35 ms·

Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific researc

• everyone 5y ago
  What other areas have you experienced? What you're describing is just human nature, every field of human endeavour is like that, because they're run by humans. Despite this, we have made unimaginable scientific progress over the last few 100 years, and we are continuing to progress at and even faster rate.
• yesenadam 5y ago
  > if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong. Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Perhaps things seem (much) worse now because we have survivorship bias, the same way classical music seems higher quality than pop, because the 90% crud[0] has been long forgotten. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  • donw 5y ago
    > Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Unlikely. In its infancy, science -- aka "Natural Philosophy" as it was called at the time -- had to establish its credibility. It did so by delivering results.
    • chr1 5y ago
      Alchemy was part of natural philosophy as well though.
    • robbintt 5y ago
      I think most of the science back then was really bad, we just don't talk about it, which is exactly the parent post's point.
    • yesenadam 5y ago
      Maybe only one person in ten delivered results - then you'd have both results and 90% crud.
    • amcoastal 5y ago
      And in the same way, a lot of science done and published in the last 25 years has shown real technological improvement in the world around us.
      • bencollier49 5y ago
        Is that not mostly engineering? Refinement of existing hard science?
• kakistokrat 5y ago
  From the viewpoint of someone who has been practicing science daily for the last 30 years: I tend to agree
• sega_sai 5y ago
  As a person working in science (long past PhD), I disagree. There are tons of problem in science: grant system, pressure to publish etc. Also everyone in science is still a person with standard people problems: ego, desire to be right, wanting recognition etc. Also some fields had more issues because of poor statistical methods etc. But the self-correcting nature of science is still its biggest redeeming feature. And therefore unless I can figure out things by myself, I'll trust scientific consensus. I may not trust individual papers, as people make mistakes, may have an axe to grind, but I'll believe the consensus. For sure occasionally even scientific consensus will be wrong.
  • raziel2p 5y ago
    It may be useful to separate science itself (with its self-correcting nature and such) from academia and the community/economics of scientists and research. Furthermore, if the incentives for publishing research are wrongly aligned, can you really trust published papers in mass? Scientific consensus can be a hard thing to define sometimes. Climate change is an example where there are enough studies out there that a meta-study can prove consensus, but what about something more recent and difficult to measure, like the effectiveness of covid vaccines/measures?
  • nsainsbury 5y ago
    Science does eventually self-correct, but unfortunately it takes far too long to do so. One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal. In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
• lettergram 5y ago
  > Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premier post-doc position. People in their lab (who I caught up with at a conference) mentioned their work was terrible. Now they’re a professor at a top tier university. Along the way, everyone knew and when people tried to bring up concerns higher ups in the institution suppressed the knowledge. Mostly because their fraudulent work was already cited tens of times. This wasn’t directly in my field, but I saw it go down and followed it. In my day job, I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code. Most cs work is equally useless. It’s all a farce. EDIT: I recommend the book for some insights - “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris” There’s also a decent podcast by Bret and Eric Weinstein that dives into a similar story https://youtu.be/dJNjH4SP6vw?list=PLq9jO8fmlPee9ezOraOHAJ3g9Zh3V2F2G https://youtu.be/dJNjH4SP6vw?list=PLq9jO8fmlPee9ezOraOHAJ3g9... There are many examples, at the end of the day... the people in the institutions will protect themselves.
  • BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    > Along the way, everyone knew and when people tried to bring up concerns higher ups in the institution suppressed the knowledge. As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      Much of this was told to me in confidence (via their lab-mates, etc) I’m not going to betray their trust.
      • slg 5y ago
        Your first comment was effectively "Everyone knows this person is a fraud and no one is willing to stand up and put a stop to it". Your second comment was effectively "Well I don't know they are a fraud and I'm not going to be the one who upsets people by trying to put a stop to it". I don't say this as a criticism of you. I say this a defense of the people you are criticizing. Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. Most of us aren't willing to do it despite us pretending otherwise.
• blablabla123 5y ago
  This highly depends on the field. In Physics the barriers are very high. I mean not necessarily for things to end up on arxiv.org but to be published in a peer reviewed magazine. Although probably that's not for every field and perhaps not even feasible because the data is just not there. Thinking about Medicine, every single data point there is probably a lot of work (and speaking of human trials 4 digit expensive).
  • chithanh 5y ago
    I think it is quite telling that Planck's principle was formulated by a physicist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle Though probably Planck was at the time still under the impression of the C.G. Barkla affair.
  • crmd 5y ago
    Across the academy, there is a movement away from the mission of seeking truth to the mission of seeking justice. The exact sciences are about a decade behind the social sciences in this transition.
    • kuhewa 5y ago
      Nah. Just because societies and journals in STEMier fields are moving towards being more inclusive in broader practices does not equate to a fundamental difference in what counts as science
• nsainsbury 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely this. I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism). Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    with the dizzying speed, complexity and volumes of reference materials, the single word "degraded" does not have enough descriptive power to start to be interesting. Its just so much more of everything, so much faster, plus all the factors named here.
  • resource0x 5y ago
    > There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) What do you mean by "etc."? Do you have another example?
  • robotresearcher 5y ago
    > I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith. Unless you think we had a special good period in, say, the twentieth century that we've retreated from. It did seem to be an acceleration. But there's at least some pretty amazing biotech going on this century. I think most every activity sector has the phenomenon that 80-90% of the people/companies in it are a pointless waste of time and money. It's the price we pay for the 10-20% treasure.
    • p-e-w 5y ago
• champagnois 5y ago
  The natural sciences offer a unique opportunity for an individual to change the world on their own. Institutions and peer review exist only to verify that the individual offered the best new model of the world. Academia has been taken over by an advanced persistent threat of social sciences that are all completely corrupted. That corruption infects and touches every aspect of the academic's life cycle these days. Funding determines most research and doubley so the conclusions. The infection politicizes everything and rewards those who use scientific branding to support the establishment.
• sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I think you aren’t leaving any room for scientists to be mistaken, which is an essential part of the process. In fact, it’s impossible to prove you’re correct in science, only to falsify a statement. Your claims have merit, but they’re stretched slightly too far. The best work is done among the chaos. And doing stellar work is often a lot more chaotic than it appears in camera-ready papers.
• nautilius 5y ago
  “I played in the local soccer club once, and can now confidently tell you that every professional athlete is an alcoholic. “
  • b112 5y ago
    Or, such narratives are created, just as narratives that all politicians are corrupt, that meritocracy is wrong, as an attempt to weaken western democracies.
    • nautilius 5y ago
      Not arguing one way or another, but what is the evidence?
      • b112 5y ago
        Most nations spend a notable portion of their defense budget, on disrupting opponents via whisper campaigns, and dividing an opponent from within. This has been going on through all of recorded history. Disrupting belief in any important part of your opponent's society, is key. The goal is to cause societal disfunction, an inability to work cooperatively. Why fight a war, if your opponent destructs from within? Or, almost as good, loses some capacity to make war? Also good, is if your actions cause your opponent to change regimes, and become aligned with your goals.
        • nautilius 5y ago
          Oh I completely see the why, I am curious about evidence of the whether.
          • b112 5y ago
            Not sure on the whether, only the potential. Frankly, I'd be astonished not.
            • 5y ago
• andrecarini 5y ago
  What's the alternative? While I agree with the general sentiment, science and academia is still better than random YouTube videos.
  • raziel2p 5y ago
    Change the economic incentives in academia and research. If right now universities and researches are rewarded for publishing studies/papers no matter the quality, change the rules so that you're rewarded for quality, not quantity.
    • andrecarini 5y ago
      How do we change those incentives? Who gets to determine the quality threshold?
      • betwixthewires 5y ago
        Reproducibility.
      • nradov 5y ago
        The journal editors have a lot of power. As a start they could devote at least half of their articles to reproduction studies instead of novel research.
    • labster 5y ago
      They are rewarded for impact, which weighs quality over quantity, but only in a complex way that equally weights social dynamics mixed with profit motives. i.e. journals.
    • CamperBob2 5y ago
      I'm not in a position to do any of that, sorry. What do you recommend I do right now to obtain the best available public health information for myself and my family?
      • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bluedays 5y ago
  As someone who also works in Academia it is astonishing how many people come into this thread who have no background in the field cast doubt on you. There is a serious degree of conservatism there is among liberals who think that science and academics should not dare be questioned.
  • LasEspuelas 5y ago
    Not sure what you are saying, but I do believe that we scientist need an extra big dose of humility and we need to learn how to better accept when we are wrong.
  • chr1 5y ago
    Funny how "don't believe, always question everything" have transformed back into "believe in science". Believing in science is a very old thing, Maya have believed in their eclipse prediction science so much that were even making human sacrifice to save the sun from being eaten. We should teach the public not to "believe in science", but the main skill of any scientist: to try to find errors in the theory you think is right with more ardour than in the theory you think is wrong.
    • lovecg 5y ago
      I think we got there by mixing up science and policy. In an emergency (like a pandemic) you can’t have an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in decision making - someone have to make the tough calls and stand by them. Unfortunately we don’t have clear delineation between “science” (what and how we know, and how certain we are) and “policy” (what should we do based on this information) in the public discourse - the same talking heads are often representing both. Then we naturally end up at a place where we have to either “believe in science” or cast doubt on policy decisions, which seems suboptimal.
      • chr1 5y ago
        Why can’t you have an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in decision making? Doubt is always better than false certainty. Public figures lying during pandemic have only prompted more people to be distrustful of science and the official policy decisions.
• pharrington 5y ago
  In your opinion, when was most scientific research not flawed or "useless"? Remember, the Einsteins, Clarks, etc of the world were wildly exceptional outliers. Do you really think that if you were to look at most research done between 1897 and 1922, the overall quality would be higher? And that there would be less social factors competing with the integrity of work?
  • GeekyBear 5y ago
    > In your opinion, when was most scientific research not flawed or "useless"? How long has it been since replicating someone else's study to validate the results was routinely part of the scientific process? >The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
    • pharrington 5y ago
      I've been wondering the same.
    • cgrealy 5y ago
      Isn't that an economic problem rather than a scientific one? Science doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still needs humans to do grunt work and those humans need to be paid, and there isn't much money in replicating an existing study and saying "yep, that's what we thought".
      • GeekyBear 5y ago
        > Isn't that an economic problem rather than a scientific one? I'll add the other sentence from the first paragraph of the source above. >Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
• CamperBob2 5y ago
  All of this may be true, but it leads to the question: if not science, what do you recommend instead? Not being a virologist or epidemiologist, I have to listen to somebody. Are you saying I'd actually be better off listening to Art Bell and Joe Rogan than official sources like Fauci? If so, that's an extraordinary claim if there ever was one.
  • jlawson 5y ago
    Accept that there is no source of info you can just believe at face value. You need to collect information from across your infosphere and intensively de-bias and cross-check it. It'll take a lot of effort. If that's not worth it to you, go agnostic on things you don't have time to figure out, or join a tribe and shout the slogans with your tribe-friends. Your life choices will depend on your values.
    • nu11ptr 5y ago
      This has been my method for quite some time. It is very time consuming. I rarely reach conclusions, but I get close enough to feel confident in my choices.
  • lentil_soup 5y ago
    Agree 100%. And the same is true for a lot of other things, they're just not as contentious. Every time I get on a plane I have to trust the science and engineering behind it, I have zero clue why it works but I can't become an expert in aerodynamics just to go on holiday. When I drink milk I have to trust the science behind pasteurization, I trust the physics calculations when going up a high rise and the same for when I take medicine. I have to trust someone for 95% of my day to day actions, and while a system like "science" is flawed it's the best we've got so far. All up for improvements, but let's not throw the baby with the bathwater.
