Dysfunction In Modern Science?

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Dysfunction In Modern Science?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @04:48AM from the could-be-worse-could-be-social-text dept.

eldavojohn writes "The editors of Infection and Immunity are sending a warning signal about modern science. Two editorials (1 and 2) published in the journal have given other biomedical researchers pause to ask if modern science is dysfunctional. Readers familiar with the state of academia may not be surprised but the claims have been presented today to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that level the following allegations: 'Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science' and 'The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal, this is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career.' The data to back up such slanderous claims? 'In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%.' At least a few of such retractions have been covered here."

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Grant whores and PR scientists by crazyjj · 2012-03-27 04:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

When I was in grad school there were always grant-whore and PR scientists around. Everyone knew who they were. They were the Chicken Littles who were always proclaiming the end of the world if their pet project wasn't funded. They were always the first to run to the press with GREATLY exaggerated claims and alarmism if it served their purposes (especially when they were looking for political support with funding). Their "science" was far less about scientific method than their own financial self-interests (including getting the precious tenure that they all craved like little lapdogs).
Of course, I have a friend who still won't accept that this EVER happens. "Science would never allow that," he says. His naivete is so endearing.

--
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
1. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:00 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's because it's not a problem with science, but rather with the funding of science, which is an administrative and political problem, not a scientific one. Strictly speaking, your friend is technically correct - the best kind of correct.
2. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Kenja · 2012-03-27 05:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Your fried is right, "science" wont allow that to happen, but people will. And when it happens, its not science.
  
  --
  
  "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
3. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by magsol · 2012-03-27 05:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  While it's disheartening to hear about such abuse of the scientific method, from a purely scientific perspective (meta!) this actually isn't all that surprising. Abuse exists in every system; there's always a distribution around the mean of those who are honest and trying to do the right thing, and the minority who are either malevolently trying to game the system or who are truly just competent enough to not get fired. I'm also a grad student and while I would love to agree with your friend--in theory, science shouldn't allow it, but as we know, theory and practice rarely align in practice--I have to acknowledge that science is just another system run by imperfect human beings and, implicitly, will have some imperfections.
  
  The problem arises when this distribution of participants skews and the "expected" minority (the quantity of which you still try to minimize!) grows. So the question becomes: is modern science suffering from a growing problem of bad scientists? It's hard to say. While I'm willing to accept the numbers, the title "is modern science dysfunctional" is, itself, a tad bit sensational, making the rest of the article difficult to take seriously.
  
  --
  "I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
4. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by eternaldoctorwho · 2012-03-27 05:02 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I completely agree. The rampant elitism in academia is another contributing factor to how broken modern science is, I believe. I used to find it hilarious back in grad school how professors would never want anything to do with their students. Should a student produce something meaningful, however, you should see the scramble of the faculty to ride their coattails. It seems you can only be successful in science these days if you produce something that will make the faculty important and/or famous and/or wealthy.
5. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2012-03-27 05:04 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Double edged blade. If you have tenure then you can hold off on publishing to make sure you're really, truly correct. If you don't, then you have no choice.
  To my mind the real issue is that the notion of "debate in the literature" is being rapidly killed by the increase in complexity and cost of some experiments, and to a greater extent the very terse manner in which journals like to have their experimental methods published: I'd much rather read a rambling journal or logbook then someone's - effectively "opinion" - on what they think their important experimental variables are, since accusing someone of publishing false information is ridiculously difficult (and not to be taken lightly) whereas people simply missing things is common and to be expected.
6. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by SuricouRaven · 2012-03-27 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  Unless you can quantify honesty, it's a distribution around the mode.
7. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Pausanias · 2012-03-27 05:07 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  You are either bitter, or were stuck in a bad department. While such sensationalist people certainly exist, few of them actually influence the broader debate. In my community such people are far outnumbered by brilliant and truly insightful researchers who work incredibly hard and whose contributions to our understanding of the universe are vastly undervalued by their pay. To think that some of the most brilliant minds in the world, working at the frontiers of science simply because they love it, are paid no more than a senior code monkeys, is the real travesty.
8. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  While I'm willing to accept the numbers, the title "is modern science dysfunctional" is, itself, a tad bit sensational, making the rest of the article difficult to take seriously.
  It's indeed ironic to have a sensational scientific article about the sensationalism in scientific articles.
  If we take the article seriously, than by it's own standards, we shouldn't take it seriously.
9. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by SJester · 2012-03-27 05:16 · Score: 2
  
  I'm in a similar community but unfortunately people outside of science, even educated and intelligent people, do not distinguish between the two breeds. My university is honoring a well-respected faculty thinker who proffers deep and meaningful opinions with little evidence, while us fact-based scientists slave like Morlocks in the subterranean labs to find evidence for little things. The people who set our salaries enjoy showmanship; they call it "good communication." I'm often asked, in fact, why we don't discover stuff like Scientist X, or when we'll have a cure for Malady Y. I'm a scientist after all, shouldn't I have a silver bullet by now?
10. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 05:16 · Score: 1
  
  "science shouldn't allow it, but as we know, theory and practice rarely align in practice"
  It looks like science isn't allowing it, which isn't really surprising. The fakers are caught out eventually, whether it's being explicitly identified and their papers retracted, or their results disproved.
  The problem is non-scientific - we'd like the system to work more efficiently by discouraging the fakery and other dirty tricks in the first place, using means unrelated to the scientific method.
11. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 05:21 · Score: 2
  
  Th outright fraud will be exposed, but the real problem is the huge amount of selection and publication bias that goes on (at least in biomed), as well as misuse of stats. We need to start getting excel spreadsheets in the supplements.
12. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by NeutronCowboy · 2012-03-27 05:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  In other news, HR people find out that when people are judged against a specific metric, those people will work towards that metric and disregard their actual job. HR and management is particularly shocked, and wants to know what metrics they can use to make sure people don't game their system.
  
