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> I guess it may seem strange to outsiders though. Of course it seems strange. The output of the scientific/academic community is often presented to people as
by hnaccy 8y ago
> I guess it may seem strange to outsiders though.
Of course it seems strange. The output of the scientific/academic community is often presented to people as being a source of truth and scientists do little to dissuade this. To learn that it's all rotten to the core is upsetting.
- aluren 8y agoIt's not rotten to the core, it's just imperfect, like all human communities are. Nepotism, conflicts of interests, human error, unconscious biases, etc. don't magically disappear just because we're in academia. As I said below: "All in all, I'd say we're doing fine. We're just not the ethereal source of truth that some people hold us to be, the very same people who, after claming that 'God is dead', are very quick to replace Him with His sillicon-based equivalent around which we would act like priests, except with lab coats in lieu of clerical garments." It's all about trust, really. Many people choose to trust state-of-the-art medical research when they do vaccinations on their kids; some do not. You can indeed choose not to trust us as a 'source of truth', and it seems a fair chunk of the US political landscape is being led down that path; we'll see where it goes.
- lvh 8y agoMost of those other systems don’t claim to be designed to prevent them intrinsically via process, though.
- aluren 8y agoWe never claimed to be completely free of bias, or immune to nepotism. We're human. I think you're making it to be a bigger deal than it actually is. Most of these things are just noise. We just ignore it. If someone rises to prominence with outrageously fake results, rest assured that they will get shot down quickly by concurrents (all the incentive to publish fake results lies within highly competitive fields). If you know what you're doing, and work in a lab where people know what they're doing too, you can still do pretty good science. I would guess than in all communities, academic or not, there's a nonzero amount of bogus, over-hype, nepotism, politics and what not, and a subset of people who actually get things done and make the whole field advance. After a while, the test of time truly determines what was actually useful from what is bunk. That's how it's always been.
- cwyers 8y agoBrian Wansink didn't get shot down quickly at all.
- ACow_Adonis 8y agoI think it's one of those things you just have to learn to live with :/ And believe me I hate being defeatist, it made me a lot angrier when I was younger and I consider it to be one of the things that stopped me trying to go down the academic route so far. While coders (who aren't just being boosters for particular technologies) have to live with the fact that the world is run on mountains of bad code, scientists of anyone engaging with academia or journal papers has to sleep at night realising how much bad science is being done and how much the publication process is skewed to publishing and politics over quality or fact checking. I can no more fix it than I can fix all software bugs or politics in big corporations...
- wrs 8y agoIf the most prominent repositories of research not only do nothing about but actively resist and retaliate against substantiated challenges to published results, that sounds to me like something pretty rotten, at or near the core. The core principles of science are in conflict with natural human behavior (which is one reason it took so long to invent science), so saying “they’re only human” is really no excuse.
- Chathamization 8y agoIt makes me wonder why more effort isn't put into finding alternatives to this fundamentally broken system.
- ALittleLight 8y agoI don't think it is all rotten to the core. I think it is a human establishment trying to do something very complicated with varying results. Sometimes they get things right and sometimes they make mistakes and sometimes they are infiltrated by bad actors. What I try to do when reading academic papers is, if there are multiple on the same topic, read them and try to understand the differences. If different papers come to the same conclusion, that should make you a lot more confident in the result. If there aren't many papers on the subject then you just need to understand that this is kind of a "best effort" thing that is more likely to be true than a random guess, but not certainly accurate.
- Fomite 8y agoIt's not rotten to the core. It's a complex system, full of human beings, with egos and incentives and other reasons for doing things. Different labs also do different things - mine is currently reworking a paper that was basically done because something we did might matter, and my students have developing tests as part of their workload for developing code.
- dnautics 8y agoIt's not rotten to the core. There are good people in there, but good people are not rewarded, and advancement selects for some bad traits. Maybe that's scarier than it being rotten to the core.