nearly nuclear destructive capabilities? Or humanity, which may have had few options except for adopting the resilience of the undead to have any chance at survival against the Green Menace?
"New carnivorous attribute of known plant discovered in Pacific Northwest", perhaps?
I don’t understand why not just say it — it sounds pretty exciting to me.
For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.
Based on us routinely finding new organs within the human body, I would say there is a ton about our own biology that we just don't understand. I would go further and just accept that humans know or understand very few things indeed.
If it absorbs half it's nitrogen from insects that get stuck to the stem…
Their spines all point towards the base of the plant, where, in a mature specimen, there’s usually a hollow without thorns.
Thing is, if you’re a furry or woolly animal, like a sheep, and you get caught in the thorns, your struggles bring you into the centre of the plant, where you’re thoroughly trapped, and you die of exhaustion.
Then you decompose, and the bramble gets fed.
I’ve seen this happen to sheep, and here, while clearing huge swathes of giant brambles, it’s not uncommon to find a skull or a few bits of bone around the bottom of a plant.
The plant in the article is less ambiguous: they detected a digestive enzyme in the sticky stalks which is common to other carnivorous plants, and means the plant digests the insects directly.
A bramble consumes unlucky mammals with the help of mycorrhisae in the soil, rather doing so directly. Is this more like the bacteria which help ruminants digest cellulose (no one would say that cows don't eat grass!) or is it more like saying that vegans are carnivores because organic fertilizers have blood and fish meal in them?
to be extinct in a decade because no one is taking fresh IPCC report, AR6 WP1, seriously. and not giving long to endemic plants in this context.
"Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants.
"And then they have these sticky stems," Graham says. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."
The real procedure that we should teach kids is: collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers, and only then do a experiment to test your theory. The question formulation, based on observational evidence, is where all of the interesting science really happens.
I think that focusing on either side alone can lead to biases and problematic science, and focusing on both is actually the most "fun"
You can't see what do you don't look for.
In this respect I think GP's comment is admirable - it means teaching kids to use their experiences to formulate hypotheses, rather than forcing them to guess what you want them to formulate.
(As an aside, I set out to comment here because I tire of the point that XYZ can be done incorrectly... Everything can be - it's not very interesting - I wish we could discuss less about that, more about new things to do correctly.)
It can help focus the data gathering phase, and you get two results: you can ignore your first hypothesis from now on, and you have further data to look at to formulate a decent hypothesis to expand on.
Isn't all our knowledge little knowledge - even if it seems like a lot? Wouldn't your advice apply equally as well to your most knowledgable topic?
The hard part isn't having knowledge, it's finding the hypothesis to show how your knowledge is little knowledge.
(Aside: I would love to hear the experiences you are forming your comment around! I'm sure there's a lot of interesting stuff there.)
For the background of these, on a professional level I try to sell the experiments with some angle, whatever it is, even if it is intuitively wrong.
An exemple of that was a discussion around wording for a relatively delicate part of our site. We didn’t know how to approach it, and it hasn’t been touch for a very long time. So, the random hypothesis taken was that nobody reads the text anyway. We set hooks and tracking in and out of the sections to have a decent view of what’s happening, and we got enough data to come with new insights and propositions; Next phase was AB testing two changes, with expectations to have positive effect, and the tracking we set in place was to validate it went as planned. This also didn’t go fully as expected, but not that far from the mark, and we iterated.
In hindsight we could surely have just done the data collection and make hypothesis from it, but I feel the data would have been more vague and less exploitable. I don‘t trust “let’s just collect data” approaches much.
Apparently lots of interesting discoveries have followed the formula of "get drunk with other PhD students, wait for someone to ask "what if...", do experiment, pretend idea wasn't suggested in a bar at conference"
The boogeyman of confirmation bias paralyzes researchers.
Outside of the hard sciences, your procedure could make more sense. We do this in business consulting (not always a science but it can be if you do it well) by looking through financial, operational and HR data and asking questions or trying to draw out interesting relationships that can lead to hypothesis for deeper examination. I would expect the same is true in lots of health science as well or any empirical field where we have data on outcomes and the characteristics that may influence then. Even in these fields though, it doesn't preclude starting with a causal mechanism based on underlying theory and then devising data collection and experiments to go out and conform or refute your hypothesis.
Personally, I've seen lots of cases where people are quick to rely on statistics and empirical studies, without looking for the mechanism that must exist behind the relationship they're claiming. Such findings are much weaker than results that may have less data or a bigger p-value but are grounded in actual theory and not just reporting a model-free relationship.
So to summarize, there is certainly a place for the order you suggest, but if done right, a stronger formulation can be made based on what you call the American school system method.
