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It'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
by aluren 8y ago
It'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.