5 ms·

Science isn't self correcting. This is a harmful meme that we need to collectively put in the trash can, as it's constantly used by academics to evade accountab

Science isn't self correcting. This is a harmful meme that we need to collectively put in the trash can, as it's constantly used by academics to evade accountability. The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. The scientific method is a set of techniques that help people discover and report true things. But there are two huge problems with it: 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like there's a constitutional amendment that lays it out. Try and pin people down and you'll discover nobody agrees on what science actually requires. 2. Even if some subset of people did write down a definition, nobody is checking anyone is following it. So people conflate science the Platonic methodological ideal with Science™, the institutions that claim most forcefully to be its avatar. But those institutions have neither a definition nor any enforcement arm, so fraud and abuse runs rampant. There's no reason why anything should self correct in this environment outside of corporate science, where the self-correction mechanism is managerial intervention or, in the absence of that, bankruptcy.

ahartmetz 1mo ago
3. Publish or perish, scientific publications (count x impact factor) as careeer credits. What a terrible yet hard to kill idea.
aktenlage 1mo ago
My take on the self correction is, that later research usually cannot be build on wrong results. So over the decades or centuries the correct results prevail.
- mike_hearn 1mo ago
  You'd think so. I used to believe this too. Surely you try and build on a result which creates an implicit replication study, then your experiments don't work and the problem is discovered pretty quick. Hence, self correction. It often doesn't happen. The reasons seem to vary by field. We do see it in a few very hard fields like materials science. In the softer end of social sciences like anthropology, education or the humanities it's obvious why not: they don't make empirically testable claims about reality anyway so there's nothing to replicate. This is the Arday problem, where he was publishing what they call auto-ethnography: effectively just blog posts about the author's own feelings. He even interviewed himself in the third person. In the harder social sciences it's because nothing actually builds on anything else (see "A problem in theory" [1]). Psychology and related fields like sociology, criminology, etc are basically just a pile of random ideas pooped out in brainstorming sessions. There are hardly any overarching theories generating testable predictions, so studies test whatever random claims the researcher thinks is interesting enough to get in the news. Everything is just rocks lying on the ground rather than towers of understanding, so when one paper is overturned it has no impact on anything else. Citation counts obscure this fact, but do some reverse-citation checks and you'll find a lot of citations are worthless or outright invalid. In modeling based fields like economics, epidemiology or climatology, it's because they can't put the thing they study in a lab and do high speed experimentation. "Replication" comes to mean repeating the same analysis on the same data set. Often they literally just run the same program on the same input file, get the same result and call it replicated - or sometimes they call it replicated even if the outputs don't match! See [2]. But the program is just a set of assumptions, not real discoveries, so building more papers on top of that program's output doesn't detect invalidity. It will all replicate in some very narrow technical sense without that proving anything useful. Sometimes outsiders notice what's happening but over time academia has built up a complex web of lore that protects them psychologically. For example, they routinely reject or ignore feedback from outside their field on the basis that it doesn't come from "experts", meaning themselves, or it comes from "right wing" people, meaning anyone who isn't an academic or close political ally. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1 [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons...
  - tomnicholas1 1mo ago
    Whilst I weakly agree with this characterisation, it's not at all fair or accurate to put epidemiology and climatology in the same category as your other examples. Yes they have some weaknesses in replication practices (especially for purely computational work), yes the feedback loop for self-correction can be slow, but it would be a mistake to conclude or imply that the major results of those fields are therefore unreliable. That's because those fields do still make objective empirical predictions about the world, which might take years to be testable but are still ultimately testable. For example, it's been convincingly shown that climate models from decades ago predicted our current climate pretty well. [0] These fields are more comparable to subfields of physics which only get to do big experiments a handful of times, e.g. because they can only observe so many planets/supernovae/universes, or because they have to spend decades building a new billion-dollar machine to test new hypotheses. We should also not confuse these arguments with uselessness - soft social science work can still be societally valuable without being easily empirically testable. [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
    - mike_hearn 1mo ago
      Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough. Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circular reasoning, buggy coding and logical fallacies. During COVID I wrote a whole report on this topic for some politicians [1]. But the biggest issue is "A problem in theory" again - epidemiologists conflate fitting a curve in R with developing a hypothesis, so the field is overrun with overfit models that aren't based on any refinable theory of disease, just misuses of statistics. Even if you prove a paper's predictions were wrong it changes nothing because nothing built on it anyway. The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory, e.g. September 2013: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists-face-crisis-over-global-warming-pause-a-923937.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... June 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 [1] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf
- lazide 1mo ago
  Only if people fight for that to happen, or there is some external factor forcing it to be so (like a war or other existential threat). Otherwise people will happily go along with BS.
- jerf 1mo ago
  Later correct research can't build on previous wrong results. Later incorrect research most assuredly can build on previous wrong results essentially indefinitely. I'm not constructing a full differential equation model for an HN comment, but I'm pretty sure any realistic model of likelihood of detection of the falseness of past research and other similar parameters would produce a surprisingly sharp cutoff when looked at over time, above which the science does tend to self-correct and below which it disintegrates into endlessly recursive garbage drowning out any real science being produced. And I'm pretty sure a number of fields are below that threshold right now. That doesn't mean the problem is permanent... the parameters can be changed over time, too, but the problem does get worse and harder to fix if allowed to accrue too much.
- chermi 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
    Economics is a particularly slippery subject, since double blind experiments are practically impossible. No doubt some of the things Marx wrote correctly describe reality, even if some of the social experiments built on his work were massive failures.
    - chermi 1mo ago
      I mean more the Marxist school of thought, not just the economics. Things like critical theory and post modernism. But also, he made predictions of the near future in his time. They were incorrect. No updates were made. Those who did try to refine and update his ideas are far less influential. His original theory survives like gospel. I wish I could say only by non-academics. Edit - back to economics. It's funny. I would say in economics the closest thing we have to double blind wrt economic systems is socialism/communism vs. capitalism. It's clearly not a true double blind. But also clearly some people just don't care to feed that data back in to their models. Because they aren't scientific.
      - undeveloper 1mo ago
        marxism (a materialist ideology) is incompatible with post-modernism, a post-truth ideology
- dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago
  >My take on the self correction is, that later research usually cannot be build on wrong results. AFIK, it does not seem to happen much with mainstream medicinal research. Many layers of fraud/incompetence/assumptions for centuries with no correction in sight. Of course there are certain sub-areas that may have advanced. In fact it's the modern day religion, having replaced the god centric religion of yesteryears.
  - davidgay 1mo ago
    I'll very happily (as a significant benefactor) take this century's medicine over the last. And the one or two centuries before that aren't even worth starting to think about. So something must be working wioth mainstream medicinal research.
raverbashing 1mo ago
Yup Motte-and-bailey fallacy abound Nature (not the magazine) doesn't care if you published a peer-reviewed paper in a high-impact journal. It doesn't care if reviewer 2 thinks you need to quote his friend It also doesn't care that you think a dewormer works against a virus because it doesn't > What exactly is the scientific method? Trying and seeing what sticks. That's literally it. Of course publishing (and publicity) forces like to jiggle that one way or another
- tremon 1mo ago
  > Trying and seeing what sticks. That's literally it. I'd like to add a readiness to abandon that which doesn't stick. Otherwise you end up with people going 'round in circles around a campfire.
  - chermi 1mo ago
    That's covered by trying and seeing what sticks. That's really all there is to it. I already got downvoted for saying this in other words - feedback against observed phenomena is what matters. Everywhere you see shitty "science" you see either missing or ignored feedback.
- rightnutwingjob 1mo ago
  Do you mind if nature also considers it a lice and mite control agent? Or are you planning on continuing to call it a “dewormer”. Completely factual vs factually complete.
  - raverbashing 1mo ago
    Why wouldn't I agree You might be confusing me with your friends that failed HS biology
anon-3988 1mo ago
> Science isn't self correcting.... I am not sure what your proposal is? It seems to be the solution is only more science? This meme that science can't solve anything or is ineffective is also a meme that needs to die. Science is about the only thing that we have to make sense of the world. What else is there? > 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like there's a constitutional amendment that lays it out. Try and pin people down and you'll discover nobody agrees on what science actually requires. I am pretty sure the only necessary requirement is repeatability. As far as science is concerned, it does not matter if Jesus did in fact born from a virgin mother, it is not repeatable, and therefore not scientific. We could be entirely wrong about gravity, maybe Earth is indeed only 5 years old and God just created everything to appear the way it is.
