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There is a bigger and much broader crisis in science right now that academics refuse to face head on. From physics to social sciences to economics famous academ

There is a bigger and much broader crisis in science right now that academics refuse to face head on. From physics to social sciences to economics famous academics have promoted totally bumpkis theories as facts in order to justify PR and publication. Academics are more and more regularly taking data or exaggerating results and the public is starting to catch on. It’s eroding rational sciences as a whole.

crotchfire 3y ago
"science plus politics equals politics"
- api 3y ago
  Works for other things too, like art or religion.
  - stillwithit 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - api 3y ago
      Everything's made out of meat.
godelski 3y ago
One thing I've been trying to push is the idea of Goodhart's Hell and how we're all metric hacking. In academia, one of these things is fundamentally about how papers are written. As someone finishing up my PhD I can't wait to graduate and do real fucking research. The difference? I am not writing papers to my colleagues and fellow researchers in my niche; I'm writing papers to reviewers. These may seem like the same thing but they are very different. In a similar vein, many researchers are chasing hype and publicity. If you don't you don't get through these dumb filters. Journals and conferences do nothing (well at least conferences serve as a meetup, but not more than that). All they exist for, in modern times, is to give a signal to the bureaucrats at universities designed to operate as businesses to judge if a researcher is a good researcher or not (to be clear, this signal doesn't actually indicate such a concept, which is near impossible to tell). This, and other factors, underlines the whole replication crisis, hype (dear fucking god ML...(my area of study!)), and all this bullshit. Research papers are about scientists communicating with one another. It doesn't matter if it is a preprint like arxiv, Nature, CVPR, or a fucking blog, these are all scientists communicating with one another. I can't wait to be out to just take my time with research, post to OpenReview and my blog, and move on not wasting my time explaining to a reviewer why metric we reproduced is different from the one in the original paper despite already including references of other works who also could not reproduce the original number and getting rejected because I had a broken link to my appendix. It's a fucking waste of time and it is a complete embarrassment that we call this process science.
Kommiecat 3y ago
An excellent book on this topic (only link I could find for the English version; I read it I German): https://www.everand.com/book/671828518/The-Crisis-of-Bourgeois-Natural-Science https://www.everand.com/book/671828518/The-Crisis-of-Bourgeo... The crisis in the sciences is very much a political one. Within a capitalist system, the sciences are actively hindered from being in the position to solve humanity's big problems, because bourgeois values so often dictate how and what is researched, funded, developed. (Profit oriented) In this book was also the fist time I heard critical analysis of the big bang theory (aside from creationists in my youth), which I actually thought had a wide consensus. It really makes no sense when thinking about it materialistically. All the laws and known processes involving matter are supposed to have come from nothing? Helped me see how the big bang theory is nothing more than naked idealism. No wonder catholic popes got on board with it so quickly. Another interesting thesis presented is that medicine in its form today is not actually a real science - infected by positivism and pragmatism, the way it's practiced is like a constant race to cover up symptoms rather than aiming to understand the human body in its entire complexity to heal issues at the root instead. Anyway, highly recommended read. Covers several scientific fields and how they are being plagued by regressive ideology.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Within a capitalist system I really hate these lines. Not because capitalism doesn't have loads of problems but rather that it is missing underlying principles and incentives that exist to create these structures and incentives. They are coupled with the economic systems but not strictly dependent on them. These issues aren't fundamentally broken because the privatization nor nationalization of capital resources. Many of these issues exist because of metric hacking which exist due to bureaucratization and politicization. So in that sense it doesn't matter if your society is capitalist, socialist, feudal, monarchistic, anarchistic, or whatever. It has to do with how humans fundamentally organize structures, delegate, and evaluate. It is a crisis of the 21st century because only now have we had such scale and such specialization. But as complexity has been increasing at an exponential rate we are simplifying our metrics and decreasing trust.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
javitron 3y ago
There is no "crisis in science" LOL. Talk about overblowing a few isolated data points trying to make them representative of whole fields.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  You must have not watched the video…

crotchfire 3y ago

"science plus politics equals politics"

api 3y ago
Works for other things too, like art or religion.
- stillwithit 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - api 3y ago
    Everything's made out of meat.

godelski 3y ago

One thing I've been trying to push is the idea of Goodhart's Hell and how we're all metric hacking. In academia, one of these things is fundamentally about how papers are written. As someone finishing up my PhD I can't wait to graduate and do real fucking research. The difference? I am not writing papers to my colleagues and fellow researchers in my niche; I'm writing papers to reviewers. These may seem like the same thing but they are very different. In a similar vein, many researchers are chasing hype and publicity. If you don't you don't get through these dumb filters. Journals and conferences do nothing (well at least conferences serve as a meetup, but not more than that). All they exist for, in modern times, is to give a signal to the bureaucrats at universities designed to operate as businesses to judge if a researcher is a good researcher or not (to be clear, this signal doesn't actually indicate such a concept, which is near impossible to tell). This, and other factors, underlines the whole replication crisis, hype (dear fucking god ML...(my area of study!)), and all this bullshit. Research papers are about scientists communicating with one another. It doesn't matter if it is a preprint like arxiv, Nature, CVPR, or a fucking blog, these are all scientists communicating with one another. I can't wait to be out to just take my time with research, post to OpenReview and my blog, and move on not wasting my time explaining to a reviewer why metric we reproduced is different from the one in the original paper despite already including references of other works who also could not reproduce the original number and getting rejected because I had a broken link to my appendix. It's a fucking waste of time and it is a complete embarrassment that we call this process science.

Kommiecat 3y ago

An excellent book on this topic (only link I could find for the English version; I read it I German): https://www.everand.com/book/671828518/The-Crisis-of-Bourgeois-Natural-Science https://www.everand.com/book/671828518/The-Crisis-of-Bourgeo... The crisis in the sciences is very much a political one. Within a capitalist system, the sciences are actively hindered from being in the position to solve humanity's big problems, because bourgeois values so often dictate how and what is researched, funded, developed. (Profit oriented) In this book was also the fist time I heard critical analysis of the big bang theory (aside from creationists in my youth), which I actually thought had a wide consensus. It really makes no sense when thinking about it materialistically. All the laws and known processes involving matter are supposed to have come from nothing? Helped me see how the big bang theory is nothing more than naked idealism. No wonder catholic popes got on board with it so quickly. Another interesting thesis presented is that medicine in its form today is not actually a real science - infected by positivism and pragmatism, the way it's practiced is like a constant race to cover up symptoms rather than aiming to understand the human body in its entire complexity to heal issues at the root instead. Anyway, highly recommended read. Covers several scientific fields and how they are being plagued by regressive ideology.

godelski 3y ago
> Within a capitalist system I really hate these lines. Not because capitalism doesn't have loads of problems but rather that it is missing underlying principles and incentives that exist to create these structures and incentives. They are coupled with the economic systems but not strictly dependent on them. These issues aren't fundamentally broken because the privatization nor nationalization of capital resources. Many of these issues exist because of metric hacking which exist due to bureaucratization and politicization. So in that sense it doesn't matter if your society is capitalist, socialist, feudal, monarchistic, anarchistic, or whatever. It has to do with how humans fundamentally organize structures, delegate, and evaluate. It is a crisis of the 21st century because only now have we had such scale and such specialization. But as complexity has been increasing at an exponential rate we are simplifying our metrics and decreasing trust.
- ricardobeat 3y ago

javitron 3y ago

There is no "crisis in science" LOL. Talk about overblowing a few isolated data points trying to make them representative of whole fields.

tsunamifury 3y ago
You must have not watched the video…