  --
  Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
13. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Mindcontrolled · 2012-03-27 05:27 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Ah, yeah. The good old poisoning the well argument combined with the Goebbels strategy of argumentation - repeat a lie until it becomes truth. At least you yourself do believe in it by now. Good job, liar.
  
  --
  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
14. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Mindcontrolled · 2012-03-27 05:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The climate denialists' poisoning of the wells has worked out. Everyone believes by now that "they are only doing it for the grant money".
  
  --
  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
15. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ColdWetDog · 2012-03-27 05:31 · Score: 0
  
  Behave. This is Slashdot. Don't say 'excel' - say 'data in CSV or other open format".
  
  --
  Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
16. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 05:31 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I have yet to see evidence that there is any publication bias, at least of the kind that most people talk about. There is an ANALYSIS bias - everybody (thinks) they know how to analyze for positive results, but few few researchers have any clue at all how to actually analyze negative results. When you hear the vast majority of (non-particle physics) researchers talk about "negative results" they're actually talking about inconclusive results - p-values that are not significant, with no discussion of beta, confidence intervals, or minimum significant effects. Inconclusive results shouldn't be published, unless it's to provide required sample size estimates for future studies.
  Most researchers' poor stats skills are indeed a problem, but not a scientific method one. Errors due to poor stats will be discovered, in time, by the scientific method, just like actual fraud.
17. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by idontgno · 2012-03-27 05:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And what is "Science" (must capitalize correctly) without scientists? Including unscrupulous ones?
  Way to posit "no true scientist.".
  Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
  There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
  
  --
  Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
18. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by j-beda · 2012-03-27 05:35 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  >>> who are either malevolently trying to game the system
  Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
  Or rather it was later *claimed* he had altered his numbers, etc. etc.
  My understanding is that while there have been many criticisms of this work (the 1998 Nature journal Mann, Bradley and Hughes multiproxy study on "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries"), the vast majority of subsequent work has supported the majority of their conclusions, and all investigated claims of improper conduct have come to naught.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
19. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by englishknnigits · 2012-03-27 05:40 · Score: 1
  
  The point is that it is labeled as science even when it isn't. People hold up findings and research claimed to be scientific as if they were science. Those findings and research were found and performed by people who are capable of mistakes, distortion, lies, and so on. People generally can't tell the difference between actual science and fake science sometimes published in scientific journals. A growing amount of bad science makes it more difficult to trust the current state of science. This stuff tends to sort itself out over time but puts recent developments more into question.
20. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by wisty · 2012-03-27 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  It is "good communication". It does add a lot of value. Malcolm Gladwell famous because he's a great communicator. But it would be silly to call him a scientist.
21. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by cpu6502 · 2012-03-27 06:03 · Score: 0
  
  Godwin (comparing me to a Nazi). Your post is invalidated as nothing but FUD..... if I wanted to hear that shit I'd tune-in Glenn Beck (compares democrats to nazis).
  --- You also committed a logical fallacy of using an ad hominem attack....."You act like the Nazi Goebbels therefore you must be as dumb as him." Not a valid debate method and does invalidate my original post.
  
  --
  My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
22. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by dbet · 2012-03-27 06:04 · Score: 1
  
  Why wouldn't "science" allow it? Science allows for outrageous hypotheses, even if they eventually can't be proven, or are proven false.
23. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by cpu6502 · 2012-03-27 06:09 · Score: 0
  
  [correction]
  You also committed a logical fallacy of using an ad hominem attack.....'You act like the Nazi Goebbels therefore you must be as dumb as him.' Not a valid debate method and does [not] invalidate my original post about Mann and how he has been caught, multiple times, fudging data or massaging his equations.
  
  --
  My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
24. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-03-27 06:10 · Score: 2
  
  Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
  I don't suppose it bothers you at all that your description of this incident has nothing to do with reality?
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
25. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Mindcontrolled · 2012-03-27 06:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  You are, word for word, using the strategy Goebbels laid out. That is not a fallacy, that is a simple fact. If you do not like that fact, you might want to change your debating strategy and for a change deal in facts, not in lies. Btw. Goebbels was by no means dumb. Probably the most intelligent of that particular crowd of lowlifes. Which, however, does change nothing about the original point, you being a liar, repeating the lies other liars served you.
  
  --
  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
26. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:16 · Score: 0
  
  Too bad for you Mindcontrolled (how ironic) wasn't comparing you to a nazi, he was simply using a well-known example to illustrate what you were doing. Besides, Godwin's Law makes no claim to the validity of a comparison, only that given enough time, a comparison becomes inevitable.
  You are right about one thing though. Nothing Mindcontrolled said invalidates your original post. The fact that your original post is wrong, however, does invalidate it.
27. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 06:19 · Score: 1
  
  All data is beautiful and should be published. "Inconclusive" is subjective. It depends on the prior probability you ascribe to the hypothesis.
28. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  Science itself is a philosophy, and like all philosophies there is the ideological view and the practical view.
  Ideologically science is a philosophic framework that is used to determine what is true, what could be true, and what we don't know is true.
  Practically, its a business that has a defined output (published papers) to justify its expense.
29. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-03-27 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  This. Dunno about other fields, but it's pretty routine these days in bioinformatics and biostatistics for authors to post their data either as supplemental material with the article or on their departmental web site. The problem is that the format for the data they post is generally "whatever format I have it in at the moment" -- if your lab chooses to keep everything in Excel, that's your business, but it's no fun for the rest of us. Microarray data all goes into GEO or ArrayExpress these days, but even there the file specifications are much looser than they should be; and of course microarray data, as important as it is, is only one small portion of the bioinformatics data universe.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
30. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 06:26 · Score: 2
  
  Debate in the literature is being killed by people (silly reviewers included) who think that everything should be perfect before it's published. Someone in the Slashdot story about cancer cures today posted that scientists shouldn't publish animal research because the results might not translate to humans. I had a reviewer on my last paper actually say "method should be perfect before it is published" because we mentioned some potential improvements we planned to look at as future work.
31. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Mindcontrolled · 2012-03-27 06:47 · Score: 1
  
  Oh my. A "social network of scientist." Hold the presses! Scientists cooperate! That is positively socialist!!! We need to put a stop to such nonsense!
  