Our biggest issue in general scientific literacy is in people being convinced by quacks, charlatans, and well intentioned incompetence.
I'll use examples to demonstrate the fix.
Let's start with a recent bogus claim: "vaccine causes biomagnetism"
The experiment people use is to stick a smooth magnetic object on their oily skin.
Let's see if this works using what we teach people
"collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers"
Those could lead people to conclude the biomagnetism theory. That's the problem.
Instead, scientific literacy needs to focus on scrutiny. Karl Popper style testing, verifying, falsifying, validating.
For example: trying to stick magnets to unvaccinated people or similar shaped non-magnets to either group, see if they respond to a compass, or use a piece of paper in between the skin and the magnet, or some talc to smooth the skin (Randi debunked human magnetism with this).
But instead, there's hundreds of videos of the smooth object on oily skin test followed by the conclusion that vaccines cause biomagnetism.
A friend of mine showed me an hour compilation of countless people repeating the same flawed experiment as if a larger quantity was a valid refutation of my methodological objections.
I watched it regardless. The same flawed experiment repeated. A large stream of commenters claimed this is what convinced them.
Why? What we teach in school won't help us identify how this is wrong. In fact, they're taught that repeatability is good, and it is, but it doesn't necessarily support a hypothesis without sufficient variation. That's Robert Boyle, 1600s.
That's why instead students should poke holes (or support) in increasingly difficult arguments as they progress through school.
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Second example, let's stick with vaccines because why not.
The hogwash: vaccines cause X.
The graphs are pretty convincing until you ask how things are defined, detected and the frequency of testing. Then everything is easily explained.
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Third example: homoeopaths. They pass all the current methods taught in school.
That's the reason medicine invented double blind studies, to show homoeopaths were nonsense. (See the salt tests of 1835 https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/articles/inventing-the-rand...)
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If students learned valid scrutiny and real scientific skepticism (not the sloppy hand waving nonsense that climate denying propagandists put out for instance) we'd have addressed climate change.
We'd have more effective social programs, better economic policy, not be wasteful as a society and not have half the people getting boondoggled by grifters and charlatans.
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Let me belabor the point with one final example. The extremely dangerous advice given by Norman Vincent Peale in his famous 1952 text, "The power of positive thinking". He uses the word "scientific" 40 times and produces exactly zero science beyond unverifiable anecdotes.
Some of his uses of "scientific" include "scientific use of prayer" and "spiritually scientific principles (used 3 times)".
He makes remarkable and totally unsubstantiated claims throughout the book on things such as clairvoyance, ESP, and just straight up magic such as miraculous healings and physically impossible events.
His techniques have actually led to severe psychological illness and many suicides. Translated into 42 languages, sold 15 million copies.
People seem to be on board, just like they kill their children with homeopaths and themselves because they refuse to take a vaccine that will supposedly make them magnetic.
What they've been taught is science backs them up on every one o...
It's okay to prefix this with an explicit "observe" step but the absence of that step in teaching doesn't mean we haven't already spent time observing.
> It is often said that science rests on two pillars, experiment and theory. Which has lead some to propose one or two additional pillars for the computing age: simulation and data analysis. However, the real two pillars of science are observations and models. Observations are the input to science, in the form of numerous but incomplete and imperfect views on reality. Models are the inner state of science. They represent our current understanding of reality, which is necessarily incomplete and imperfect, but understandable and applicable. Simulation and data analysis are tools for interfacing and thus comparing observations and models. They don’t add new pillars, but transforms both of them.
However, modern/computational linguistics has started asking new questions that were simply not considered in traditional linguistics: why and how do the rules of grammar arise? How are they learned by infants? Why do human beings use language at all? How are human languages different from animal communication?
For many such questions, looking at hundreds of regional variations of certain words or grammar rules is not particularly helpful, unfortunately, though there is some work that was done based on that as well.
isn't this, like, what we all have feared regarding genomic data falling into the government's hands?
people paid by the government stole this poor innocent plant's genomes and then ran it through their fancy machines that claimed dubious statistical similarity with the genes of murderers, then...
people paid by the government then showed up, radioinfused some fruitflies, stuck them on this poor innocent plant, denied it food and water, waited for the flies to die and decompose, dug up traces in the plant and then declared it a MURDERER for fame and fortune.
this is way scarier than apple checking hashes of images to see if they're evidence of exploitation of children in their icloud photo uploader... wake up sheeple!!!
VEGETABLE RIGHTS AND PEACE
Get vaccinated y'all
Fun fact: Venus fly traps are native to the Carolinas. Carnivorous plants are everywhere!
> "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site."
to this:
> Fewer than 1,000 plant species are carnivorous
4000 years of Botanical research since egyptians, duh...
So I guess that explains what happened to all the Tree Octopi.