Terence Tao

painting a narrative, and it's been out of gaps.

So even Darwin, as I said, there are pieces of his theory he cannot explain, but he could still make a case that in the future, people would find transitional forms, that they would find the mechanism of inheritance, and they did.

Yeah, I don't know how you can quantify that in such a precise way that you can start to reinforce something.

Maybe that will be forever the human side of science.

So astronomy was one of the first sciences to really embrace data analysis and squeezing every last possible drop of information out of the information they had because data was the bottleneck.

I mean, it still is the bottleneck.

I mean, it's really hard to collect astronomical data.

So astronomers are the best, almost world-class in extracting, almost like Sherlock, it's just like extracting all kinds of conclusions from little traces of data.

I hear that a lot of quant hedge funds, they're preferred hires in astronomy PhD.

They also are very interested for other reasons in extracting signals from various random bits of data.

we do underexplore sort of how to extract extra information from various signals.

Like, just to pick one random study, I remember reading once that people had discovered, were trying to measure how often scientists actually read these citations, the papers that they cite.

So how do you measure this?

You could try to survey different scientists, but they had some clever ideas

So many citations have little typos, like a number is wrong or a punctuation symbol is wrong.

And they measured how often a typo got copied from one reference to the next.

And they could infer whether an author was actually just copying, cutting and pasting a reference without actually checking it.

And so from that, they were able to infer some measure of sort of how much attention people were paying.

So there are also clever tricks to extract.

So these questions you posed earlier of how can we assess whether a scientific development is fruitful or interesting or represents real progress, maybe there are really useful metrics or footprints of this approach