- esalman 1mo ago
  > it does not matter if Jesus did in fact born from a virgin mother, it is not repeatable, and therefore not scientific https://www.newscientist.com/article/1837276-the-boy-whose-blood-has-no-father/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/1837276-the-boy-whose-b...
  - CrazyStat 1mo ago
    Even better, from the BMJ christmas edition https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102 https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102 > Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births.
    - dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago
      In the true spirit of science this needs to be pursued however outlandish it may seem.
    - esalman 1mo ago
      Not necessarily. The article I linked reported that the white blood cell DNA of the child did not contain Y chromosome. That's different than conducting a survey.
blackbear_ 1mo ago
This is unnecessarily cynical. > The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. You fell into the same trap by criticizing scientific institutions and the human spirit in an attempt to criticize the scientific method. > What exactly is the scientific method? What a ridiculous argument. What exactly is a hamburger? Just ask around and you will find that nobody agrees if a veggie burger should be considered a hamburger, or if you can replace the bun with lettuce and still call it a hamburger. And even if you get people to agree what a hamburger is, nobody is checking that the recipe is followed to the letter. Therefore, real hamburgers do not exist, and nobody can claim in good faith that they are making a hamburger. In fact, why don't we sue McDonalds for their fraud hamburgers? > Science isn't self correcting. The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true. You are going to need to sharpen your rethorical devices if you want to argue against hundreds of years of scientific progress, including for example everything that enabled us to argue about this in front of our devices while barely 150 years ago people had to use candles to see each other after dinner. Mind you, not all of this was developed by industrial research labs, in fact the origins of very many modern technologies lie in academic research labs pursuing ideas that are too risky for a commercial entity to bet on. And of course there are plenty of examples of industrial fraud happening despite "managerial intervention" (lol). Reality is more complex. Not many things, if at all, exist in this world under their platonic ideal form. That does not make them any less real. Yes, we all know that humans are not perfect, sometimes are selfish and chase money and power, not only in academia but also in business, politics, and so on. Wherever humans are involved this sometimes happens. But saying that nothing good ever happens because of this goes against everything one can see when looking out of the window. Scientific progress is real, and needs both industrial and academic labs.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- mike_hearn 1mo ago
  You're right that we don't need a universal definition of hamburger. That's because the government stays out of it, so private individuals can use things like Google Maps reviews to police a common sense definition of hamburger along with quality and other nuance. If governments were forcing everyone to buy anything advertised as a hamburger no questions asked, then the definition of hamburger would matter a lot. The devices on my desk are 99.9% the product of the private sector and owe nearly nothing to academia. If people can't define it, then that seems to me like a valid criticism of the scientific method. You can't have institutions that claim to be doing science if they don't use the same definition of science as other people do.
dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago
Fully concur with you here. Ultimately it boils down to integrity and objectivity of the individuals involved, which IMO is in short supply. Also my way of phrasing what you said: science = verb, Science™ = noun. George Orwell had a point about the play of words.
chermi 1mo ago
Science that is science is self-correcting via prediction and experiment. The key piece is the feedback. The "scientific method" as taught in grade school hardly matters and is basically cargo cult. The "is this science" lint is "are you working toward more accurate and especially predictive models of observed phenomena? Are you actively trying to destroy your theory?" If the feedback is missing or ignored, it's just opinion pieces. Edit- I don't know what's controversial about this? Feedback is the self-correcting piece.
anthonyrstevens 1mo ago
How do you square your position with all the ... self corrections ... that have happened in science in the last, oh, 500 years or so?
- mike_hearn 1mo ago
  Most of the problems are with academic fields that were barely funded before WW2.
  - a123b456c 1mo ago
    Your comment claims that academics do not correct other academics. Your comment appears on a post in which, literally, academics are correcting other academics.
    - mike_hearn 1mo ago
      Data Colada is a handful of volunteers who do this kind of thing as extra-curricular activities, and rely primarily on tips. That is a tiny drop in an ocean of fraud, for which the institutions get no credit at all. Academic institutions don't systematically check for fraud, but they do systematically ignore fraud reports that come from outside the academy (of which there are many).
sharts 1mo ago
Indeed. “Science” is modern religion.

