5 ms·

>Most of the professional science we produce right now is bad. Seriously, pick a paper at random and see how well it holds up. This is utter BS. Occasionally,

by beloch 3y ago

>Most of the professional science we produce right now is bad. Seriously, pick a paper at random and see how well it holds up. This is utter BS. Occasionally, a high-profile fraudster is found out, but the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny (not that there couldn't be more scrutiny!). Scientists are humans though, and a certain percentage are scumbags. Given how scum rises to the top in private enterprise, I'm actually surprised we don't see more fraud from top administrators at ivy league colleges. Academia has always had to strike a balance between embracing new ideas and resisting quacks. It's not news that revolutionary ideas sometimes have a tough time gaining acceptance. Science provides a framework that makes accepting ideas that work almost inevitable, but sometimes it takes time. Can millions of backyard scientists really move things forward? Only if they're actually scientists in the sense that they keep careful notes and can reproduce their findings. If you find something weird and can't reproduce it, why should anyone take your word for it? Science has to be replicable. You can't have some secret process that only works in your backyard. You need to be able to write down how you produced your result in a way that someone else can read it and then replicate it in their own backyard. Only then can it become useful. Unfortunately, for some areas of science, there are certain requirements that are impossible to meet in your backyard. You can't experiment with creating anti-hydrogen in your backyard because you need a massive particle accelerator for that kind of work. What is most direly needed is better lines of communication between academia and the public. Currently, most university laboratories' communication with the public is carefully managed by PR departments. You don't just talk to anyone you like about your latest work. The PR people must be involved, lest you say something embarrassing or fail to sufficiently puff up the university's image. This needs to end. Scientists are sometimes awkward communicators. Certain words sometimes mean very different things to them. We need to get the public used to letting the occasional gaff slide and we need to get scientists out of the PR hustle sideshow. We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing, and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery. It lets the public know what's being done with their tax dollars and gives amateur scientists a chance to get up to speed on cutting edge research. It also bombards scientists with ideas. Even bad ones can be valuable prods in novel directions. We don't need people saying that academia has failed and it's time for unpaid enthusiasts to pick up the mantle of progress, because that's not true and not how we move forward. We need to bridge the communications gap and unite the creativity of amateurs with the resources of professionals.

madrox 3y ago
This post was written by a social psychology post-doc. In his field, I'm ready to believe most professional science is BS.
- musicale 3y ago
  Computer Science seems to fit into the "so-called science" category, since few published results are independently reproduced.
  - SpriglyElixir12 3y ago
    This seems interesting to me. Shouldn't CS experiments be able to be backed up code? Is there no such standard for papers in the field?
pdonis 3y ago
> the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny I guess you didn't get the memo about the replication crisis? But even leaving that aside, no, your statement here is not correct. Even in "hard" sciences, many papers don't end up holding up under scrutiny. That's by design. The purpose of publishing a paper is not to document a result that is already known for sure to be right. It is to push the boundaries of current knowledge. Many such pushes don't pan out. We non-scientists don't see that because we never hear about those papers. We only hear about the ones that do pan out--or the ones that somebody hyped and marketed even though they hadn't panned out yet, and then got caught. To take an example from a century ago: if you just look at Einstein's published papers on General Relativity, it looks pretty straightforward. He made a few tries all tending in the same direction and finally ended up with the right field equation, the one that we now know, a century later, to have extensive experimental confirmation. What you don't see is all the papers published by all the other physicists that were working on a relativistic theory of gravity--all of which were wrong and were dropped. But they were still published papers, because the standard of publication wasn't "this has to be right", but "this is worth considering to see if maybe it's right". > We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing We already have that. Scientists write books, do videos, have blogs. Unfortunately, scientists don't do a good job at communicating with the public, because they don't take care to distinguish what is actually established--by experimental confirmation and replication--from their own pet hypotheses that haven't yet been confirmed. (String theory in physics is a prime example: string theory makes no testable predictions at all, yet string theorists routinely talk about it as if it were proven fact.) > and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery. No, we don't need that, because nobody from the "peanut gallery" (meaning people who are interested in science but don't have a good understanding of our best current theories) has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing. Tales to the contrary are myths. For example, Einstein is often given as an example of a "peanut gallery" person who came up with a great theory; in fact he was nothing of the kind. He got a doctorate in physics right around the time he published his classic 1905 papers. He had a thorough understanding of the best current theories of the time in physics, and that was recognized by the top physicists of the time. He had close connections with top experimental physicists who kept him up to speed on the latest discoveries, and he worked with them to develop theoretical models for them (for example his work on Brownian motion and on specific heats). He was no "peanut gallery" person; he was a working scientist.

by beloch 3y ago

madrox 3y ago

This post was written by a social psychology post-doc. In his field, I'm ready to believe most professional science is BS.

musicale 3y ago
Computer Science seems to fit into the "so-called science" category, since few published results are independently reproduced.
- SpriglyElixir12 3y ago
  This seems interesting to me. Shouldn't CS experiments be able to be backed up code? Is there no such standard for papers in the field?

pdonis 3y ago

> the overwhelming majority of papers in most disciplines will hold up very well under scrutiny I guess you didn't get the memo about the replication crisis? But even leaving that aside, no, your statement here is not correct. Even in "hard" sciences, many papers don't end up holding up under scrutiny. That's by design. The purpose of publishing a paper is not to document a result that is already known for sure to be right. It is to push the boundaries of current knowledge. Many such pushes don't pan out. We non-scientists don't see that because we never hear about those papers. We only hear about the ones that do pan out--or the ones that somebody hyped and marketed even though they hadn't panned out yet, and then got caught. To take an example from a century ago: if you just look at Einstein's published papers on General Relativity, it looks pretty straightforward. He made a few tries all tending in the same direction and finally ended up with the right field equation, the one that we now know, a century later, to have extensive experimental confirmation. What you don't see is all the papers published by all the other physicists that were working on a relativistic theory of gravity--all of which were wrong and were dropped. But they were still published papers, because the standard of publication wasn't "this has to be right", but "this is worth considering to see if maybe it's right". > We need scientists talking directly to the public, explaining what they're doing We already have that. Scientists write books, do videos, have blogs. Unfortunately, scientists don't do a good job at communicating with the public, because they don't take care to distinguish what is actually established--by experimental confirmation and replication--from their own pet hypotheses that haven't yet been confirmed. (String theory in physics is a prime example: string theory makes no testable predictions at all, yet string theorists routinely talk about it as if it were proven fact.) > and listening to screwball ideas from the peanut gallery. No, we don't need that, because nobody from the "peanut gallery" (meaning people who are interested in science but don't have a good understanding of our best current theories) has ever, in the history of science, come up with an idea worth pursuing. Tales to the contrary are myths. For example, Einstein is often given as an example of a "peanut gallery" person who came up with a great theory; in fact he was nothing of the kind. He got a doctorate in physics right around the time he published his classic 1905 papers. He had a thorough understanding of the best current theories of the time in physics, and that was recognized by the top physicists of the time. He had close connections with top experimental physicists who kept him up to speed on the latest discoveries, and he worked with them to develop theoretical models for them (for example his work on Brownian motion and on specific heats). He was no "peanut gallery" person; he was a working scientist.