[ImprobableTruth]

Do you take issue with the 'purely empirical' approach (just trying out variants and seeing which sticks) or only with its insufficient documentation?

I don't know how you'd improve on the former. For a lot of it there simply isn't any sound theoretical foundation, so you just end up with flimsy post-hoc rationalizations.

While I agree that it's unfortunate that people often just present magic numbers without explaining where they come from, in my experience providing documentation for how one arrives at these often enough gets punished because it draws more attention to them. That is, reviewers will e.g. complain about preliminary experiments, asking for theoretical analysis or question why only certain variants were tried, whereas magic numbers are just kind of accepted.

[SiempreViernes]

Seems pretty clear they aren't objecting to throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but with calling the outcome of sticky-wall work "science".

I'd say that's a bit strict take on science, one could be generous and compare it to biologist going out into the forest and combing bsck with a report on finding a new lichen.

Thought admittedly these days the biologist is probably expected to report details about their search strategy, which the sticky-wall researchers don't.

[thechao]

The biologist would be expected to describe the lichen in detail, including where it was found, its expected ecology, its place in the ecosystem, life-cycle, structure, etc. It is no longer 1696 where we can go spear some hapless fish, bring back its desiccated body, and let our fellow gentleman ogle over its weirdness.

[jszymborski]

I'm not GP, but I don't think they are taking issue with the fact that e.g. layer numbers or architecture were arrived at without first-principles but rather empirically.

Rather that when you do come to something empirically, you need to validate your findings by e.g. ablations, hypothesis testing, case studies, etc...

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Exactly, I can confirm this is what I meant.

[fads_go]

> I don't know how you'd improve on the former. For a lot of it there simply isn't any sound theoretical foundation, so you just end up with flimsy post-hoc rationalizations.

So great science would come up with a sound theoretical foundation, or at least strong arguments as to why no such foundation can exist.