• LasEspuelas 5y ago
  I also disagree. Nobody documents or publicizes the small labs doing small "useless" stuff. The kind of stuff that seems irrelevant but that slowly piles into a mountain of new information. As a PHD myself, many times I thought to myself: "this research is quite insignificant" and what we found was truly small potatoes, but I can only hope that, in the aggregate, all of us that did small stuff during that period advanced science in significant ways.
  • CrazyCatDog 5y ago
    It’s often useful to have the obvious or insignificant already established in the literature allowing one to focus on more elusive and revolutionary research!
• vkou 5y ago
  > The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselves. You're correct, in that what you describe isn't a threat to the ivory towers of 'science'. Unfortunately, here in the real world, outside of academia, those people's unassailable belief in all flavors of bullshit has quite a negative effect on the quality of life of the rest of us. But at least I can sleep soundly, knowing that 'science' isn't being harmed by them. When, say, the planet burns down around us, because of inaction on climate change, I'll take solace in knowing that the science behind climate change was never in any real danger - unlike the rest of us.
  • rob_c 5y ago
    Given the boogey man was that we'd be out of coal by 2020 in the late 90s (I can dig out the material from British schools to show you this!) I think we can survive the over-exaggeration of how soon and alarmingly and the end of the world is coming. As I keep saying, why can't we just make the planet better? Why is that so difficult? What's the risk?
• xmprt 5y ago
  Really interesting research isn't done because of the risk of a negative result that can't be published.
  • lovecg 5y ago
    I thought pre-registration is a thing? Though I don’t really know how (or how well) any of this works in detail.
• jhallenworld 5y ago
  >Most research is flawed or useless, Also the research could be downright fraudulent. A very interesting case is the Schön scandal, involving organic semiconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal There is an engrossing set of videos about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64
  • e1g 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing. I did not expect to watch the entire 1.5hrs, but this story was exceptionally well prepared and presented, educational, and surprising about how far a bit of fraud can go even in hard sciences. Also, why these systems work the way they do.
• sammalloy 5y ago
  > The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselves. With respect, you can make this criticism about every single field and discipline. This is because the endemic problems under discussion have nothing to do with science per se, but are unique to the human condition.
• dayvid 5y ago
  I personally know two people who left Ph.D. programs because of fraud from their professors/departments in research. I think a lot of it stems from working out an experiment or theory for years and finding something that invalidates it. They then cover it up or embellish data to keep funding and not lose all the work time.
  • wildrhythms 5y ago
    At the heart of the issue, as you arrived at, is that our researchers are constantly under pressure to meet some funding goal, constantly looking for their next grant to continue work. This pressure should not exist. It is my belief that, in absence of that pressure, whatever 'fraud' is happening will no longer need to exist. Of all things, researchers should not need to be worried about funding.
    • jpeloquin 5y ago
      As a researcher, although I love the idea of a pressure-free job, I'm also keenly aware that I'm being paid by tax money and therefore should be accountable for my productivity (or lack thereof). I would rather have more robust review of research activities, and reliable consequences for misconduct, than freedom from financial pressure. I am also somewhat skeptical that removing funding pressure will reduce fraud. It may reduce the amount of show publications, i.e, work that doesn't really make any progress but isn't wrong either. But in my experience outright falsification of results comes from entitlement. A fraudster feels that they entitled to a certain level of achievement and recognition for it, and are willing to make something up when they're not getting that recognition. I believe that the pressure that drives a person to commit fraud is internal, not external.
• oh_my_goodness 5y ago
  It's fun to complain about the lack of perfection in science, while posting on an instantaneous, free world-wide forum.
  • TimTheTinker 5y ago
    This forum and all the infrastructure that supports it was based primarily on hard science and conducted in the "hot path" of tech progress where inaccurate results are both unacceptable and quickly falsified: mathematics (Shannon, etc.), physics, chemistry, materials engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. There's a reason technology has changed the world significantly in the last 50 years and other scientific areas (e.g. medical research) haven't as much.
    • mcnamaratw 5y ago
      Are you saying that medicine hasn’t advanced much in the last 50 years?
      • TimTheTinker 5y ago
        No, just that the rate of change is much lower than that of tech. We haven't had any penicillin-level breakthroughs recently. Admittedly, part of the reason for that is that what's left in medicine is the "long tail" of as-of-yet relatively neglected conditions.
• seventytwo 5y ago
  You’re correct with this issue, but what other, better option does the general public have other than to try to follow scientific concensus? It’s flawed and can be improved, but it’s still the best thing we have.
• tonto 5y ago
  you really think science is suffering that big of an existential threat or are you just pandering to the crowd here
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    Honestly, I'm still salty about my PhD experience 5 years later. It's not just a case of it being a sub-optimal or there being waste here and there, the way a healthy but "real world" company might be. The entire system really does work against you to make sure you don't achieve the goals that you're ostensibly aiming for.
• nradov 5y ago
  For background I highly recommend this article. Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
• porcoda 5y ago
  I'm biased - I'm a researcher at a big research institution and finished my PhD 15+ years ago. Seeing how the sausage is made shouldn't cause one to become less "pro-science". It should give people perspective that the scientific process is a process performed by humans, with all their flaws (ego, ambition, competition, etc). Furthermore, science is all about making hypotheses and seeing how they work out - with the understanding that many are wrong for all kinds of reasons (bad idea, bad motivations to push known bad ideas, etc.). When I hear people disillusioned with how science works, more often than not I see someone who is forced to see that the mental model they had of how it works doesn't line up with how it actually works. It's messy, and has always been messy. Just read some history books, and you'll see "scientific" ideas in the 19th and early 20th century that persisted for a long time simply because some people disliked specific other people with opposing ideas. You'll see horrible egos, non-scientific arguments to reject ideas, people scheming and trying to undermine each other, and so on. Basically, humans being humans to each other. There never was a time when science was performed in the idealized model that we sometimes wish it was done: it always involves people being people, flaws and all. Plus, I don't know any working scientist who doesn't assume most scientific discoveries are complete bullshit (or, more likely, they aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding). We all know how the game works and why people put ideas out there (especially with the increased volume of publications people are expected to have now). What keeps people like me going is that I know most ideas are dumb or flat out garbage, but good ones emerge from that churn too and push things along. I like to think that some of my dumb ideas, when I throw them into that churn, will also occasionally push things along. Don't get me started in the "believe in the science" line. The fact that we've turned that phrase into a political cudgel is not helping the situation.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    >aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding How else do you define bullshit?
