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Why isn’t research more decentralized?

• coaxial 8y ago
  Because most people can't understand research or how it's done, so there is not enough pressure to change anything. I found the books by Ben Goldacre to be enlightening. He has a ted talk as well I believe.
• marcosdumay 8y ago
  Who would do that decentralized research? Why would they do that? The real question is why do governments watch private interests take over public research institutions and not only do nothing to preserve the lack of bias, but even go out of their way to help the process? (And yes, the answer is not secret.)
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    Do you really think government research absent private bias is free from bias? How government money gets spent is a very political process, and naturally that puts a lot of pressure on research organizations to produce the politically correct result.
• yorwba 8y ago
  Those lobbyists and the scientists they fund are decentralized. Decentralization isn't guaranteed to improve anything, usually it only adds overhead. Decentralized consensus works in Bitcoin (a minority can never fool the majority) because verifying work is much easier than doing the work. Decentralized consensus doesn't work very well in research, because verifying work is even harder. If you repeat someone's experiment and get different results, maybe you just didn't do it correctly? So you need multiple replication attempts before you can be sure to have falsified it, and in that time someone else has already published the next bogus study.