  --
  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
32. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 06:52 · Score: 1
  
  "All data is beautiful and should be published."
  Almost all data is ugly, capricious and vile. Occasionally, with lots of work, you can dress it up to be moderately attractive. If you want to publish all data then start a Journal of Inconclusive Results and Lazy Statistics. The mainstream journals have too much trouble publishing what they get now.
  "'Inconclusive' is subjective. It depends on the prior probability you ascribe to the hypothesis."
  It is not. Your very next sentence suggests how it can be objectively assessed. If you're too lazy to calculate confidence intervals on your non-significant result and make an argument about why the maximum likely difference is too small to care about then you're definitely too lazy to properly calculate (and justify) prior probabilities.
  In light of your post, let me revise the statement of my thesis slightly: "publication bias" as generally described is a bias against publishing papers with inadequate data and/or inadequate statistics.
33. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by narcc · 2012-03-27 06:53 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Science doesn't deal in truth -- and arguably, despite the name, deals only practically in knowledge -- science deals with understanding.
  From science we build models of the natural world that are explanatory, but need not be true in any meaningful sense of the word. To declare something "true" is to make an unscientific statement as such a declaration denies falsifiability.
  Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding. Such a goal is decidedly anti-science.
  
  --
  Required reading for internet skeptics
34. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Samantha+Wright · 2012-03-27 07:05 · Score: 1
  
  The chemistry and ecology departments here swears by Office and various other low-end Microsoft technologies. It really messed me up in first year to be inundated with crappy spreadsheets and "press the magic button to calculate the t-statistic!" in first year. Fortunately, later years have been more focused on real-world standards as my coursework has gotten more and more specific to bioinformatics. Presumably that's why I've had four separate lectures on the FASTA format.
  
  --
  Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
35. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 07:09 · Score: 1
  
  he has been caught, multiple times, fudging data or massaging his equations.
  Citation needed. Otherwise your theory, without facts to prove it, will remain a theory (i.e. worthless).
36. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by radtea · 2012-03-27 07:10 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding.
  It isn't clear why this is considered a "popular" misunderstanding when smug ignoramuses have been responding to it with nonsense like yours for decades. Idiots saying, "Science is about building models..." are at least ten times more common than idiots saying, "Science is about truth..."
  Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models" and similar pseudo-Cartesian gibberish. If you don't understand that you aren't talking about science, but some imaginary philosophical construct that's completely irrelevant to any discussion of science.
  
  --
  Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
37. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  Interesting, I will definitely keep this in mind.
38. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-03-27 07:17 · Score: 1
  
  It really messed me up in first year to be inundated with crappy spreadsheets and "press the magic button to calculate the t-statistic!" in first year.
  Gaaah. Yeah. As a statistician, I have a real hatred for that kind of "teaching."
  
  Presumably that's why I've had four separate lectures on the FASTA format.
  Heh. It kind of makes sense if you figure that a fair number of people in each class will be coming in without the necessary prior knowledge. But it does get a bit insulting, doesn't it? It's as if every biology class, at every level, started with an explanation of the Krebs cycle. FASTA parsing is really Bioinformatics 101 material, and at some point, I'd like to see teaching in the field mature enough that familiarity with common file formats is assumed for anyone taking a class above the introductory level.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
39. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 07:25 · Score: 2
  
  Almost all data is ugly, capricious and vile.
  Ha, this is what I think is beautiful. I was kind of kidding though. Anyway, journal's have no problem with publishing 5 pages articles with 40-50 page supplements, I don't think space is an issue. For people studying very similar things having access to the (almost) raw data would be very useful. Of course it should be curated and organized somewhat.
  
  If you're too lazy to calculate confidence intervals on your non-significant result and make an argument about why the maximum likely difference is too small to care about then you're definitely too lazy to properly calculate (and justify) prior probabilities.
  Which is exactly why the data should be published (in supplements), in case someone who is interested can assess that data. Are you really against this idea?
  
  In light of your post, let me revise the statement of my thesis slightly: "publication bias" as generally described is a bias against publishing papers with inadequate data and/or inadequate statistics.
  Selection bias (e.g. dropping outliers rather than stratifying) and over-reliance on summary statistics (often assuming normal distributions, etc) are the more important problems I believe this would solve.
40. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by B1ackDragon · 2012-03-27 07:46 · Score: 1
  
  Stating something is undoubtedly true would be anti-science, especially according to the falsifiability definition. But it should be noted that this wasn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be meant to divorce science from truth: in fact, Popper (who popularized falsifiability) stated that "there are criteria of progress toward the truth".
  
  --
  The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
41. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by operagost · 2012-03-27 08:06 · Score: 2
  
  "Science would never allow that?" That's the problem right there: assuming that science is a moral system.
  
