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Why should people respect formal education? Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. The non-scientific pa

Why should people respect formal education? Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. The non-scientific parts of academia are dominated by in-group politics and shallow status seeking. And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology: research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. If academia wants respect, it should work on improving itself instead of trying to find a "strategy that works against populism". Edit: Citations > Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... > Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the Same Results https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-rep... > 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on... > Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent. > Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi... > In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate. http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf > When Inbar and Lammers contacted [social psychologists] ... they found that ... the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers. ... Participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas? As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak out. > Over all, close to nineteen per cent [of social psychologists surveyed] reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper...and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psy...

luc4sdreyer 8y ago
You're making a lot of wild claims. >Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. Citation needed. >And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology Citation needed. >research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. Citation needed. Maybe it has happened to a couple of people at a few screwed up universities, but you're implying this is common. EDIT: I predict you're going to use the exact methods described in the article to "win" the argument.
- deleted 8y ago
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- titanix2 8y ago
  You can do your own research about that by yourself if you have a real interest in the topic. Anyway, here is a book about this issue in sociology (written by two researchers of the field): Gérald Bronner et Étienne Géhin (2017), Le Danger sociologique, Paris, Puf, 252 p.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    By “do your own research”, do you mean “repeat a statistically significant number of the various studies to find out how repeatable the results are”, or do you mean “read a book which convinced me”?
    - menckenjr 8y ago
      There's a third option - "do a meta-analysis of representative studies to determine true effect size".
      - ben_w 8y ago
        I counted that as “repeat”, given that’s part of how this problem was first discovered. On reflection though, that only works when you know roughly how many negative results get published: part of the problem with unreproducable results is that negatives have been difficult to publish, biasing publications so that entirely competent and honest mistakes are much more common than one would expect from just the p-value.

luc4sdreyer 8y ago

You're making a lot of wild claims. >Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. Citation needed. >And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology Citation needed. >research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. Citation needed. Maybe it has happened to a couple of people at a few screwed up universities, but you're implying this is common. EDIT: I predict you're going to use the exact methods described in the article to "win" the argument.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
titanix2 8y ago
You can do your own research about that by yourself if you have a real interest in the topic. Anyway, here is a book about this issue in sociology (written by two researchers of the field): Gérald Bronner et Étienne Géhin (2017), Le Danger sociologique, Paris, Puf, 252 p.
- ben_w 8y ago
  By “do your own research”, do you mean “repeat a statistically significant number of the various studies to find out how repeatable the results are”, or do you mean “read a book which convinced me”?
  - menckenjr 8y ago
    There's a third option - "do a meta-analysis of representative studies to determine true effect size".
    - ben_w 8y ago
      I counted that as “repeat”, given that’s part of how this problem was first discovered. On reflection though, that only works when you know roughly how many negative results get published: part of the problem with unreproducable results is that negatives have been difficult to publish, biasing publications so that entirely competent and honest mistakes are much more common than one would expect from just the p-value.