ahartmetz 1mo ago

3. Publish or perish, scientific publications (count x impact factor) as careeer credits. What a terrible yet hard to kill idea.

aktenlage 1mo ago

My take on the self correction is, that later research usually cannot be build on wrong results. So over the decades or centuries the correct results prevail.

mike_hearn 1mo ago
You'd think so. I used to believe this too. Surely you try and build on a result which creates an implicit replication study, then your experiments don't work and the problem is discovered pretty quick. Hence, self correction. It often doesn't happen. The reasons seem to vary by field. We do see it in a few very hard fields like materials science. In the softer end of social sciences like anthropology, education or the humanities it's obvious why not: they don't make empirically testable claims about reality anyway so there's nothing to replicate. This is the Arday problem, where he was publishing what they call auto-ethnography: effectively just blog posts about the author's own feelings. He even interviewed himself in the third person. In the harder social sciences it's because nothing actually builds on anything else (see "A problem in theory" [1]). Psychology and related fields like sociology, criminology, etc are basically just a pile of random ideas pooped out in brainstorming sessions. There are hardly any overarching theories generating testable predictions, so studies test whatever random claims the researcher thinks is interesting enough to get in the news. Everything is just rocks lying on the ground rather than towers of understanding, so when one paper is overturned it has no impact on anything else. Citation counts obscure this fact, but do some reverse-citation checks and you'll find a lot of citations are worthless or outright invalid. In modeling based fields like economics, epidemiology or climatology, it's because they can't put the thing they study in a lab and do high speed experimentation. "Replication" comes to mean repeating the same analysis on the same data set. Often they literally just run the same program on the same input file, get the same result and call it replicated - or sometimes they call it replicated even if the outputs don't match! See [2]. But the program is just a set of assumptions, not real discoveries, so building more papers on top of that program's output doesn't detect invalidity. It will all replicate in some very narrow technical sense without that proving anything useful. Sometimes outsiders notice what's happening but over time academia has built up a complex web of lore that protects them psychologically. For example, they routinely reject or ignore feedback from outside their field on the basis that it doesn't come from "experts", meaning themselves, or it comes from "right wing" people, meaning anyone who isn't an academic or close political ally. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1 [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/06/code-review-of-fergusons...
- tomnicholas1 1mo ago
  Whilst I weakly agree with this characterisation, it's not at all fair or accurate to put epidemiology and climatology in the same category as your other examples. Yes they have some weaknesses in replication practices (especially for purely computational work), yes the feedback loop for self-correction can be slow, but it would be a mistake to conclude or imply that the major results of those fields are therefore unreliable. That's because those fields do still make objective empirical predictions about the world, which might take years to be testable but are still ultimately testable. For example, it's been convincingly shown that climate models from decades ago predicted our current climate pretty well. [0] These fields are more comparable to subfields of physics which only get to do big experiments a handful of times, e.g. because they can only observe so many planets/supernovae/universes, or because they have to spend decades building a new billion-dollar machine to test new hypotheses. We should also not confuse these arguments with uselessness - soft social science work can still be societally valuable without being easily empirically testable. [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
  - mike_hearn 1mo ago
    Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough. Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circular reasoning, buggy coding and logical fallacies. During COVID I wrote a whole report on this topic for some politicians [1]. But the biggest issue is "A problem in theory" again - epidemiologists conflate fitting a curve in R with developing a hypothesis, so the field is overrun with overfit models that aren't based on any refinable theory of disease, just misuses of statistics. Even if you prove a paper's predictions were wrong it changes nothing because nothing built on it anyway. The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory, e.g. September 2013: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists-face-crisis-over-global-warming-pause-a-923937.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... June 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 [1] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf
lazide 1mo ago
Only if people fight for that to happen, or there is some external factor forcing it to be so (like a war or other existential threat). Otherwise people will happily go along with BS.
jerf 1mo ago
Later correct research can't build on previous wrong results. Later incorrect research most assuredly can build on previous wrong results essentially indefinitely. I'm not constructing a full differential equation model for an HN comment, but I'm pretty sure any realistic model of likelihood of detection of the falseness of past research and other similar parameters would produce a surprisingly sharp cutoff when looked at over time, above which the science does tend to self-correct and below which it disintegrates into endlessly recursive garbage drowning out any real science being produced. And I'm pretty sure a number of fields are below that threshold right now. That doesn't mean the problem is permanent... the parameters can be changed over time, too, but the problem does get worse and harder to fix if allowed to accrue too much.
chermi 1mo ago
[flagged]
- amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
  Economics is a particularly slippery subject, since double blind experiments are practically impossible. No doubt some of the things Marx wrote correctly describe reality, even if some of the social experiments built on his work were massive failures.
  - chermi 1mo ago
    I mean more the Marxist school of thought, not just the economics. Things like critical theory and post modernism. But also, he made predictions of the near future in his time. They were incorrect. No updates were made. Those who did try to refine and update his ideas are far less influential. His original theory survives like gospel. I wish I could say only by non-academics. Edit - back to economics. It's funny. I would say in economics the closest thing we have to double blind wrt economic systems is socialism/communism vs. capitalism. It's clearly not a true double blind. But also clearly some people just don't care to feed that data back in to their models. Because they aren't scientific.
    - undeveloper 1mo ago
      marxism (a materialist ideology) is incompatible with post-modernism, a post-truth ideology
dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago
>My take on the self correction is, that later research usually cannot be build on wrong results. AFIK, it does not seem to happen much with mainstream medicinal research. Many layers of fraud/incompetence/assumptions for centuries with no correction in sight. Of course there are certain sub-areas that may have advanced. In fact it's the modern day religion, having replaced the god centric religion of yesteryears.
- davidgay 1mo ago
  I'll very happily (as a significant benefactor) take this century's medicine over the last. And the one or two centuries before that aren't even worth starting to think about. So something must be working wioth mainstream medicinal research.