  --
  
  Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
42. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Mindcontrolled · 2012-03-27 08:12 · Score: 2
  
  Seriously, learn what "fallacy" means. Pro-tip: it does NOT mean "fact I do not like".
  
  --
  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
43. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by nedlohs · 2012-03-27 08:15 · Score: 2
  
  he has been caught, multiple times, fudging data or massaging his equations
  
  No he hasn't. You made that up. Or more likely regurgitated lies because they agree with your world view.
  You of course didn't provide any evidence for your made up claim, but anyway: http://www.nsf.gov/oig/search/A09120086.pdf for what I think is the latest of the never ending inquiries.
44. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by narcc · 2012-03-27 08:23 · Score: 1
  
  Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models"
  
  I love that you claim that "science is Bayesian" considering the known limits of Bayesianism as far as the young field of model selection is concerned. In a bit of fun, making such an assertion actually supports my post!
  I'm still trying to work out what you mean by "pseudo-Cartesian gibberish" -- perhaps you can elucidate further. So far, your assertions have be rather helpful to my case. :)
  
  --
  Required reading for internet skeptics
45. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 08:25 · Score: 0
  
  (claim made without backing evidence)
  Too bad for you, you're the one who made the claim (penn state guy fudging numbers). Therefore, until and unless you can back up that statement, you are clearly lying.
46. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 08:46 · Score: 1
  
  Science is about observing something and using multiple lines of evidence to assess the plausibility of various explanations for that something. The process is probabilistic and bayesian.
47. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by reve_etrange · 2012-03-27 09:33 · Score: 1
  
  it's not a problem with science, but rather with the funding of science, which is an administrative and political problem
  Absolutely. The extreme competition and unscrupulous behavior we see today is because there is not enough money to go around. When (if) funding is restored to historical levels I expect we will see a concomitant decrease in malfeasance.
  
  --
  .: Semper Absurda :.
48. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 10:28 · Score: 0
  
  ...or WMDs in Iraq and Alqaida ties with Saddam Hussein. Oh yeah.. Such lies gullible people die for..
49. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by geekpowa · 2012-03-27 10:54 · Score: 1
  
  The climate denialists' poisoning of the wells has worked out.
  Or rather, as the article suggests, it is merely that CAGW is cargo cult science and it is coming home to roost. Your use of the word 'denialist' shows your poor grasp of the debate and the range of opinions out there. Where do 'lukewarmers' fit into your simplistic world view?
  
  Everyone believes by now that "they are only doing it for the grant money".
  Such a crude strawman. Typical of this debate. If we insist on discussing motives, then subconscious drivers perhaps. I suspect that it is to some extent about social prestige and the desire contribute back to the human race. After all Scientist amongst Fireman and Teacher are consistently in top 5 most presitgious jobs. What better way than to exert your self-worth than to save the human race from imminent annilation; even A-list actors want to cover themselves in a bit of planet saving glory. And so what if a handful like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs make a metric f-tonne of money in the process? They've earned it. Or maybe we all watched far too much Captain Planet as children?
50. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 11:11 · Score: 0
  
  ahaha the irony of your comment...
  if you look climate science it pretty much fills out the excalty same formula as churchs indulgences and purgatory scare mongering... you can't find such place from bible but that didnt prevent from priests(that times most learned people) speculating about purgatory fire where your soul will linger in flames if you have sinned...
  and no the protestant reformer luther did react After the fact Fugger banker family had bought the holy roman empire(germany at that time) area's indulgence rights from pope... it was only when priests them selves didnt benefit from the system it was called "off" partly, not all the world did turn into protestant movement...
  history serves good lessons people worship money, and as our mr Luther most likely the climate bs will come to terms with reality once the climate scientists realize they just get pennies.... the global suggested co2 trade system, gave in eu all the energy companies all the rights to pollute for free, but consumers have to pay anyhow... (the windfall profits)
  +whole climate science is at brink of stupidity when we know for fact predicting is with current math&logic sets so bad in complex systems you cant even predict lottery numbers considering the fact it's n+1^100000 times more "controlled" than our climate... +the funny fact that the people who study the historical atmosphere of earth are rather ignored unless your whoppidoo tomorrow we die nutcase.
  Also suggest you read up whom fund globally greens, namely theres one rockefeller funding it's workings through foundations... its basicly taxfree propaganda if they get people to believe they make even more profit... actually in case of eu they made themselves uncompetitive vs outside world just by forcing the carbon taxing = profit to all other countries.
  thats why im "mildly" amused by this poisoning the well attitude of green believers when your own funding is made throught trusts&funds of worst of worse venture capitalist families and they get actual tax cuts atleast in usa for making propaganda...
51. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by serviscope_minor · 2012-03-27 11:58 · Score: 1
  
  Science is Bayesian.
  Have you read your sig recently? :)
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
52. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by serviscope_minor · 2012-03-27 12:05 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  : I'd much rather read a rambling journal or logbook then someone's - effectively "opinion" - on what they think their important experimental variables are,
  You think you would, but trust me, you wouldn't. This is what you get when you have a bad paper to review. A disorganised rambling mush of random, unconnected results mixed in with a bunch of rather peculiar and rambling experimental conditions where it is amazingly hard to figure out what's going on. It is really, really hard to figure out if the experiments are sane and the results even remotely interesting in a paper like that. Even getting past the first page will bore you to tears.
  While your current opinion reflects an admirable level idealism in the dispassionate search for knowledge, unfortunately the world in all its messy glory has a habit of getting in the way.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
53. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 13:10 · Score: 0
  
  As for the hockey stick graph:
  It's a time series and they used a non-causal filter to smooth the data.
  Seems to me this implies one or two of two things: incompetence, fraud
  Others case to weigh in on this?
54. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by sg_oneill · 2012-03-27 14:31 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah the hockey stick model has not been found to be wrong, and Mann definately was not discovered to have altered his numbers.
  I really wish the denialists would quit with this talking point. The "climategate" thing was largely found to be nonsense, with the only misadventure found being that the CRU where not fully living up to FOI requests from a certain crank blogger. And even this not so much, since most of the data was under a commercial NDA and thus they couldnt release it even if they wanted to.
  I'm sure I'm not the only coder who rolled his eyes when the non technical press started ranting about fudge factors (for non programmers this is just geek slang for a linear calibration) and poor fortran (physicists write bad fortran as a rule rather than exception. The code however checks out to the model). Hell mann even published a frigging paper years before this false scandal on the calibration. There are no secrets in that code.
  