    • pvarangot 5y ago
      So in science the game is never be caught lying, and they usually define bullshit as lying. I’m with you in that getting payed to write two six page papers that contain absolutely no new information per year is bullshit. Not because what’s on the papers is a lie, but because pretending society needs to invest in you so that in the future we are all more productive or happy or wise is a lie. Science itself is not bullshit and most papers are not bullshit, what’s bullshit is that we need to have so many useless science just in the from within it some useful discoveries will emerge, which is a strong underlying premise under which a lot of scientists get payed.
• autoexec 5y ago
  There are a ton of problems with how science is done and most of it comes down to the same root cause: greed. You have corporations buying off scientists (if not to rig experiments/falsify results, then to bury unfavorable findings), journals willing to publish any garbage with little (if any) meaningful review, then media companies willing to turn that junk science into a click-bait friendly press release for a company or industry. The corruption of science into advertising and science by press conference is a huge problem, but it's not the fault of science itself. It's the institutions we've built around science that are responsible. The way we choose to handle funding, the universities, and the journals, these are all systems that were created and they are all systems that can be replaced or reformed. The underlying framework for scientific observation and testing are still solid and remains the best way to further our understanding the world we live in, but we need accountability and regulations in place to keep the output high quality. It's the same issue we have with medicine. Not enough accountability and oversight has allowed for things like doctors taking kick backs from pharmaceutical companies (the opioid crisis was a good example, but it's been going on for ages) and people like Stella Immanuel who can tell her patients their illness is caused by demon sperm and alien DNA but she still gets to keep her license to practice medicine. Without regulation and oversight every system is vulnerable to corruption and failure. It doesn't mean you should throw away the system, it means we aren't doing our job to keep it functioning.
  • Smoosh 5y ago
    I suppose that over time, science changed from a hobby for the wealthy to a source of wealth for companies.
    • autoexec 5y ago
      The sad thing is that there was always money to be made by having a greater understanding of our world and developing new technologies. Investing in research pays off very well, but it requires long term thinking. If you only care about next quarter's profits and growth you aren't going to make that kind of investment. Not when you can manipulate science today and get a lot of money right now. 3M and DuPont poisoned the world and even their own children with PFAS for decades after they knew it was harmful because they couldn't resist the money they'd make doing it. For a lot of people, no amount of wealth is ever enough.
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  Where did you study, what was your concentration, and did you finish? I'm not sure whether anyone on HN ought to care about your opinion. I'm not convinced that the sausage factory you experienced was a hot dog cart.
• fr33d0m_ 5y ago
  So how do you think this gets solved? What do you think some of the root causes are? Semi-related, I was reading about the history of some of the "US greatest universities"; Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. were actually Christian Universities? Wasn't even Cambridge founded in the 1200's have similar history? https://www.quora.com/When-did-Harvard-College-stop-being-a-Christian-school https://www.quora.com/When-did-Harvard-College-stop-being-a-... I'm not sure of the complete validity, but it's an interesting perspective for sure. I even remember reading Einstein working alongside Father Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest (Founder of Big Bang Theory) on some groundbreaking work? I've always joked that maybe G-d gave us the computer as he felt pity on us for it took 4000 years for man to calculate several hundred digits of Pi, and who knows how many great minds dedicated to hand calculating only a more "perfect circle". Didn't even Archimedes die calculating Pi? "Nōlī turbāre circulōs meōs!" a Latin phrase, "Do not disturb my circles!". It is said to have been uttered by Archimedes—in reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand—when he was confronted by a Roman soldier during the Siege of Syracuse prior to being killed.
  • Terry_Roll 5y ago
    The root causes are scientists are experts in operating tools, just like many programmers can write code, it doesnt mean they understand the process. The medical profession is largely still the snake oil industry it was hundreds of years ago, and Govt legislation enables their monopoly. I have as little to do with the NHS as possible because these so called experts are experts in minutiae and not the big picture. They prescribe what they have been taught. The Govt/NHS also limits a GP's prescribing ability so private healthcare should be the gold standard not a communist era make work scheme like the NHS. You try getting a doctor to explain their thinking, most will not, and when you challenge them they go all jihad on you, in a western country of all places! This just demonstrates cognitive dissonance in what they have been taught, but any country or institution or individual who believes in sky faeries just shows humans can hold some diametrically opposed beliefs which are irrational and should be cause to be struck off any so called professional register!
  • CyberDildonics 5y ago
    This is an incoherent reply that has practically nothing to do with this thread.
• atleta 5y ago
  > The fact remains that if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last > 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong. This is not a fact, it's a claim (may even by a hyperbole, we don't know for sure). But even at that, you're overlooking a very important perspective: there are more important and less important discoveries (results) and thus the effect of them being wrong should also be weighted. I'd also be inclined to think that the more important ones are scrutinized more and thus are likely to be right more often. The great and unique thing with science, not ignoring the issues you've raised, is that it can correct itself. And it's better at it than everyday people are. So yep, the issues mentioned by you and others should be corrected (and some of these, like the replication issues and the publication bias, etc. are well known which means that I'm sure they are being worked on). But the general public also has to learn that science is still our best chance to understand reality. Because most science (and thus reality) deniers usually just look at it as if it was a simple choice between "do I believe them or not" as in "do I let myself be lied to/mislead or not". Whereas the real choice is who do I rather believe? The science guy or myself (without knowing much about anything, basically). Which will give me the better results? Because when I have to make a decision (e.g. vaccinate or not) then it will be a decision between these too. (Just like "vaccinate or not" is really a decision of "contract the virus with or without being pre-immunized by the vaccine". And not "do I want to risk the side effects or not".)
