4 ms·

I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious s

• btrettel 7y ago
  > But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues. To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals: > [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to. From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ The status quo is not the best we can do.
• clairity 7y ago
  science doesn't have to be conservative at all, so why presume it? most (advanced) knowledge is tentative anyway, so why not take the strategy of accepting it all while it's uncertain? negative results are just a valuable as advances, and contradictions are just areas begging for more research. what you really seem to be asking is "why can't science be more efficient?" and science shouldn't be more efficient. it should be wholly less efficient. we should have more people searching in the dark for the implausible. conservatism wants the safe and sure, and science is, and must be, anything but.
  • bobthechef 7y ago
    When people say that science is conservative, what they mean is that it progresses slowly and cautiously to built up certainty. Science is a tradition that typically progresses incrementally and is revised incrementally (I should say, there are many scientific traditions that proceed this way, not some single, grand, capital S "Science!"). When anomalies occur in the experimental results, it takes a while for them to be digested in a way that leads to model revision and then broad acceptance. Now, that isn't to say that people can't explore unexplored avenues or explore alternatives. They should, but that doesn't contradict the idea that the sciences proceed conservatively. Otherwise, you've got chaos, not science. In any case, you're typically going to profit much more by learning from a meticulously examined and fleshed out tradition than you are by starting from proverbial scratch. Science wants certainty which it why, when done properly (aye, there's the rub!), it goes to great lengths to verify things. Conservatism, contrary to widespread misconception, is not about stagnation, but about being careful and responsible with the stewardship of your hard won inheritance.
    • clairity 7y ago
      you're idealizing science and literally begging the question[0], in this case, making an a priori assumption that science must proceed conservatively and then trying to rationalize that position. conservatism unduly burdens science by overly valuing correctness over exploration. science advances on the latter, not the former. be wrong, it's ok. it only adds to our scientific knowledge. we can't even know when we're wrong without a grueling many attempts at being right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question