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I'm sorry but this saddens me to no end, even I did better science during my BSc and MSc; it's not just disheartening, it's frightening. Reading this almost mad

I'm sorry but this saddens me to no end, even I did better science during my BSc and MSc; it's not just disheartening, it's frightening. Reading this almost made me feel ill to my stomach. I don't know what else to say at the blatant disregard for scientific ethics and sense of duty. And we complain that the public at large doesn't trust us "educated" folk, well I can't see why...

arethuza 6y ago
My own, rather bitter, experiences with academic research in the early 1990s led me to suspect that by trying to "manage" academic research at a large scale was utterly counter productive and was optimising for all the wrong things (publications, career progression, money, politics) and was actually dramatically reducing the amount of actual science being done. I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for a moment. Edit: The point where I was sure I had to leave was when I was actually starting to play the "publications" game too well - when you find yourself negotiating with colleagues to get your name on their paper for a bit of help I'd decided things weren't really for me. Edit2: I'd wanted to be an academic research scientist since I was about 5 or so when I actually got what I thought was my dream job I was delighted - took me a couple of years to work out why almost nothing in the environment seemed to work in the way I expected them to ("Why is everyone so conservative?") and became, as one outsider described me, "hyper cynical".
- pas 6y ago
  What does conservative mean in this context? Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.
    - andi999 6y ago
      Actually in some sciences they are. But anything touching medicine... forget it.
    - pas 6y ago
      Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?
      - arethuza 6y ago
        It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.
  - gryn 6y ago
    If I had to guess, in the academic context it would mean no actual novel thinking, just churning out more papers on the same `winning` theories in the field, things where before even starting you have a clear idea of what the result would look like.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Is that small-c conservative? Or do you mean rightwing? (curious, I assume the former...) In either case pretty much all humans are profoundly small-c conservative, "big change projects" on society-scale do often end in war/death/etc. At least, it's probably 50/50 whether its a "National Health Service" or a "World War". However the reason is deeper than that: evolution does not care if you're thriving, it cares that you are breeding. So you're optimized for "minimum safety" not "maximum flourishing". So if things are stable then you will prefer to stay in them for as long as possible. It is why people need to "hit rock bottom" before they can be helped, often, ie., their local-minimum needs to become unstable so they will prefer the uncertainty of change.
- jhbadger 6y ago
  The problem with going to a startup is it is kind of like going from the frying pan into the fire. As someone who has worked in both academia and industry, while academia and its pursuit of publications leads to bad behavior, industry and its pursuit of money is even more unprincipled. While it might not be that hard to fool peer reviewers with nonsense, it is way easier to fool venture capitalists, who often know no science and and are just listening for the hot buzzwords.
- mercer 6y ago
  I had the 'luck' of being a research assistant at a prestigious academic collaboration involving multiple equally prestigious universities. This was in my bachelor years, and I still hadn't decided whether to pursue a career in academia or elsewhere. While the experience day to day was definitely fun, it destroyed any desire I had of entering the field. A lot of politics, a lot of statistically suspect stuff (even to me, in my third year of a bachelor), and a lot of busiwork. After that experience I went into web development (full-stack). What I like about it is that even though there IS politics, even though there IS taking shortcuts, and god forgive me for some of the code I delivered, in the end whatever I work on has to actually do the thing it's supposed to do. It doesn't remove the aforementioned problems, but it grounds everything in a way that is mostly acceptable to me. As frustrating as it can be to build some convoluted web app that feels like it's held together by scotch tape, it's nice to know that it eventually has to do whatever the client asks for, however flawed.
radiator 6y ago
This is true, and in my opinion there is one more tendency which you also imply. Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Hk a that old saying go? Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. In my experience this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.
mlang23 6y ago
It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated. This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.
- Radim 6y ago
  This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!" It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements. No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories. How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?
  - xkde 6y ago
    I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon, but this, I think, accounts for many of the issues in current discourse.
    - moomin 6y ago
      In the UK we've seen a fascinating evolution from skeptic societies to science denial conspiracy theorists. To _massively_ simplify what's a relatively complex piece of sociological weirdness: using your intuition about how the world works is a good heuristic for spotting charlatans, but it fails you badly when the science tells you something that doesn't accord with your intuition.
    - analog31 6y ago
      I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts. Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.