raverbashing 1mo ago

Yup Motte-and-bailey fallacy abound Nature (not the magazine) doesn't care if you published a peer-reviewed paper in a high-impact journal. It doesn't care if reviewer 2 thinks you need to quote his friend It also doesn't care that you think a dewormer works against a virus because it doesn't > What exactly is the scientific method? Trying and seeing what sticks. That's literally it. Of course publishing (and publicity) forces like to jiggle that one way or another

tremon 1mo ago
> Trying and seeing what sticks. That's literally it. I'd like to add a readiness to abandon that which doesn't stick. Otherwise you end up with people going 'round in circles around a campfire.
- chermi 1mo ago
  That's covered by trying and seeing what sticks. That's really all there is to it. I already got downvoted for saying this in other words - feedback against observed phenomena is what matters. Everywhere you see shitty "science" you see either missing or ignored feedback.
rightnutwingjob 1mo ago
Do you mind if nature also considers it a lice and mite control agent? Or are you planning on continuing to call it a “dewormer”. Completely factual vs factually complete.
- raverbashing 1mo ago
  Why wouldn't I agree You might be confusing me with your friends that failed HS biology

anon-3988 1mo ago

> Science isn't self correcting.... I am not sure what your proposal is? It seems to be the solution is only more science? This meme that science can't solve anything or is ineffective is also a meme that needs to die. Science is about the only thing that we have to make sense of the world. What else is there? > 1. What exactly is the scientific method? It's not like there's a constitutional amendment that lays it out. Try and pin people down and you'll discover nobody agrees on what science actually requires. I am pretty sure the only necessary requirement is repeatability. As far as science is concerned, it does not matter if Jesus did in fact born from a virgin mother, it is not repeatable, and therefore not scientific. We could be entirely wrong about gravity, maybe Earth is indeed only 5 years old and God just created everything to appear the way it is.

