The HUMILITY of modern scientific collaboration drives our WHY

We want to do science, in a serious fashion, in order to explore misunderstandings and engage in the larger community of pure science.

Pure science is like painting, sculpting, playing music or doing pure math in that it is something done PURELY for its own sake, for its own rewards … without any compensation, without any ego, without any bullshit about building a reputation or maintaining a professional career.

Being able to do pure science is a privilege and a blessing … doing it is something that we do out of LOVE … because as part of doing this, we are also building the infrastructure and capabilities in others that are all about extending knowledge in order to ensure that we are even more privileged, more blessed in the future.

Pure science is close, but is not exactly the Big Science world of academia, research instiutions, industry and government, which is about money, empires and careers. Being part of Big Science is a tough, demanding, stressful, very professional gig … we have immense respect for professional scientists, but we are purists … it is possible to be BOTH professional and purist – but the focus of each group is in a very different place.

We should not be too hard on professionals. Professionals necessarily HAVE TO worry about money/costs/resources/calendars/meetings, reputation and EGO … that’s all necessarily part of the game, part of the business. Purists, like successful retired people who paint for the JOY of it, have the freedom to purely worry about only the science … discipline equals freedom … pure scientists do not have to worry about sustaining a department, making budgetary goals, worry about who is going to fund the next grant or anything about obtaining their next paying gig.

The why of this whole thing is doing pure science for advancing or expanding this freedom for others … discipline equals freedom … we want others to have the freedom to learn, to explore, to learn how to learn scientifically, to learn how knowledge advances, to explore impossible challenges and quandries, to dwell in those areas that we know are misundertood at some deeper level.

It’s necessarily virtual, but there IS a social side to doing pure science … the practical part of advancing the discipline is about reaching out and become much, much better at engaging the larger internetworked community and collaboratively exploring the processes of learning at massively, embarrassingly global scale … the culture and social aspect of shared practical appreciation of things that are faintly understood or likely misunderstood is fundamentally what the discipline of this approach to pure science is about.

Learning is based upon the modern scientific DISCIPLINE of engaging in the much, much larger super-community of pure, genuine scientists around the globe … there’s even room for professionals.

The social side is about the JOY and LOVE of the scientific community … about studying what others have learned, interacting with others who love discovering new things and generally leveling up everyone skills … just as we learn best when explain what we have learned to others, we actually learn the material ourselves or we learn facets of a topic that did not originally occur to us when we use a computational approach or use machines to automate our [group] learning processes.

In addition to fully exploiting the network effects of scientific communities, niches, sub-disciplines, we also want or perhaps need to exploit computational power and uses of computational power such as deep learning or HPC simulations. Computation, AI and advances in HPC technologies are about improving our ability to deeply learn faster or to misunderstand at a deeper level … the intention of the whole effort is to find surprises. REAL information is about SURPRISE, not affirmation.

“The best that any of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.”

― Wolfgang Pauli

Scientific Operations …Sci Ops … why Infrastructure-as-Code is so import

Many [especially who are heavily vested in career franchises that involve working alone, rather than collaboratively developing code and exploring data with others] do not understand, and frankly detest, the emergent dominance of things like machine images provisioned with Python libraries and Notebooks or JupyterLab servers for scientific computation … the point of Python is not really about computation as much as it is about the network effects of virtual scientific seminars in which everyone gets to play with the data, the code and the kinds of things that audiences used to just passively listen to.

SciOps … or provisioning development containers in an infrastructure-as-code fashion is fundamentally about a different kind of science, because it is about ACTIVELY ENGAGING an audience in the data, code and discussion … social collaboration in development containers is like giving EVERYONE an instrument to play, rather expecting the audience to be well-behaved as they passively listen to the professional song-and-dance man up on stage.

Active engagement with the audience is why we embrace the discipline of using an infrastructure-as-code philosophy … this SciOps dev workflow is really about being able to share results and interact with a focus on the science [rather than on whether someone’s getting different results because their machine is set up different] … SciOps involves automating the effectiveness of the structure of curated, annotated, scripted, automated learning – so we use tools like Jupyter and Python because OTHER people use these things for exploratory analysis … SciOps is about making the community interactions mostly about the pure science, RATHER than about the set-up or installation or dependencies or debugging someone’s system.

Mostly, our reason for wanting to just get into it is about more rapidly discovering where our misunderstandings are causing difficulties … we want push our knowledge until it breaks and fails … anything that humans doing with serious or intensity is all about failing … not being a comfortable spectator, but more rapidly being humiliated by how little we actually understand.