• jasone 5y ago
  Perhaps you are imagining less imperfect, less egotistical, less insecure scientists in a past Golden Age of Science. I for one have stopped believing such an era ever existed, or will ever exist. But I continue to believe that the scientific process will continue to serve humanity well despite the terrible flaws of us humans attempting to apply it. Yes, I believe in the scientific process , that it will self-correct, that the attacks by bad actors and self-deluded participants will come out in the wash. As a doctoral student I had a paper rejected because I didn't toe the dogmatic line of one prestigious reviewer (seriously, the review feedback lacked only the word "dogma"). Terrible, right? But this is a common theme over centuries as near as I can tell, and here we are, living in a magnificent future! We will continue to benefit from the scientific process, despite all our individual flaws, and despite how easily we each fool ourselves (and sometimes others).
  • csee 5y ago
    Why don't you think a golden age existed? The landscape is different today, which attracts a different sort of character. Back when scientific pursuit was a passion, you mostly had the creative and innately curious types who were drawn to the field all working on the same problems. Now you have a large swathe of careerists with a handful of curious types, which invariably means the curious types get drowned out in the discourse and ultimately chased away from scientific pursuit. The incentives are different as well. Peer review and showcasing ideas/work for grant money are new things. All of your work has to go through a committee of your non-curious careerist B-tier colleagues. If they don't like what you're doing, you won't get published and you won't get a grant. It's now become a Job with the objective of getting all your work approved by committees. So it's different today.
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  You only need to look at the all "the science" which gets ignored by people pushing an agenda to know it's not about science it's about power and control.
  • immibis 5y ago
    The ones who are ignoring "the science" to push agendas are the ones currently without power and control, who wish they had it. Since they cannot earn it honestly through correctness, they try violence.
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      I see lots of power hungry people doing it, and they have varying amounts of power and control, many have a lot of power and a lot of control
      • immibis 5y ago
        I guess people like Joe Rogan do have lots of power and control. But those are outliers.
        • throwawaylinux 5y ago
          I don't know what you're trying to get at, but no. Trump lied about it when he was president. Biden lies about it now. The most powerful politicians in the US.
• deleted 5y ago
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• gogoincar 5y ago
  Many responses already commenting that science (the process) is intentionally capable of addressing these issues, but that timespan can be longer than we’d like. One major point in this comment and in many others in support is the observation that the quality of research output is increasingly poor and degraded. It reads to me there is an implicit assumption that because of this the overall process is no longer valid. It’s not at all clear this is the case, and jumping to that conclusion is taking a very emotional and unscientific stance. Many academics get a shock at some point early on when they look into how things actually work at a small scale, and often later in their careers come to see the effectiveness of consensus and reproduction (or don’t care and just try to get credit for them and theirs). Jumping to the conclusion that science is somehow falling apart requires taking about change over time, not point observations. Now I’m not providing evidence either way, and definitely see reasons why it could be the case. But at the same time the volume of scientific output is larger than it has ever been, and many fields are developing at an unprecedented rate. And we’re seeing the result of this in rapid technological advancement in many fields, so it’s clearly not all complete horseshit. It’s possible, likely even, that due to comparatively rapid advancement in comparison getting to solid consensus appears to take longer.
• dools 5y ago
  "The fact remains that if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong." That doesn't sound like a fact to me ...
• cbsmith 5y ago
  I don't disagree that there's degradation of quality. There should be a lack of trust in our institutions (and really a need to invest in them more). What confuses me though is why there is trust in sources that have so much less reason to be trusted. The forces undermining the quality of scientific institutions are at play outside those institutions as well, and outside the framework, there's far less of a defense against them. We're seeing all kinds of chicanery that I had thought had largely been consigned to history, but it's all making a comeback.
• JetAlone 5y ago
  I think you're hitting an important point here. The academy at its best is meant to be like a hospital for people's ignorance about their subjects and neglectful, intellectually lazy practices. What you're commenting on right now is the many forms of proverbial sicknesses that have gotten out of control. I personally think if the situation is going to be improved, it's a "physician heal thyself" situation, where some of the very people guilty of p-hacking and junk science are even now being called to come forward and change, taking on a risk of their careers as a sacrifice in exchange for a real possibility for us all to move forwards.
• dragonsky 5y ago
  > Educated" people can say what they want about how important it is to believe in the science and have faith in our researchers and the institutions they work for. This comment shows the problem in the argument. Science does not require belief or faith. In fact the idea of faith is the antithesis of science. Science is about the hypothesis supported by evidence and remains current knowledge until a hypothesis that is better supported by the evidence. Questioning is required, inquiry is required, not faith.
  • throwiuadfasta 5y ago
    Yes, I'm sure everyone has a home lab that they go to to verify when they read the newspaper. I'm not being snarky - these illustrates a core problem in epistemology, trust and social systems (in case the NIH/Fauci/Wuhan debacle already hasn't).