esalman 1mo ago
> it does not matter if Jesus did in fact born from a virgin mother, it is not repeatable, and therefore not scientific https://www.newscientist.com/article/1837276-the-boy-whose-blood-has-no-father/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/1837276-the-boy-whose-b...
- CrazyStat 1mo ago
  Even better, from the BMJ christmas edition https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102 https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102 > Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births.
  - dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago
    In the true spirit of science this needs to be pursued however outlandish it may seem.
  - esalman 1mo ago
    Not necessarily. The article I linked reported that the white blood cell DNA of the child did not contain Y chromosome. That's different than conducting a survey.

blackbear_ 1mo ago

This is unnecessarily cynical. > The core problem is people conflating science with Science™. You fell into the same trap by criticizing scientific institutions and the human spirit in an attempt to criticize the scientific method. > What exactly is the scientific method? What a ridiculous argument. What exactly is a hamburger? Just ask around and you will find that nobody agrees if a veggie burger should be considered a hamburger, or if you can replace the bun with lettuce and still call it a hamburger. And even if you get people to agree what a hamburger is, nobody is checking that the recipe is followed to the letter. Therefore, real hamburgers do not exist, and nobody can claim in good faith that they are making a hamburger. In fact, why don't we sue McDonalds for their fraud hamburgers? > Science isn't self correcting. The very fact that fraud is identified is clear evidence that is is not true. You are going to need to sharpen your rethorical devices if you want to argue against hundreds of years of scientific progress, including for example everything that enabled us to argue about this in front of our devices while barely 150 years ago people had to use candles to see each other after dinner. Mind you, not all of this was developed by industrial research labs, in fact the origins of very many modern technologies lie in academic research labs pursuing ideas that are too risky for a commercial entity to bet on. And of course there are plenty of examples of industrial fraud happening despite "managerial intervention" (lol). Reality is more complex. Not many things, if at all, exist in this world under their platonic ideal form. That does not make them any less real. Yes, we all know that humans are not perfect, sometimes are selfish and chase money and power, not only in academia but also in business, politics, and so on. Wherever humans are involved this sometimes happens. But saying that nothing good ever happens because of this goes against everything one can see when looking out of the window. Scientific progress is real, and needs both industrial and academic labs.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
mike_hearn 1mo ago
You're right that we don't need a universal definition of hamburger. That's because the government stays out of it, so private individuals can use things like Google Maps reviews to police a common sense definition of hamburger along with quality and other nuance. If governments were forcing everyone to buy anything advertised as a hamburger no questions asked, then the definition of hamburger would matter a lot. The devices on my desk are 99.9% the product of the private sector and owe nearly nothing to academia. If people can't define it, then that seems to me like a valid criticism of the scientific method. You can't have institutions that claim to be doing science if they don't use the same definition of science as other people do.

dennis_jeeves2 1mo ago

Fully concur with you here. Ultimately it boils down to integrity and objectivity of the individuals involved, which IMO is in short supply. Also my way of phrasing what you said: science = verb, Science™ = noun. George Orwell had a point about the play of words.

chermi 1mo ago

Science that is science is self-correcting via prediction and experiment. The key piece is the feedback. The "scientific method" as taught in grade school hardly matters and is basically cargo cult. The "is this science" lint is "are you working toward more accurate and especially predictive models of observed phenomena? Are you actively trying to destroy your theory?" If the feedback is missing or ignored, it's just opinion pieces. Edit- I don't know what's controversial about this? Feedback is the self-correcting piece.

anthonyrstevens 1mo ago

How do you square your position with all the ... self corrections ... that have happened in science in the last, oh, 500 years or so?

mike_hearn 1mo ago
Most of the problems are with academic fields that were barely funded before WW2.
- a123b456c 1mo ago
  Your comment claims that academics do not correct other academics. Your comment appears on a post in which, literally, academics are correcting other academics.
  - mike_hearn 1mo ago
    Data Colada is a handful of volunteers who do this kind of thing as extra-curricular activities, and rely primarily on tips. That is a tiny drop in an ocean of fraud, for which the institutions get no credit at all. Academic institutions don't systematically check for fraud, but they do systematically ignore fraud reports that come from outside the academy (of which there are many).

sharts 1mo ago

Indeed. “Science” is modern religion.