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There is a fallacy in comprehend the meaning of Scientific method: confidence in nice and needed to cooperate, but in Science no one should (despite almost all
by kkfx 5y ago
There is a fallacy in comprehend the meaning of Scientific method: confidence in nice and needed to cooperate, but in Science no one should (despite almost all regularly do) trust blindly anything.
Of course we can't verify the entire involved knowledge any time, and that's why the concept of collaborative peer review was born, not much different than the concept of "chains of trust": interest researchers in something verify some others publications and add up their own confirmations or doubt, "the network" do the rest.
The problem there is that such review and network does not really exists. Oh yes there is the ArXiv, HAL, ... papers circulate etc, but the "mainstream" is a network of hi priced journals and hi paid corporate-backed research + equally hi paid PR in the press. That's why people loose confidence: they do not have ontological means to know but they smell actual Science is mostly commerce and just very little Science.
IMVHO the sole way to correct that is build the above mentioned networks. Public, publicly well-founded universities that do research and reviews for the society, very-well separated from the private sector, and share this knowledge with the entire world. At that point the SciHub will be a public, legal and well founded platform and PR can do something but not enough to contaminate knowledge for private interest. At that point people would still not be able to verify, witch is not good, but they have something worth their confidence.