  --
  Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
55. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 14:32 · Score: 0
  
  Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired
  You're getting your conspiracy theories mixed up. The claim against Mann not that he altered data, but that his reconstruction algorithm was biased. It was biased, but not to the extent claimed, and there isn't any evidence that he did this intentionally; there are plenty of statistical algorithms that have bias. (Sometimes this is even intentional; look up bias-variance tradeoff.) There was a separate claim that the CRU temperature record altered data, which is also false.
56. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by timeOday · 2012-03-27 15:31 · Score: 1
  
  You are, word for word, using the strategy Goebbels laid out. That is not a fallacy, that is a simple fact.
  Actually you are incorrect. I assume you are referring to "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." He never actually said or wrote that. The link supplies the evidence, but the tipoff is that the quote is good to be true; real people never go around saying "hey, I'm evil!" because that's not how they see themselves.
57. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 15:56 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah. See the next article: "MIT Solar Towers Beat Solar Panels By Up To 20x". They announced that if you start with a square meter of ground and cover it with solar cells, you can get X of energy. If you then build a tall tower on that square meter, and cover it with several square meters of solar cells, you can get more than X worth of energy out of it.
  Duh.
  I think they did some clever optimization, too, which might be worth publishing, but expressing the efficiency in terms of watts per square meter of dirt is nothing less than publicity whoredom. (a) dirt isn't the expensive bit, and (b) if you put two of these miraculous towers near eachother, one will shadow the other.
58. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by ATMAvatar · 2012-03-27 16:13 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  More generally speaking, take any positive human endeavor, add money to it, and watch the value to humanity leech away.
  
  --
  "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
59. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by UnknownSoldier · 2012-03-28 03:14 · Score: 1
  
  To expand upon your great post, at the risk of getting modded down, since people confuse passion and integrity:
  A fantastic read is "Myths of Skepticism"
  http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html
  Feynman already warned about how Science was turning into a religion.
  http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
  He wasn't the first, Planck said it ~50 years earlier.
  "Science advanced one funeral at a time", paraphrasing Max Planck's "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
  The worse are the "pseudo skeptics" -- those who "pretends to be a skeptic but is so closed-minded that they have become a fundamentalist; unable to accept any other perspective - their mind is already made up by ignoring any (potential new) evidence, such as that liar Randi, a magician pretending to be a Scientist.
  http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm#RealSkeptics
  
  "Simply put, one unwon public challenge by a debunker and magician does NOT invalidate the countless millions of paranormal experiences throughout world history, nor does it refute the years of replicable psi research done by Ganzfeld or PEAR experiments, among others."
  
  A perfect example of how Science has become Religion is Astronomy. They make _several_ assumptions that will turn out to be false once they have more information. They "assume" Dark Matter and Dark Energy Energy exists but they have never observed it. They assume the laws of physics are constant throughout the universe; that is a very dangerous precedent when you have only directly explored %0.0000000001 of it.
  While it is fine to come to conclusions before the evidence is in BUT it would behoove BOTH the scientist and public by being honest and upfront with the usual disclaimer: "With our current understanding, this is our best guess (theory) for how we think things work." To pretend otherwise is sheer dogma.
  The greatest problem with a few Scientists is that they believe their Holy Scientific Principle is the ONLY way to achieve truth. What Science does is remove one _falsehood_ at a time. There are other methods that add truth one level at a time.
  Great post BTW.
60. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-28 03:26 · Score: 0
  
  Look at what climatologists have done over the last decade or so. Man, has their funding increased like a mother fucker. It is not collusion either, when one scientist sees what another is doing and it works, they all can hop on board and say "yeah, we need to be looking into more closely.Think of the children"
  What started out as a spike in CO2 in the atmosphere correlated to the rise of human population in the last 200 years, was turned into a fucking spectacle.
61. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by cpu6502 · 2012-03-28 04:54 · Score: 1
  
  And you have no valid arguement except, "You act like a Nazi." Name-calling. Juvenile behavior. Not acting like a mature, rational adult.
  
  --
  My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
62. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by cpu6502 · 2012-03-28 05:00 · Score: 0
  
  >>> who are either malevolently trying to game the system
  Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus gain fame to the public & extra fund from the government). There's dishonesty in every profession.
  
  --
  My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
63. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by Eponymous+Hero · 2012-03-28 05:43 · Score: 1
  
  you are correct. i disagree with those who claim the OP's friend is "technically correct." when he says, "science would never allow that" there is a presumption that science can do anything to prevent politics and human fallibility from allowing it. in reality, these situations are out of science's control.
  
