I enjoyed your article a lot! My husband and I often have conversations in this line when we talk work (he's an engineer and I'm an ecologist) that end up with him complaining about how frustrating my field is because of all the exceptions... I will admit, exploring all the rules and their exceptions is what makes biology so fascinating. There's still so much we simply don't know, like you said. Lots of hunting for nuts and bolts and how they work
Thanks for this very interesting piece. Behavior Analysis, the underlying philosophy of which is Radical Behaviorism, is the alchemy-to-chemistry revolution the rest of Psychology has yet to embrace. It's often misunderstood, misrepresented, and dismissed -- so I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it-- but we are a natural science, and we have discovered some of the basic processes, like elements or colors, you mention. Reinforcement, punishment, generalization, matching law, behavioral momentum... We are far from mainstream, and our concepts and principles are often taken and watered down by other professionals (who haven't spent years studying, practicing, and researching from a behavioral science lens), but we do exist, and we've done a LOT of good, for many populations. I have many recommended readings, but, based on the things you said about psychology herein, B.F. Skinner's "Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms" might be an interesting place to start.
I love this article tho it seems to drift off at the end and doesn’t explicitly say why LLMs are not science and don’t currently seem to be able to derive mechanisms. Unless they begin incorporating neurosymbolic mechanisms (read mechanistic causal modeling)
To be fair to van Helmont, since the empirical formula for polysaccharides (including cellulose - wood) is (CH2O)n, it’s arguable that the tree is mainly water.
If you do oxygen-18 isotope tracing, you'll see that the O in sugars produced by photosynthesis comes from the CO2, not the H2O. This is a result of the RuBisCO enzyme.
So most of the *dry mass* of a tree comes from the air. Of course a live tree will be mostly water by mass anyway.
I enjoyed your article a lot! My husband and I often have conversations in this line when we talk work (he's an engineer and I'm an ecologist) that end up with him complaining about how frustrating my field is because of all the exceptions... I will admit, exploring all the rules and their exceptions is what makes biology so fascinating. There's still so much we simply don't know, like you said. Lots of hunting for nuts and bolts and how they work
Thanks for this very interesting piece. Behavior Analysis, the underlying philosophy of which is Radical Behaviorism, is the alchemy-to-chemistry revolution the rest of Psychology has yet to embrace. It's often misunderstood, misrepresented, and dismissed -- so I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it-- but we are a natural science, and we have discovered some of the basic processes, like elements or colors, you mention. Reinforcement, punishment, generalization, matching law, behavioral momentum... We are far from mainstream, and our concepts and principles are often taken and watered down by other professionals (who haven't spent years studying, practicing, and researching from a behavioral science lens), but we do exist, and we've done a LOT of good, for many populations. I have many recommended readings, but, based on the things you said about psychology herein, B.F. Skinner's "Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms" might be an interesting place to start.
I love this article tho it seems to drift off at the end and doesn’t explicitly say why LLMs are not science and don’t currently seem to be able to derive mechanisms. Unless they begin incorporating neurosymbolic mechanisms (read mechanistic causal modeling)
To be fair to van Helmont, since the empirical formula for polysaccharides (including cellulose - wood) is (CH2O)n, it’s arguable that the tree is mainly water.
If you do oxygen-18 isotope tracing, you'll see that the O in sugars produced by photosynthesis comes from the CO2, not the H2O. This is a result of the RuBisCO enzyme.
So most of the *dry mass* of a tree comes from the air. Of course a live tree will be mostly water by mass anyway.
Yes - that’s why I hedged my bets with “arguable”.