3 ms·

Is it because many researchers put their ego first over the science? It's so many times that they ridicule ideas, that often amounts to bullying and then they r

Is it because many researchers put their ego first over the science? It's so many times that they ridicule ideas, that often amounts to bullying and then they rarely even say sorry when it turns out they were wrong. Why won't academia flush out these types of people? The toxic atmosphere with no way of getting rid of bad apples is what put me off from studying.

hprotagonist 5y ago
>Why won't academia flush out these types of people? Because this behavior is part of human nature. Do you think scientists as a class are are somehow exempt from this, say, by some form of rationalistic purity?
Swizec 5y ago
It’s because discovering something completely new and unheard of that isn’t even hinted at hy any existing theory is extremely rare. Most people with such claims turn out to be wrong, doing bad experiments, fudging data, or worse. The scientific community is resistent to such things because 90% of the time they are right to be resistant, the hypothesis is conclusively disproven, and we never hear about it again. Sometimes, rarely, the claim comes through, survives the scrutiny, and scientists quickly change their minds based on new established fact. Imagine if someone came out with “I have found a way to run 50 compute cycles per CPU instruction!!”. We would justifiably ridicule that person’s idea as implausible or impossible. It would take a lot of evidence to change the whole computer industry’s opinion on what’s possible.
- patall 5y ago
  Exactly, though I would rather put that number at >99%. I would think, its kind of black swan event where in hindsight, everyone thinks its easy to see but it was not. Recently, we see that here and there with covid research where some single lab (or doctor) comes up with theory that matches some peoples preformed believe. When most scientists then oppose that theory, those people claim that this one of those <1% of cases were all the science is disproven, citing all the cases where it was, failing to see the many more situations where it wasn't.
- andrewjl 5y ago
  "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Perhaps the single best heuristic for judging any type of objective claim.
dekhn 5y ago
it's nuanced. prusiner himself was a bully who ran a toxic lab. my group collaborated with him and we got an eyeful.
raincom 5y ago
This phenomenon is studied in the history and philosophy of sciences; it is called "paradigm change" ala Thomas Kuhn. Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on. So, this resistance is expected. 'How to overcome resistance' is studied in Sociology of Science.
- andrekandre 5y ago
  Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on. programmers can be like this as well!
vkou 5y ago
It's because scientific evidence for a novel theory is often spotty and incomplete, and without any inertia, we'd be jumping from one fad to another, only to discover that the hot new thing is just a statistical anomaly, or a failure in experiment design. See: the Pons cold fusion nonsense. Yes, this does sometimes mean that correct novel theories, that don't have an insurmountable body of experimental evidence behind them have a harder time getting adoption. It's a tradeoff. It's the kind of tradeoff that anyone who actually wants to get any work done is constantly making.

hprotagonist 5y ago

>Why won't academia flush out these types of people? Because this behavior is part of human nature. Do you think scientists as a class are are somehow exempt from this, say, by some form of rationalistic purity?

Swizec 5y ago

It’s because discovering something completely new and unheard of that isn’t even hinted at hy any existing theory is extremely rare. Most people with such claims turn out to be wrong, doing bad experiments, fudging data, or worse. The scientific community is resistent to such things because 90% of the time they are right to be resistant, the hypothesis is conclusively disproven, and we never hear about it again. Sometimes, rarely, the claim comes through, survives the scrutiny, and scientists quickly change their minds based on new established fact. Imagine if someone came out with “I have found a way to run 50 compute cycles per CPU instruction!!”. We would justifiably ridicule that person’s idea as implausible or impossible. It would take a lot of evidence to change the whole computer industry’s opinion on what’s possible.

patall 5y ago
Exactly, though I would rather put that number at >99%. I would think, its kind of black swan event where in hindsight, everyone thinks its easy to see but it was not. Recently, we see that here and there with covid research where some single lab (or doctor) comes up with theory that matches some peoples preformed believe. When most scientists then oppose that theory, those people claim that this one of those <1% of cases were all the science is disproven, citing all the cases where it was, failing to see the many more situations where it wasn't.
andrewjl 5y ago
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Perhaps the single best heuristic for judging any type of objective claim.

dekhn 5y ago

it's nuanced. prusiner himself was a bully who ran a toxic lab. my group collaborated with him and we got an eyeful.

raincom 5y ago

This phenomenon is studied in the history and philosophy of sciences; it is called "paradigm change" ala Thomas Kuhn. Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on. So, this resistance is expected. 'How to overcome resistance' is studied in Sociology of Science.

andrekandre 5y ago
Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on. programmers can be like this as well!

vkou 5y ago

It's because scientific evidence for a novel theory is often spotty and incomplete, and without any inertia, we'd be jumping from one fad to another, only to discover that the hot new thing is just a statistical anomaly, or a failure in experiment design. See: the Pons cold fusion nonsense. Yes, this does sometimes mean that correct novel theories, that don't have an insurmountable body of experimental evidence behind them have a harder time getting adoption. It's a tradeoff. It's the kind of tradeoff that anyone who actually wants to get any work done is constantly making.