  --
  insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
64. Re:Grant whores and PR scientists by WOOFYGOOFY · 2012-03-28 06:04 · Score: 1
  
  Science is etc...
  Wow an entire school of thought or two perhaps completely overthrown with three little words. You're amazing.
  And to anyone else... if you don't know why he said what he or don't agree with it then it just proves that he's right and you ARE an idiot
  Typical fucking asshole Asbergers case... I say it authoritatively, and with brevity somehow makes it true. ...
  All those stupid philosophers and scientists who wasted their lives because they didn't understand that "science is Bayesian"... if ONLY you had been around then, you could have saved their careers and they wouldn't have wasted their lives....
  WHAT a great man you are! There. Did someone finally say what you're constantly craving to hear?
Yet... by betterunixthanunix · 2012-03-27 04:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

For some reason, people defend publish-or-perish and systems that evaluate researchers based on the quantity of work or the names of journals or conferences where they have presented their work.

--
Palm trees and 8
1. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 05:00 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Publish or perish is good. As a scientist you MUST communicate your ideas or you're a failure. What's wrong is the use of simple metrics like paper count or journal "quality." As usual, if you want to properly evaluate someone's worth you need to use your brain, not your calculator.
2. Re:Yet... by dkleinsc · 2012-03-27 05:07 · Score: 3
  
  But really, there's another way to solve this problem, and one that I'm sure at least some people make use of: Plagiarism.
  To quote Tom Lehrer:
  
  I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold. Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. What I'm going to do? But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!
  I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk
  Whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk
  With friend in Akmolinsk
  His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk
  Whose friend somehow is solving now
  The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
  And when his work is done - ha ha! - begins the fun
  From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
  By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk
  To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
  To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk
  To me the news will run
  Yes, to me the news will run
  And then I write, by morning, night
  And afternoon, and pretty soon
  My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
  When he finds out I publish first
  
  --
  I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
3. Re:Yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:07 · Score: 0
  
  Agreed. I'm just finishing grad school in the field myself, and I see first-hand what the hyper-competitive, quantity-over-quality, impact factor-obsessed academic research system of today has brought about: At the very least, it breeds very conservative, fashionable, least-imaginative research because it's "safe" and therefore ensures the continuation of one's career. At worst, it creates incentives to lie or exaggerate (people do desperate things when their entire career is on the line).
  A major watershed change in academic biomedical research is going to have to occur in the very near future.
4. Re:Yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:38 · Score: 1
  
  Publish or Perish? Oh yeah, we have that, it's called do your job or get fired.
5. Re:Yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:16 · Score: 0
  
  Really? Because despite what a popular snarky webcomic has to say, I think most people familiar with the situation would much more accurately call it "pad your part like a grade school-level book report or have a brown-nosing fearmonger take all the grant money regardless of content". Which is most certainly NOT productive to the fields of education or science in any way.
6. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 06:29 · Score: 2
  
  I'm familiar with the situation. Most granting agencies, and most universities, at least the ones I interact with, have reasonable limits for minimum productivity. If you're going multiple years without producing any publications you're not contributing to the scientific community and need to reexamine the way you do science. On the flip side, if you're publishing a hundred papers a year, the university needs to take a look at exactly how you're doing it.
7. Re:Yet... by Penguinisto · 2012-03-27 07:15 · Score: 1
  
  Publish or perish is good. As a scientist you MUST communicate your ideas or you're a failure. What's wrong is the use of simple metrics like paper count or journal "quality." As usual, if you want to properly evaluate someone's worth you need to use your brain, not your calculator.
  I agree with the latter, but as for the first sentence? Not so much. The reason why? We need look no further than a gent by the name of Jan Hendrik Schön
  
  --
  Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
8. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 07:52 · Score: 1
  
  "The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud."
  Nothing to do with publish or perish. The guy wasn't even faking things because he was up for review and didn't have any papers - he was faking things to get famous.
  If that's the best example you can come up with....
9. Re:Yet... by Penguinisto · 2012-03-27 07:58 · Score: 1
  
  Motivation isn't the issue here, only the environment and results. ;)
  
  --
  Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
10. Re:Yet... by rmstar · 2012-03-27 08:56 · Score: 1
  
  If you're going multiple years without producing any publications you're not contributing to the scientific community and need to reexamine the way you do science.
  Most likely, you should call it a day. Very, very few people ever come back from yearlong productivity breaks.
11. Re:Yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 08:58 · Score: 0
  
  But you need a lot of time to formulate your ideas formaly (this is always the case for any significant breaktrought), you perish before publishing. If your research leads to a paradigm shift the chance you will have hard time to be published is really high. Any sufficiently advanced theory is indistinguishable from bullshit negative numbers were bullshit, complex numbers were bullshit, helio centrism was bullshit, galois theory was bullshit, ...
  The metric on paper count is as wrong in every single way as is the line count for programming.
12. Re:Yet... by reve_etrange · 2012-03-27 09:30 · Score: 1
  
  Publish or perish is good.
  This is correct! Just look at the difference in output between scientists in the Soviet Union and the US during the cold war. Our system, in which output is paramount, uses competition to drive scientific work. The USSR had a lot of brilliant, well-funded people, but because there was little pressure to publish the impact of their work was limited.
  The problem today is that research is so severely underfunded that competition arises not from the desire for excellence, but because there is simply not enough to go around.
  