    • dragonsky 5y ago
      Witch exactly illustrates my point. You need to intelligently reason about what you have been told, understanding that you may not be a domain expert and that your conclusions will almost certainly miss something that the domain experts have taken into account. When presented with a claim by authorities about a new virus and say it's going to be dangerous, do you think, authorities always lie about everything or do you think well virus are a thing, I know they can mutate because I know that if I get the flu this year, it's no guarantee that I will be immune from the version that will come around next year. You also have seen evidence that vaccines are generally safe and work because most people have had them and for the most part don't have people suffering from polio in the western world because of that. You could say, nah, they lie, this is plot to force us to have genome altering vaccines that will install mind control chips that kill kittens. (yeah, over the top I know)... Most people have a degree of trust (not faith, very different) until proven wrong that public health figures are actually their trying to improve public health.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    Unfortunately, my knowledge is insufficient to question. So I’m forced to have faith that the researchers are not bullshitting me.
• kingkawn 5y ago
  Another corrupt priest class with hollow ideals leeching off the society
• zjpiazza 5y ago
  Wow man...totally nailed it on the head. And anytime you bring up questions around experimental design or anything, 99 percent of people are already yawning and not interested in anything you're saying at that point. Everything happening right now regarding the vaccines and COVID is alienating so many people and guaranteeing they will never listen to the government or any other "trusted" institution ever again.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• subsection1h 5y ago
  > Most research is flawed or useless [...] if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong. If this were true, then you could easily provide numerous examples of discredited papers published in journals like those of the AAAS and National Academy of Science, and yet you didn't. Your comment is worthless.
  • l33t2328 5y ago
    Do you suspect that most research is published in the National Academy of Science?
• NL807 5y ago
  The optimistic outlook is that science is an integral part of human progress, technological or otherwise. The implication is here is that even if there is a lot rubbish papers out there, they will be weeded out, because progress demands practical concepts that actually works. So dodgy work of "scientists" that rort the grants system will be ultimately discarded and forgotten.
• matthewdgreen 5y ago
  I don’t know what is going on in this thread. Did science sneak into your house(s) and kill your pet cat? I don’t know what Universe you all live in, but I’m in my 40s and scientific research has made incredible strides just in my lifetime. This includes academic research, industrial research, both together or looked at separately. We have made amazing progress in understanding the human genome, the internals of living cells, devising incredibly powerful semiconductor devices, probing the mysteries of the Universe, developing useable machine learning technology and other areas. We have a goddamn space telescope at L2. Even the “controversial” areas are incredibly successful. In the aggregate, climate change papers from the 1980s and the 1990s broadly predict the warming we can measure today, and COVID research (despite being about two years old) has gifted us vaccines that provide enormous measurable benefits and were delivered on a timescale that previous generations would be amazed by. Yes, at the micro level there are some individual bad results as there have always been and a few fields have had difficulty with replicating small-effect-size experiments, but even there we only know about these issues because scientists pointed them out and began improving their techniques. In the vast majority of sciences, if you pick a point 20 or 40 years ago and look at the tangible progress we’ve made, it’s enormous and more impressive than anything we have accomplished in any other area of human endeavor. I’m not sure if people here are angry at the world, or if they’ve just raised their expectations to unattainable heights, but it’s awfully depressing watching people ignore this progress.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  The rabble of ignorant science deniers aren't a problem for science, but they are a problem for policy. Reality itself can't sue climate change deniers for defamation, and for all intents and purposes they have control of policy in the world's largest economy as long as the US senate is deadlocked.
• tasogare 5y ago
• vkk8 5y ago
  I don't know which field you studied, but I think that in physics it's not quite that bad. There might be some research published that's just wrong or fraudulent, but not that much. I think it's because in physics, outside maybe high energy particle physics, it's usually feasible to check other people's experiments. In theoretical physics it's certainly common to work through other people's results before extending them. However, I would say there's a lot of pointless research. Lots of graduate student and postdoc working hours are spent to produce results that no-one could possibly think are interesting or useful just because papers need to be produced. I think it's the reduction of the system into a career mill (PhD for students, tenure for postdocs and grant money for professors) that ruins it. Science is inherently too unpredictable to be reduced into an algorithm that just about anyone can use to produce knowledge.
  • thrown_22 5y ago
    >I don't know which field you studied, but I think that in physics it's not quite that bad. It's not that bad because it doesn't need to be. In theoretical physics I could have spend all day every day working on problems that have no physical evidence behind them at a top tier university. This is fraudulent because physics should have something to do with the real world. If you want maths for maths sake go into maths.
• nyc111 5y ago
  I think the reason for this is that what is called “science” is really academic scholasticism.
• Radim 5y ago
  Yes, but there is still hope. Not in the current academia (IMO rotten beyond repair) but in human nature. Because have you noticed how when something "real" hits the science shelves, any honest research grounded in reality and careful thought, it goes like hot cakes? The research doesn't even have to be revolutionary: anything repeatable, or at least sanely executed. The bar is incredibly low. Everyone is starved for real ideas… or at least real implementations. Anything authentic, in the sea of marketing BS. Which I find a hopeful sign! As long as that human instinct persists, the truth bubbles up. People still "feel" wrong when lying, which is great. When that stops (a question of culture?), we're in real trouble. Funny aside: The front page of today's national news: an elected university rector had to step down. Reason? Academic fraud! https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/vojtech-adam-rezignoval-na-post-rektora-40385588 https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/vojtech-adam-rezignoval...
• pietrovismara 5y ago
  Is there anything left in this world that hasn't been corrupted by greed and thirst for power?
• Rastonbury 5y ago
  Respectfully, I disagree with you, it's mainly because of social media. Academic degradation definitely contributes (it give conspiracy theorists ammo) but if you've been exposed to the echo chambers that drive anti-science conspiracies I think you'll realise how toxic the movement and social media. Mainstream social media is the gateway and it surfaces these influencers to the curious with less harmful theories like Invermectin then to antivax and homeopathy and mistrust in doctors and traditional drugs. A lot of these influencers have been deplatformed and flocked to alternatives like centralised telegram groups, social media. Non-conspiracy people treat conspiracy people like outcasts, no one likes arguing with no conclusion when the answers is 'I don't believe your source' so they retreat to these echo chambers for social acceptance. I've seen this happen to people I know, they just doom scroll, share anti-tech, -media, -pharma, -government memes. They become rabid in their beliefs and there is no pulling them out. I've seen this firsthand infect people who are "smart" university educated, career success. It's a shame, part of decent people I know are gone. There is a simmering undercurrent of I'm smart and you're an idiot and its probably felt both ways. I'm not from the US, but I've read accounts of what Fox News does to people and it feels similar.
• helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  When you say you are no longer highly 'pro science' would you say that you would rather people take advice from scientists or from people who have a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter". Because that's the level we're at at the moment. The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned. Not some BS CS paper on a performance improvement in something that will be read and forgotten about, or that some new medication/fruit/treatment has some miracle cure that others can't duplicate. We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died. Academia may be broken - but don't loose faith in science.
  • dannyw 5y ago
    We're also living in the world where certain governments are mandating vaccines that pose 50% higher excess risk of myocarditis compared to an infection[1] for those aged under 40, according to a peer-reviewed, UK population-level study. Or shutdowns of discussion that some health authorities, like Sweden, have (IMO correctly) judged that there is no clear benefit to vaccinating kids under 12 against COVID [2]. The issue I see is less on the fringe 'microchips' but more around the complete shutdown of discussion of complex topics are not binary. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0/figures/2 [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
    • consp 5y ago
      You should also take all the benefits and complications into account when looking at vaccines. The complication rate of infection for those under 40 is far from zero and assumed to be significantly higher than the complication rate of the vaccines. Discussion is good but your argument sounds less like a discussion and more like a statement.
    • helsinkiandrew 5y ago
• indigochill 5y ago
  Much more abstractly, even if everyone had perfect motivations, it's science's role to be progressively less wrong over time by invalidating faulty hypotheses/theories but almost never to be conclusively correct. Any claim that we understand how or why something works should be taken with a mountain of salt. Claims that a certain observation were made are usually much closer to actual science than any claims of a conclusion. For example, Aristotle (generally a very influential and intelligent man) believed scallops emerged spontaneously from sand because of the limits of what he could observe back then. The observation itself wasn't wrong as far as the absence or presence of visible scallops, but what he didn't realize was that there was an entire system that he couldn't observe with the tools at his disposal, and this ignorance lead to an incorrect conclusion. Even Isaac Newton, who forever changed the world with his work on physics and calculus, was an alchemist as well and had some weird ideas about how to treat the plague of 1665-1666 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-plague-cure-toad-vomit https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-p...). These were also born out of observation and Newton just doing the best he could with the tools he had at the time. Overall, I believe it's both important to believe in science and scientists (even in the face of those cynically exploiting the system), but also to realize that even at its best, scientific information is ultimately about observations, not the ultimate truth of systems, even if that's the unattainable goal of science.
• albertTJames 5y ago
  Those are unsubstanciated statements about domains you know very little about. These days science is so specialised and lacking narrative that you can reach PhD level without any notion of what's really going on in your field, and even less into others.
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I mean you raise a valid concern, it's a form of corruption, "muddying the waters", or CV padding that should be combated. But doesn't low quality science impact the universities and papers that host these things? Wouldn't e.g. Elsevier want to keep charging money for high quality content? Are people and organizations not losing their reputations, jobs, and income over this? I don't think switching over to laypersons' podcasts is a valid alternative to bad science.
  • icare_1er 5y ago
    If that's the only way to hear the full panel of scientists (as opposed to only those who are in bed with Big Pharma), then i'll gladly listen to whatever podcast they are on. And I don't need liberal-lefties to tell me who I should listen to and how i should make my opinions, thanks.
  • mike_hearn 5y ago
    "But doesn't low quality science impact the universities and papers that host these things?" Sadly, no, it doesn't. "Are people and organizations not losing their reputations, jobs, and income over this?" They are not. The system doesn't actually self correct in any visible way. The people who fund bad science either can't tell the difference between good and bad science, or don't care, or both. "Wouldn't e.g. Elsevier want to keep charging money for high quality content?" You mean the companies that happily publish gibberish written by spambots as "peer reviewed science"? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03035-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03035-y "Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers. Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal."
• cm2187 5y ago
  There are also different variations of “science”. You have hard science where the research is based on repeatable experiments in a lab where you can clearly isolate every other effect. You also have softer sciences where experiments are difficult or impossible, and where people try to come up with the best approach. Climate science falls in that category (you can’t really experiment with Earth’s atmosphere, at best backtest your model to check it is compatible with your data). The problem is that medicine falls within both of those categories. Some parts are fully replicable (like test 3 anti-allergy creams on the same skin at the same time), but many others don’t have the luxury of being able to experiment on humans. So you end up relying on correlation analysis with low samples and a million possible variables. Some bits like epidemiology are more akin to climate science. The problem with these softer sciences isn’t that they aren’t science (the progress of medicine over the last century is prodigious), but that it’s hard to trust any study individually. So when someone points to a paper that shows a reduction of X by Y% if you do Z, my first reaction is skepticism. So I am struggling with the whole “follow the science” thing, and the idea that any objecting opinion must be crushed.
• fnord77 5y ago
  feels like this is part of a larger pattern of corruption up and down institutions in western civilization. everything is gamified, monetized and rigged.
• minusSeven 5y ago
  Can you give some examples that expand into your answer, maybe some blogpost or youtube videos that explains this in detail.
