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> We as a society don’t actually value the discipline of science or the pursuit of knowledge. The discipline of science is exactly how you get knowledge in a s

> We as a society don’t actually value the discipline of science or the pursuit of knowledge. The discipline of science is exactly how you get knowledge in a society that doesn't value its pursuit. It's an imperfect process of imperfect individuals that usually nevertheless arrives at knowledge eventually. Fraud is just another part of this process. Additional checks for fraud or errors cost time and money. Effective checks would basically mean science costs 2x as much. How much fraud can we tolerate? Is it worth spending this much to reduce the amount of fraud compared to investing in more research? Can we slightly change incentives (as opposed to inventing some utopia that cannot be implemented) and thereby reduce fraud more cheaply? The academic discipline has been changing ever since and will continue to change and progress.

dmckeon 3y ago
Publishing reproducible research would disincentivize fraud by providing a clear way to expose fraud, and could tend to benefit other researchers in the field, by effectively sharing specific methods as well as results. Incentivizing reproducibility would be hard as a grassroots effort, but would be enforcible if it were tied to funding. Even if only a small percentage of published studies were reproduced, and only a small percentage of them were found to be fraudulent, the disincentive for fraud would be present. We do not need more Andrew Wakefields. > Effective checks would basically mean science costs 2x as much. By that logic, we would need to enforce speed limits by having one police cruiser following every driver.