A like button failed to be smashed: where is it? Frustrating. Have to send this to lots of people now. Annoying.
TMPHBITEU
The Truth about the Starting Strength Method
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A like button failed to be smashed: where is it? Frustrating. Have to send this to lots of people now. Annoying.
Member
I like the approach of that article, you spent a lot of time discussing strength training as a means towards an end, not as an end in and of itself.
That distinction gets lost on these boards sometimes, as a lot of folks here train either for competition or for PRs, forgetting that most people train for a sport or to maintain a lifestyle.
Member
Bringing in the idea of engineering (vs. science) is great. It's a useful concept that really helps get the point across.
Member
Except it's misleading here. The ambiguity is necessary because of the terrible state of "published" science. You have to know the context to understand that...Originally Posted by spacediver
Science: experiments -> model
Engineering: model -> applications
(applications = experiments we know the results in advance w/ sufficient precision)
The divide is, obviously, not neat: lots of good science has been done by engineers and lots of good engineering has been done by scientists.
It's more like a spectrum.
Also, lots of engineering and science has been done by neither engineers nor scientists...
Member
I'm not following. You seem to be saying that science and engineering don't always have sharp boundaries. How does this fact make the strength engineering vs strength science distinction misleading?
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"testable, reliable science." is just science, not engineering or anything else.And we have a word for testable, reliable science. That word is “engineering.”
According to the quoted article and for someone unaware of the current state of "Science" it's ambiguous: you have a thing called "science" that is essentially bullshit and "testable, reliable science" that is called "engineering".
In facts, you just have (science and engineering) and a big pile of garbage. Very very distinct things that, I think, deserve very distinct words, even the madness we are in mistakes one for the other.
Turns out that experimental physicists (guys that actually do things not equations jockey playing with "string theory" and others untestable stupidities) are also very good engineers and history showed that the boundary between science and engineering behaves more like a spectrum: it's far from being mutually exclusive.
Science is just guessing a model that does not under/over fit experimental data points.
Engineering is just using scientific models to come up with applications i.e. experiments for which the result is predicted by a model with a "good enough" precision.
When engineering fails it becomes science: it means that you have a new data point that falls outside of what the models predicted: you have to update your model.
To justify scientific models you have to come up with experiments that give new data points and see if the model predict them correctly: science becomes engineering.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Member
So is your qualm that the given definition of engineering is wrong? ("testable, reliable science")
Or is it that "Strength engineering" isn't a useful concept?
Do you agree that there is a useful distinction to be made between the practice of publishing peer reviewed papers that often have limited clinical applicability, and the practice of developing, testing, and refining a comprehensive system that produces results that are of unquestionable clinical significance?
I'm still not clear on what your gripe is. I'm not saying you don't have a point to be made here, I'm just not clear on what, precisely, it is. And this may be due to me being dense.
Starting Strength Coach
This.
I understand what Rip is doing with the article, and vis-a-vis training I think it's spot on. But as to the value and nature of science itself? I'm afraid I don't think it's as bad as all that, even allowing that science is bumping up against some significant barriers to progress right now, and that the very primitive human and institutional influences on science ca. 2017 are not altogether productive (in my bid for Understatement of the Year). This is all particularly interesting in light of a circular I received from the NIH today--people are very interested in re-orienting and invigorating the scientific enterprise at every level--in part because they have to. But the scientific endeavour has been in worse straights than this. So you can put me down as one who remains optimistic.
I think we're looking at a number of imminent parallel revolutions in science a la Kuhn, with significant influences from factors beyond the lab or the Ivory Tower, and new ways of looking at nature, information, and the very meaning of scientific certainty or "knowledge." But that's another thread. As an approach to interrogating nature, science is the winner and still champeen.
And this is a True Thing:
On the book tour, on the first or second stop, I blurted something out that shocked me when I heard myself say it, and I said it for the rest of the tour: In 25 years of medical study and practice, I have never encountered an intervention that, when successfully administered, achieved the desired result every single time....until now. Everybody who does the program gets stronger.No other program in existence works as effectively and as efficiently, every time it is correctly applied, without exception.
And it’s time we said so.
That is a truly remarkable thing. (And it's time we said so.)
Member
Geez.
The point of the wording used in the quote was to point out the difference between the circle jerk world of theoretical peer review articles that have no real repercussions/applications in the real world to really prove or disprove them and engineering where the damned thing either doesn't work or falls down and kills people when you have a smoke up everyone's ass theory.
Starting Strength is more like the later because even if there are some holes in the theory (we find more fiber types, the SRA curve is off, ect) it still works and can clearly be demonstrated to do so unlike much of the theoretical science that is too often presumptions built upon other presumptions with some math thrown in, but the whole can never be subject to actual repeated experiments................like every engineering project and SS is.
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