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You say tomayto, I say tomahto. Academia's biggest problem is a severe lack of people willing to say, "that is wrong and you aren't doing real science". When y
by native_samples 5y ago
You say tomayto, I say tomahto.
Academia's biggest problem is a severe lack of people willing to say, "that is wrong and you aren't doing real science". When you read the academic literature what you see is endless oceans of pseudo-scientific garbage, whole fields that evaporate when carefully examined by outsiders. This is correctly destroying people's confidence in science, and all the institutions that have implicitly hitched their own authority to that of "science" (e.g. public health, governments, legacy media).
It shows just how far academia has decayed that tenure is now being restricted to people who others like to have around when the whole point of ideas like tenure and academic freedom was to empower people who are not good team members, and who can thus advance science in big ways by challenging the orthodoxy of the day. That sort of distinction is the justification for academia's existence. If they're only going to recruit people pleasing yes-men a.k.a. team players who they like to be around, why bother with academia at all? The results from corporate science labs are more relevant and don't need subsidies, after all.
- balsam 5y agoIt’s funny that you mention pseudoscientific garbage here. Apparently, Cesar Hildalgo’s phd advisor was Barabasi, the ardent promoter of the “scale-free network” concept. Which, while hot last decade, has (to put it charitably) gone out of fashion: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/02/scant-evidence-of-power-laws-found-in-real-world-networks-20180215.pdf https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/02/scant-... I wonder if his advisor’s “bad luck” had rubbed off on him.
- native_samples 5y agoHuh, how interesting. My reaction to reading the definition of network science was that this didn't sound like a genuine thing you could study at all. No surprise that it turned out you couldn't. It's also quite intriguing that the originators of this claim came from physics. It seems like quite a few bad ideas in recent years trace back to people who left physics. Neil Ferguson studied physics before switching to epidemiology. Perhaps the general level of rigor required in modern physics pushes out the wooly thinkers and they end up undermining other fields instead.