  --
  .: Semper Absurda :.
13. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 10:34 · Score: 1
  
  If motivation isn't the issue, then what link are you claiming between publish or perish and Schon?
14. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 10:38 · Score: 1
  
  Not necessarily true. I know of labs where unfortunate students and post docs get stuck that only publish when they've got something Nature worthy. They have lots of publishable output, they just don't publish it. You can easily bounce back from that by... publishing.
  Nature is overrated, and holding back until you have something to publish in it is silly. But lots of people do just that.
15. Re:Yet... by rmstar · 2012-03-27 10:59 · Score: 1
  
  I know of labs where unfortunate students and post docs get stuck that only publish when they've got something Nature worthy. They have lots of publishable output, they just don't publish it. You can easily bounce back from that by... publishing.
  If you have publishable results but don't publish regularly, I'd wager your mindset is such that you won't ever publish at all. The thing with waiting for something of Nature stature is that this is just a delusion. It certainly won't happen by not publishing in "lesser" journals.
16. Re:Yet... by serviscope_minor · 2012-03-27 12:14 · Score: 1
  
  If you have publishable results but don't publish regularly, I'd wager your mindset is such that you won't ever publish at all. The thing with waiting for something of Nature stature is that this is just a delusion. It certainly won't happen by not publishing in "lesser" journals.
  Emperically, it seems to me that to get something into Nature or an equivalent journal takes about 3 years of work from conception to publication, often involving multiple people. If you publish intermediate results, the the final result won't be so important relatively and probably won't get in. In terms of prestige and publicity and career building, it is worth getting that one nature paper tather than thetwo or three or four intermediate ones.
  And sometimes it's worth it. You can work for 3 years on something really cool, and publish it all in one go, and have people pay attention rather than struggling against multiple rounds of peer review on several papers with much less interesting results.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
17. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 12:18 · Score: 1
  
  It's amazing how "publish or you're fired" can change your mindset.
18. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 12:23 · Score: 1
  
  And that's the problem. By saving up for three years you've done yourself, your students and the scientific community a disservice. Publishing originated in scientists sending each other personal correspondence along the lines of "look at this cool thing I found! What do you think?" Publishing in "lesser" journals can still sometimes be a little like this (and that's a good thing). Saving up for a Nature publication (which tend NOT to be the actual revolutionary papers) is more along the lines of "hey, look how smart I am! Nah nah nah!"
  I've heard more than one Nobel laureate say that the history of science is written in papers that were not published in Nature. The Nobel laureates who founded my own field had their paper rejected, in fact.
19. Re:Yet... by LongearedBat · 2012-03-27 15:12 · Score: 2
  
  But what if your project will perish before it makes sense to publish, because the price and time of the research is too great and the progress too small, even when you're really on to something? It seems a shame to miss out on that.
20. Re:Yet... by rmstar · 2012-03-27 19:52 · Score: 1
  
  It's amazing how "publish or you're fired" can change your mindset.
  It's amazing how "publish in Nature or you are a looser" can be used as an excuse for not getting anything done.
  Look, if you are not publishing regularly (by which I mean a comfortable quantity, not 50 papers a year), you don't even know how to publish. You don't know how to write stuff up. You are not interacting with people on the frontlines of research. You don't know how to deal with editors and referees and stuff. Actually, you probably don't even know what you are doing, because you are not getting feedback neither from peers nor from yourself (because writing stuff up leads to insights you won't have otherwise). Ergo, highly unlikely you will publish in Nature nor anywhere else at all.
21. Re:Yet... by serviscope_minor · 2012-03-27 21:23 · Score: 1
  
  I'm playing devils advocate here with a real example. I don't entirely disagree, but I don't entirely agree either. I think salami-slicing is even worse than saving it up for a big journal.
  And that's the problem. By saving up for three years you've done yourself, your students and the scientific community a disservice.
  I didn't have any students. It's also a trade-off. I got to concentrate on the science for 3 years, which I enjoyed, rather than the writing, which I didn't.
  Publishing originated in scientists sending each other personal correspondence along the lines of "look at this cool thing I found! What do you think?" Publishing in "lesser" journals can still sometimes be a little like this (and that's a good thing).
  It can be. The trouble is that if the intermediate results seem dull or useless, noone will pay any attention.
  Saving up for a Nature publication (which tend NOT to be the actual revolutionary papers) is more along the lines of "hey, look how smart I am! Nah nah nah!"
  Well, yes. That is the problem. They tend to be a bit light on the details, and they're essentially used as a flag to point to later more detailed papers. But it's a public way of saying "look at this cool thing I found".
  I've heard more than one Nobel laureate say that the history of science is written in papers that were not published in Nature. The Nobel laureates who founded my own field had their paper rejected, in fact.
  Yeah well, in my field, there's a paper in nature once in a blue moon. The bigest paper in the field was published at a conference after being rejected twice from other conferences.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
22. Re:Yet... by lbbros · 2012-03-29 03:17 · Score: 1
  
  However, in the current academic climate (at least for life sciences) publish or perish is not a way to communicate your ideas or to advance knowledge. It's a way to get funded so you can continue working.
  
  --
  A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
23. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-29 03:28 · Score: 1
  
  Scientists who don't contribute shouldn't get funding.
  Yes, there need to be reasonable limits. As I said elsewhere, if you want to evaluate a person you need to use your brain, not your calculator. But off the top of my head I can think of a professor (in life sciences) at a major university who didn't publish any first author papers during her ten year post doc, and hasn't published any papers as a professor. She's coming up on her five year review in a few months. She SHOULDN'T be funded and shouldn't be a professor. Her lack of productivity is tying up money and positions that could be given to actual productive scientists and she's ruining students to boot.
24. Re:Yet... by lbbros · 2012-03-29 07:00 · Score: 1
  
  The problem is in the degree of such evaluations. Also, the "expected results" section in grants are sometimes difficult to write down, after all you're doing the experiments in the first place to actually see anything. And then there's the matter of authorship in papers, since you can easily lose the first author position out of politics (I had to fight for one of mine quite strongly).
  
