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Wow, that's a clear sign science has become too political. Proving other scientists wrong used to be how careers were made, not something to fear.
by zorga 8y ago
Wow, that's a clear sign science has become too political. Proving other scientists wrong used to be how careers were made, not something to fear.
- seibelj 8y agoAll the labs working on this spoke to each other, collaborated occasionally, and saw each other at conferences. So making a big stink about this wouldn’t have made life easier. Plus peer reviewers for submitted papers are “hidden” but because the field is so niche they are likely people you know, and they know who you are when you publish (reviews aren’t double-blind), so it could hurt your career if the PI became angry at you and started bad-mouthing you to to the other labs.
- zorga 8y agoI understand, but science isn't supposed to make life easier, it's supposed to progress mankind's knowledge and that necessarily entails eliminating bad information from the body of knowledge. Avoiding challenging bad papers because someone you know wrote it and you're worried they might not like you for it; well, yuk.
- gmueckl 8y agoNo, something like this can spiral: they can write bad reviews about your work, tanking your publication rate, which makes it harder to find funding etc...
- sverige 8y agoYou've missed the point: getting along with your peers is the most important thing. What is truth?
- zorga 8y agoNo I haven't... > getting along with your peers is the most important thing No it isn't, hence the yuk. Anyone who thinks getting along with your peers is more important than getting the science right, isn't someone I trust doing science. The most important thing is getting the science right, full stop, end of story.
- projektir 8y agoThe problem appears to be is that anyone who can't "get along with their peers", or otherwise "social game", is not getting close enough to attempt to do any kind of science/serious project/study in the first place.
- landryraccoon 8y agoSo you would argue that Galileo Galilei was a bad scientist? He was imprisoned for disagreeing with the pope. I suppose you'd have to argue that a good scientist in the middle ages had to be in good standing with the church and monarchy?
- leereeves 8y agoGalileo only needed basic tools (like feathers, balls, an inclined plane, and a handheld telescope) to pursue science. If he'd needed access to impossibly expensive equipment available only in a few palaces around Europe, politics might have stopped him before he ever got started.
- zorga 8y agoYou can't predict what the next great discovery will be, or where it'll come from. Generally however, they're on the theoretical side, not the experimental side, so your point doesn't really stand. Those big machines rarely do little more than confirm exiting theories and those theories can very well come from one person who is anti-social. Science is about being right; not about getting along with your peers.
- anoncake 8y agoWhat he actually did was closer to calling the pope a moron.
- danharaj 8y agoScience has always been political, within itself and in relation to the rest of society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
- zorga 8y agoObviously, hence the word "too".
- whatshisface 8y agoYour link is not a story about politics, it's a story about psychological bias.
- pessimizer 8y agoJust because Feynman diagnosed the gradual charge drift as internal pressure doesn't make it internal pressure. The effect would be the same between fearing one was wrong and fearing one would be condemned and punished as wrong - changing the data to be closer to the official line.
- danharaj 8y agoAuthority is always political.
- whatshisface 8y agoIt's not a story about authority, either, if by authority you mean something narrow enough to always be political.
- danharaj 8y agoIf you don't think Millikan's authority as a scientist was not a factor then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- whatshisface 8y ago
- bchjam 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer%E2%80%93Hilbert_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer%E2%80%93Hilbert_contro... Brouwer's career suffered as a consequence of his disagreements with Hilbert. EDIT (with links to the political aspect): Letters written more about the politics of publishing than the math itself are referenced in a book called "The War of the Frogs and the Mice" (PDF) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224.368&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224... (see bottom of pg 9 as displayed for the letter Brouwer wrote to Hilbert's wife)
- whatshisface 8y ago>In the later 1920s, Brouwer became involved in a public and demeaning controversy with Hilbert over editorial policy at Mathematische Annalen, It doesn't read like the political fights were about math. Although Hilbert disagreed with Brouwer, it sounds like the falling out was precipitated by arguing over something subjective.
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- youwindang00 8y agoIt’s almost like a society beholden to a billionaire aristocracy is going to have democratic process undermined in many contexts. When the overarching theme for the masses daily life is “grovel before the desires of a smaller and smaller group of haves to survive” no one going to risk their meal ticket.
- scarcely 8y agoThough worth pointing out "political" is ambiguous and that this a case of politics in the "office politics" sense not in the "use science to justify policy" sense
- RA_Fisher 8y agoI believe this applies mostly to public science. Private science is anchored by a market-based mechanism that naturally expunges fraud.
- r00fus 8y agoIs this a joke? Profit motive is far more likely to put the cart before the horse: pushing for evidence to support outcomes.
- jessewmc 8y agoI think they were referring to internal research that says 'if we do X we can sell more' which has naturally aligned incentives. This as opposed to releasing research along the lines of 'cigarettes are fine for you! smoke more!'
- sheepmullet 8y ago> if we do X we can sell more' which has naturally aligned incentives. Even then there are agency problems which mean that once a company gets over a certain size there is no natural alignment. I know plenty of managers tweaking A/B tests until they get the results they want.
- RA_Fisher 8y agoEasy fix: hire a statistician. :-)
- RA_Fisher 8y agoThis is a quote from a preeminent scientist: https://twitter.com/bmbaczkowski/status/1069891514275385344?s=21 https://twitter.com/bmbaczkowski/status/1069891514275385344?... "in academia overfitting can get you a nature paper, in industry get you fired"
- lostlogin 8y agoNot so much. When you pay someone to get a result, that’s what they do.
- anotherthrow456 8y agoYou want to know where this is the worst? Climate science. Everyone has an axe to grind on one side or the other and moderated opinions are flamed into oblivion. We can't even talk about the science because it becomes a discussion about destroying the planet.
- Sharlin 8y agoIsn’t the moderate position in climate science (regarding anthropogenic climate change) the mainstream consensus position? There are no two ”extreme views” with the truth somewhere in the middle. There’s the overwhelmingly supported by evidence scientific position and then there’s the pseudoscientific position.
- anotherthrow456 8y agoYes, I suppose I've conflated two things. The first is the strident shrieking of politicians and those who echo what politicians say,for which I would argue there are two extreme sides. And neither of these sides actually has constructive discussionin my opinion. And then, there are the different sides of scientific discussion which produce the conclusions that the politicians warp and shriek about. Some of this is good science, and a rot of itis bad science. But whatever the politicians get to blather on about is what most people are aware of, regardless of whether it's good or bad. And your comment points to part of the problem. It's science, so if we believe that we know everything, we're wrong. If we don't know everything, then that means we need to have the lattitude to argue about things. The argument is obviously not "is the earth warming?" but "how and why is the earth warming?". If your immediate response is "well, it's obviously humans producing CO2", then you have fallen into the trap that I'm trying to explain. Yes, humans produce CO2, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But the story is more complicated than that, and science needs room to wonder. The problem is the political shrieking dampens the curiosity and wonder that science is about.
- jhanschoo 8y agoBut if Earth in ancient prehistory was dominated by CO2 that was eventually sequestered by plants under the ground, and that today our oil reserves are running low, then wouldn't it make simple sense that human use of fossil fuels must have a significant impact on atmospheric CO2 levels? In that case, it's pretty settled that there is a significant human impact on atmospheric CO2 levels; the space for room to wander are, say, the exact distribution of CO2 released. I mean, physicists don't wonder and revise basic kinematics since that science is pretty much settled that Newtonian kinematics are very good approximations of reality.
- afterburner 8y agoIt turns out, people are always political, because they're people.