arethuza 6y ago

My own, rather bitter, experiences with academic research in the early 1990s led me to suspect that by trying to "manage" academic research at a large scale was utterly counter productive and was optimising for all the wrong things (publications, career progression, money, politics) and was actually dramatically reducing the amount of actual science being done. I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for a moment. Edit: The point where I was sure I had to leave was when I was actually starting to play the "publications" game too well - when you find yourself negotiating with colleagues to get your name on their paper for a bit of help I'd decided things weren't really for me. Edit2: I'd wanted to be an academic research scientist since I was about 5 or so when I actually got what I thought was my dream job I was delighted - took me a couple of years to work out why almost nothing in the environment seemed to work in the way I expected them to ("Why is everyone so conservative?") and became, as one outsider described me, "hyper cynical".

pas 6y ago
What does conservative mean in this context? Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!
- arethuza 6y ago
  Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Actually in some sciences they are. But anything touching medicine... forget it.
  - pas 6y ago
    Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?
    - arethuza 6y ago
      It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.
- gryn 6y ago
  If I had to guess, in the academic context it would mean no actual novel thinking, just churning out more papers on the same `winning` theories in the field, things where before even starting you have a clear idea of what the result would look like.
mjburgess 6y ago
Is that small-c conservative? Or do you mean rightwing? (curious, I assume the former...) In either case pretty much all humans are profoundly small-c conservative, "big change projects" on society-scale do often end in war/death/etc. At least, it's probably 50/50 whether its a "National Health Service" or a "World War". However the reason is deeper than that: evolution does not care if you're thriving, it cares that you are breeding. So you're optimized for "minimum safety" not "maximum flourishing". So if things are stable then you will prefer to stay in them for as long as possible. It is why people need to "hit rock bottom" before they can be helped, often, ie., their local-minimum needs to become unstable so they will prefer the uncertainty of change.
jhbadger 6y ago
The problem with going to a startup is it is kind of like going from the frying pan into the fire. As someone who has worked in both academia and industry, while academia and its pursuit of publications leads to bad behavior, industry and its pursuit of money is even more unprincipled. While it might not be that hard to fool peer reviewers with nonsense, it is way easier to fool venture capitalists, who often know no science and and are just listening for the hot buzzwords.
mercer 6y ago
I had the 'luck' of being a research assistant at a prestigious academic collaboration involving multiple equally prestigious universities. This was in my bachelor years, and I still hadn't decided whether to pursue a career in academia or elsewhere. While the experience day to day was definitely fun, it destroyed any desire I had of entering the field. A lot of politics, a lot of statistically suspect stuff (even to me, in my third year of a bachelor), and a lot of busiwork. After that experience I went into web development (full-stack). What I like about it is that even though there IS politics, even though there IS taking shortcuts, and god forgive me for some of the code I delivered, in the end whatever I work on has to actually do the thing it's supposed to do. It doesn't remove the aforementioned problems, but it grounds everything in a way that is mostly acceptable to me. As frustrating as it can be to build some convoluted web app that feels like it's held together by scotch tape, it's nice to know that it eventually has to do whatever the client asks for, however flawed.

radiator 6y ago

This is true, and in my opinion there is one more tendency which you also imply. Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Hk a that old saying go? Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. In my experience this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

mlang23 6y ago

It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated. This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.

Radim 6y ago
This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!" It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements. No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories. How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?
- xkde 6y ago
  I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon, but this, I think, accounts for many of the issues in current discourse.
  - moomin 6y ago
    In the UK we've seen a fascinating evolution from skeptic societies to science denial conspiracy theorists. To _massively_ simplify what's a relatively complex piece of sociological weirdness: using your intuition about how the world works is a good heuristic for spotting charlatans, but it fails you badly when the science tells you something that doesn't accord with your intuition.
  - analog31 6y ago
    I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts. Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.