• svara 5y ago
  The science system isn't perfect, scientists are just people, and if you start out with an overly naive view of what the science system is like (as I once did!) you might get disappointed. Still, you're take is wildly, overly cynical. At the end of the day science is nothing more than systematically looking for explanations that help to make predictions. There is no way that that doesn't converge on something useful, since every explanation that is of any consequence will ultimately be put to the test and it will become entirely obvious whether it is useful or not. And so here we are, computers compute, drugs are effective, airplanes don't fall from the sky. Is there uncertainty at the margins? Sure! But no one who proclaims to know things better than "the scientists" due to some fundamental flaw in "science" as whole has anything to say that would be worth listening to. Because that's not how the world works. Understanding things is not about picking the right team, it's about deeply engaging with the data and formulating logical hypotheses. And once you're doing that, you're now also a scientist. Edit: To add a bit of personal experience to the somewhat theoretical argument above... I've met a lot of good people and a lot of assholes in academia. I've certainly met a lot of people who liked to make their results sound a bit more important than they probably really were. Never once have I met someone who didn't ultimately care about drawing valid conclusions from good data.
• unity1001 5y ago
  Yep. Add to that how big a b*tch the Funding Bias is, and you can suspect a large part of science in capitalist economies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias
• dftygfhdgf 5y ago
  After years of studies and working for university I got to agree, at least for most parts. However, I think there are significant variation in quality of science between different fields. Some fields, like social sciences have long been very politicized and ideological, and this situation hasn't changed for better. I wouldn't take most studies from fields like social sciences, business and humanities very seriously, especially qualitative ones. Secondly, pay and working conditions in academia generally suck, which means most actually competent people avoid it like plague. This also has an effect on the quality of research. Becoming a researcher these days in my country at least generally means becoming a working poor, who wants that?
• rob_c 5y ago
  I'm assuming you entered a field where you weren't prepared for the egos and controversy surrounding a topic. This is what a lot of students hit if they're ill prepared (this is not a bad thing on behalf of the student). I remember my advisor saying he saw it as his responsibility to shield the new students from something crazy controversial until we knew how to walk for ourselves, make plots quickly easily, understand the jargon and materials... aka until we were mid-way through, then we should be thrown to the wolves to form our own opinion on topics. You're now falling for the daily mail mistake of 'big sensational headline in field X' therefore it must be false. Just look through the nobel awards for understanding what directions and leaps fields of science are making and ignore the self-perpetuating egos that end up on the front of 'Nature' or the daily fail. We have cloned animals, we have perfected fiber-optics, we have discovered the nature of the Higgs Boson, gravity waves and I don't even understand enough about chemistry to understand why or how that field has advanced but it clearly has. Unfortunately I'd suggest your supervisor failed to prepare you for your PhD. Don't worry I can point to several papers which have maths flaws in that impact the result by 2-sigma, but nobody cares about those results because it doesn't change the over-all message. "We saw nothing after intensive scrutiny and looking for it." despite being on flaky mathematical groundings. That 'rabble' of science deniers is growing very quickly (just look at the evolution diners in the US) and keep making arguments like. "you can't take the people of of science". If the rabble gets big enough, politicians listen and then when politicians are listening to anti-science people on whatever topic, funding inevitably gets cut or re-directed and scientific research suffers. Don't worry I'm not talking about types of research that supports raytheon by making bigger bangs, but research that cures cancer in babies and infirmity in adults and makes better and materials for the world...
• api 5y ago
  Everything is like that. Large scale human institutions are shockingly inefficient and dysfunctional.
• codeulike 5y ago
  There's a well known paper from 2005 - "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 Assuming that that paper is not false, it highlights lots of areas/reasons why things can go wrong. Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the 'scientific method' is the best we've got. "How do you get people to discover reliable knowledge without getting sidetracked by bias, bribes, career incentives, corporations or politics" is actually a very hard problem to solve. The cobbled together bunch of institutions, practices and traditions that we call 'the scientific method' needs to be understood for what it is - a patchy, error prone but just about servicable method for fighting our own biases and shortcomings. Always good to look for ways to improve it I guess but overly cynical or overly optimistic takes on it don't help much. We need to have a realistic view of it.
  • mdiesel 5y ago
    The difference versus acedemia of old is that science used to be the hobby of rich gentlemen who were under no financial pressures to pay their mortgage and feed their families. Nowadays, I have no doubt everyone is in their field because they love it and want to further it, but if you have to choose between unemployment or taking on projects that you didn't choose most can live with the latter. So the solution is to somehow decouple it again. Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business. Sure, that's obviously open to exploitation in a new way, but we only need one major discovery for the whole thing to be worth it which we can't get with small incremental research.
    • jpeloquin 5y ago
      > Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business. Personally, I favor the opposite—stop awarding universities the "indirect costs" part of grant awards unless they agree to cap the hiring of grant-seeking investigators. The number of grant applicants needs to be balanced with the supply of public funds, and I don't think the public is willing to pay much more than they already are. And I say this as someone who is currently grant-funded.
• fock 5y ago
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• bee_rider 5y ago
  I think the expression "see how the sausage is made" is widely misused, here included. While you might not have enjoyed your stint the sausage factory, sausages have a long, successful history. Handling meat safely is hard, and it has been done with varying levels of success over the years, but historically sausages weren't much worse than any of the other meats despite the nature of their creation, and with modern food standards they are pretty much safe when handled properly (of course proper handling depends on the type of sausage). If you didn't like what you saw and, as a result, decided not to eat any more sausages, this seems more like a gut response on your end than any particularly deep insight into sausage production. People are generally aware that some of the steps in the process aren't nice to look at, but they judge the product based on the end result.
• tealpod 5y ago
  I spent 6 years in a top 3rd unvieristy in US, working on Nanotech. My resepect for research is not same after that. I felt everybody runs after Science/Nature papers and funding.. I haven't found honest curiousity to discover new things. The funding organizations are also to be partially blamed, instead of funding a good idea / projects, they started influencing and interfering in the research for their interest.
• bartimus 5y ago
  For most studies the goal isn't to advance science. It's for some student who needs something published to advance their career.
• martincmartin 5y ago
  the scientists themselves are often complicit in the misrepresentation of their own research as it means more of those sweet, sweet grants. The grant agencies are at least part of the problem. They seem to have set up the wrong incentives.