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Valid points. It's an uphill battle, but still winnable over the long run. A big part of it is maintaining an extremely high level of scientific rigor and profe

by javert 4y ago

Valid points. It's an uphill battle, but still winnable over the long run. A big part of it is maintaining an extremely high level of scientific rigor and professionalism. Take the NSF for example. (Pardon a US-centric example.) If you have a record showing that a particular PI has published 10 provably false/fraudulent papers, is the NSF really going to keep funding that person? At some point, the desire to avoid embarrassment and save their own skin may drive the NSF to de-risk by not funding the flagrant frauds. Imagine if this were a world-class research institute, supported morally and with funding by people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Imagine if those people recognize that we can advance science and global progress much farther and faster if we tackle the epidemic of garbage research in academia (which I'd say is over 60%). Imagine running TV ads that say: "No, we are not right-wing nutjobs. There really IS a plague of garbage research." (In fact, right-wing sponsors should be totally ruled out. As well as clearly left-wing sponsors. We want basically nonpolitical people who are basically trusted, like, again, Bill and/or Melinda Gates, Elon Musk, and so on. So, no Peter Thiel, which is unfortunate, because it would be right up his alley.) But then you're publishing papers that try to replicate studies and specifically calling out specific frauds and getting their funding taken away, and more broadly arguing for funding agencies and academic departments to stop tolerating the culture of fraud and shoddy work. And you're calling out the worst offenders (in terms of academic departments and funding agencies) and calling on their political sponsors (like Congressmen) to cut their funding if they don't clean it up. There may be areas of science where the foundation doesn't go, like climate change (maybe race?), because they are too heated. That's OK. It doesn't have to cover everything. Part of the reason academia is really broken is, people aren't rewarded for proving that results can't be replicated. We need to find a way to incentivize that. The scientific process does not work without it. Also, academia doesn't allow people to just say, "This idea is wrong." Academia is composed of a million little old-boys-club silos. You don't get into any of these clubs if you are not going to play ball. De facto, you cannot criticize your peers, if you are in academia. For instance, the NSF has grant-award panels that are composed of researchers in the niche. So if you criticize your peers you literally cannot get NSF funding. Because your funding is literally gated by your "peers" as in "peer review." But if you were gonna be that way, you wouldn't have gotten a tenure-track job in the first place, because tenured professors only want people in the club to become their "peers" and sit on those committees. I'm concerned I may be kind of overstating my case, but it's hard for me to know exactly how widespread the worst-case version of the problem is. Certainly what I'm describing can and does happen.

mike_hearn 4y ago
"I'm concerned I may be kind of overstating my case, but it's hard for me to know exactly how widespread the worst-case version of the problem is. Certainly what I'm describing can and does happen." You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it. "If you have a record showing that a particular PI has published 10 provably false/fraudulent papers, is the NSF really going to keep funding that person?" Absolutely. The problem is: showing fraud according to whom? I can point to dozens of papers by the same authors that I personally consider provably false/fraudulent, funded by the NSF. That isn't going to achieve anything. People can't even reliably get papers retracted, let alone cut bad researcher's funding. From https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... "If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved") ... We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything." "with funding by people like Bill Gates" Bill Gates is one of the primary funding sources for epidemiology, which is more or less dominated by pseudo-science and fake research. The article we're discussing was published in a journal of epidemiology so presumably the researchers polled for data were mostly epidemiologists, and only a few percent of researchers were honest about basic things like whether they'd share their data or not. You can imagine how bad the rest of it gets. Gates doesn't care. Like all the other sources of funding for public sector research, he wants to be a philanthropist cheerleader for Science™. The act of spending money is the end, not the means. Whether that money is spent well and yields accurate conclusions is neither here nor there to him, as he has too much for that to be relevant.
- javert 4y ago
  > You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it. I mean, you can't get 100x worse than "60% of research is invalid." > Absolutely If you get enough pressure on Congress, you can always make changes. I wish you wouldn't be so belligerent. Society does change, but slowly. You would probably have said slaves will never be free, or women will never vote, or racial integration of schools will never happen. > Gates doesn't care. Like all the other sources of funding for public sector research, he wants to be a philanthropist cheerleader for Science™. You don't know that. Unless you've read his secret diary, or something. I suspect he does care. And I think the evidence weighs more heavily on my side of the argument. But you aren't debating the evidence; you're just claiming to know, which you obviously don't.

by javert 4y ago

mike_hearn 4y ago

"I'm concerned I may be kind of overstating my case, but it's hard for me to know exactly how widespread the worst-case version of the problem is. Certainly what I'm describing can and does happen." You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it. "If you have a record showing that a particular PI has published 10 provably false/fraudulent papers, is the NSF really going to keep funding that person?" Absolutely. The problem is: showing fraud according to whom? I can point to dozens of papers by the same authors that I personally consider provably false/fraudulent, funded by the NSF. That isn't going to achieve anything. People can't even reliably get papers retracted, let alone cut bad researcher's funding. From https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... "If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved") ... We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything." "with funding by people like Bill Gates" Bill Gates is one of the primary funding sources for epidemiology, which is more or less dominated by pseudo-science and fake research. The article we're discussing was published in a journal of epidemiology so presumably the researchers polled for data were mostly epidemiologists, and only a few percent of researchers were honest about basic things like whether they'd share their data or not. You can imagine how bad the rest of it gets. Gates doesn't care. Like all the other sources of funding for public sector research, he wants to be a philanthropist cheerleader for Science™. The act of spending money is the end, not the means. Whether that money is spent well and yields accurate conclusions is neither here nor there to him, as he has too much for that to be relevant.

javert 4y ago
> You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it. I mean, you can't get 100x worse than "60% of research is invalid." > Absolutely If you get enough pressure on Congress, you can always make changes. I wish you wouldn't be so belligerent. Society does change, but slowly. You would probably have said slaves will never be free, or women will never vote, or racial integration of schools will never happen. > Gates doesn't care. Like all the other sources of funding for public sector research, he wants to be a philanthropist cheerleader for Science™. You don't know that. Unless you've read his secret diary, or something. I suspect he does care. And I think the evidence weighs more heavily on my side of the argument. But you aren't debating the evidence; you're just claiming to know, which you obviously don't.