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No doubt many scientists are ethical and do good work. Others may produce reports that are either not honest or not accurate. I wonder how we could encourage
by dmckeon 14y ago
No doubt many scientists are ethical and do good work. Others may
produce reports that are either not honest or not accurate.
I wonder how we could encourage honesty and accuracy - perhaps by getting
funding agencies to increase the rewards for people who show others'
work to have been deeply inaccurate, or worse, fraudulently wrong.
Consider: what were the global costs of Rogoff & Reinhart's error?
How - and how much - will we reward Herndon, Ash, and Pollin for their
diligence in uncovering that inaccuracy?
What would the long-term effects on science be if the revelation
and correction of such inaccuracies were better rewarded, and the
perpetration of any scientific fraud involved more effective penalties?
- shardling 14y agoAh, a way to encourage more academic infighting. What could go wrong! :P I don't think an incentive like this would work very well. What you need is more people attempting to reproduce work, which means funding the attempt, not the result.
- dmckeon 14y agoLess would be wrong. Plenty could still go wrong. Consider whistle-blowing by grad students & post-docs - should that be rewarded as increasing accuracy, or punished as embarrassing to an institution? Also, I mean science to include the (often better funded) areas beyond academia - think medicine and health care. funding the attempt, not the result. Possible outcomes: 1) Reproduces as expected (all real, or all faked?) 2) Reproduction fails (failed attempt, or not reproducible?) 3) Exposes fakery in previous experiments. We should fund all of those, but reward 3) better afterward.