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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 G
by 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.
- blackbear_ 1mo agoYup, that is also how it works with scientific research: Once an article is published, anybody is free to read it, criticize it, reproduce it. That's because the government stays out of it: private individuals can use things like Google Scholar and Google Search to find other people's reviews and follow-up studies to better understand the quality and nuances of the original research. Consensus is an important part of science just as it is for reviews on Google Maps. Is consensus sometimes wrong? Yes, no doubt. Is it useless? Nope. > If people can't define it, then that seems to me like a valid criticism of the scientific method. Please read the hamburger example once more.
- mike_hearn 1mo agoPeer reviews don't appear in Google Scholar. The involvement of governments is when they force the public to pay for the studies via tax funded grants, without caring about the quality.
- blackbear_ 1mo agoAs we all know, oeer review is not a very reliable signal about the veridicity of the claims, it is merely an approximate quality gate indicating that a study was done following appropriate standards. There needs to be more awareness of this. Nonetheless, in some fields peer review have been public for a long time, and more and more journals are making peer reviews publicly visible. This is a good trend that we should all encourage. I also think that it sounds like a good idea to hold scientists accountable for the quality of their research, but moving away from fraud (which should unquestionably be punished) towards merely "low quality" is a very slippery slope. Who determines when the quality is good enough and under which criteria? Citations and follow-up research already are an approximate signal, why is that not enough? Proving a study false does not automatically make it low quality. How much money and resources would these additional measures cost? Would the savings from fewer "bad quality studies" offset these costs? How many fewer "good quality studies" would be prevented by redirecting these resources.
- qmmmur 1mo agoSorry your device owes nothing to academia? Are you referring to a computer? If that’s the case are you mad?
- dnautics 1mo agoThey said "nearly nothing". As a fraction of total effort I'd say that the contribution of academia is relatively low. If you're going to say something dumb like overweighting foundationality, I can counter by reminding you that all of modern statistics and thus academic science is literally downstream of industrial beermaking (and gambling) and not academia
- qotgalaxy 1mo ago[dead]