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True, but I would personally place more emphasis on avoiding false data being published and less on novelty. If the consequence of publishing something wrong we
by danieltillett 6y ago
True, but I would personally place more emphasis on avoiding false data being published and less on novelty. If the consequence of publishing something wrong were greater, and the costs of taking the time to do things right less, then we might see more science we can trust published.
- cycomanic 6y agoNot when people's livelihoods are on the line. You would simply get people to not report. What you are asking for is the equivalent of saying "firing programmers when a bug is found will result in better software" In science it will result in much less interesting science being done, because this will desincentivize risk. The big problem in science funding is that it already incentivizes low risk projects (you should have preliminary results that proof it works...) so let's not make it worse
- danieltillett 6y agoI am arguing that the current funding structure encourages poor quality science. Right now it is better to pump out papers as quickly as possible rather than taking the time to check the data is not flawed. From a software perspective it is like paying developers by the number of lines of code delivered and telling them to not worry about bugs. Not an approach that is likely to deliver quality software. What we need in science is to find a way that people have the time and incentives to publish results that are as accurate as possible. Somewhat off topic I do wonder if we would get better software if we fired programmers if bugs were found. I suspect we would not get much code written, but the code that was written would be very high quality.