  --
  A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
25. Re:Yet... by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-29 15:38 · Score: 1
  
  "Also, the "expected results" section in grants are sometimes difficult to write down,"
  That doesn't seem to have anything to do with publish or perish. In general you should have a hypothesis, and a justification for it, when you start, and that's an "expected result." If you're fishing in the dark, or data mining, the granting agency should probably know that.
  If you have to fight with someone for first authorship on a paper you know who not to collaborate with next time, which is often knowledge as valuable as a paper.
26. Re:Yet... by lbbros · 2012-03-29 17:49 · Score: 1
  
  Even if "who to collaborate with" is your boss, or the head of the department, or whatever (yes, they want to be the final name, but they may "suggest" names to get other collaborators happy)? It happens. I'm not saying it the norm, but the competition is too fierce and some people will go the extra mile to get that. And that is indeed a problem of the publishing papers hysteria. The whole debacle is IMO highglighted well by this book (notice it covers also a lot of unrelated topics to publish or perish).
  
  --
  A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Solution by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:00 · Score: 1

Well, the solution is pretty simple. Make sure that grants and jobs are not ridiculously hard to obtain. It is not uncommon at all to have 300 applicants for 1 tenure-track position. It is generally agreed upon that above a 3:1 pressure, things start to get messy. For grants we are closer to 5:1-10:1 and it has been increasing at an alarming rate over the last few years. And for jobs we are around 300:1 as i mentioned earlier. Incidently i have still not landed a tenure-track job.
1. Re:Solution by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:58 · Score: 0
  
  Reminds me of that Onion headline I heard: "Jobs in the field of get-paid-to-do-whatever-you-want are scarce; highly sought after."
2. Re:Solution by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  Higher education bubble without research bubble. If the government is going to create one they might as well just create both.
Naturally by john83 · 2012-03-27 05:02 · Score: 3

Surely any competitive system to select people for desirable posts is going to encourage dubious behaviour? Those editorials don't seem to offer very significant changes, just new metrics for people to game. It's not just academia either - every career where your value is measured by some proxy metrics is going to see unethical behaviour from people near the cut-off.

--
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
1. Re:Naturally by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:31 · Score: 0
  
  Agreed, but 72% for "questionable research practices" and 14.12% for falsification of results is extremely high by any standard.
  http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738
  It may well be because of competition, it likely is, but these numbers are WAY too high to be acceptable. If competition is what is the problem, then competition has to be eliminated from the equation and some other strategy has to be used. Think about all the money being poured into research, development and implementation, then consider that even allowing for reproduction of results, the chances of a given result being correct (questionable research practices leads to essentially useless results, falsification absolutely leads to useless results) is still dangerously small.
  I'm not saying that skeptics of the sciences are right - they're often wrong - but with results like these I can hardly blame them. Assuming no overlap, the numbers give you 86.12% of all results being worthless. Even with total overlap, you've 72% you have to discard. Which means that between 13.88% and 28% of science is actually of any value. It's hard to be critical of GM crop skeptics if only 28% of the science concerning ecological and human safety is actually honest.
  (This doesn't help climate cynics - reproduction of results and verification by independent means has essentially eliminated any bias that may have been introduced.)
2. Re:Naturally by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 08:07 · Score: 1
  
  Haha, AC is guilty of questionable research practices.
  
  Between 6.2% and 72% of respondents had knowledge of various questionable research practices (Table S3) (Figure 3, N = 23 (6 studies), crude unweighted mean: 28.53%, 95%CI = 18.85â"38.2).
  http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738.g003
  From Sup 3:
  
  Indicate the number of IADR/AADR members you have observed/experienced exhibiting X within the last 5 years:
  -Overlooking others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data: 72% yes
  IADR/AADR are dental research associations and the original source is from 1996. So that number doesn't really mean what you portrayed it to mean.
3. Re:Naturally by timeOday · 2012-03-27 15:47 · Score: 1
  
  I agree, except it's true of all jobs, because all performance measures are proxy measures to some degree. Even a straight commission salesman can earn a big commissions while screwing his company if he does it by making false promises to customers or undercutting others in the company to move up the ladder. All measures of "output" have unintended consequences.
There's nothing wrong with science... by Gavin+Scott · 2012-03-27 05:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.
But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.
So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.
G.
1. Re:There's nothing wrong with science... by repapetilto · 2012-03-27 07:37 · Score: 1
  
  The problem is that it is wasting a bunch of time and money. Both of the researchers publishing crap and those who have to sift through it.
Eisenhower's farewell adress by 0123456 · 2012-03-27 05:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

Read the part after the one everyone always quotes about the 'military-industrial complex'.
1. Re:Eisenhower's farewell adress by wanzeo · 2012-03-27 08:09 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Fascinating. For those who are curious:
  
  In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
  Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
  The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Back to the Garage by troylanes · 2012-03-27 05:11 · Score: 1

I'd love to see more real science and research done in the garage/basement rather than in environments which are prone to the "publish or perish" disease. Are there still basic concepts of the universe to be discovered that don't require a particle accelerator or electron microscope? I'd be willing to be there are. It also seems that current academia is so focused on such tiny details of a particular phenomenon that they can't see the forest through the trees...
1. Re:Back to the Garage by vlm · 2012-03-27 05:17 · Score: 1
  
  Your best hope for home science is in bio and astronomy, not so much physics.
  Its a risk thing... you can't study something "at work" unless you can guarantee it'll pay off and feed you and your family with better odds than everything else you could do. However, at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day, or go variable star and nova searching during the night. If it doesn't work, that's OK, you still get paid and get to eat, and all you miss is an Oprah rerun on TV. If it works, then publish.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
2. Re:Back to the Garage by ceoyoyo · 2012-03-27 05:19 · Score: 1
  
  So go do it.
3. Re:Back to the Garage by Arrepiadd · 2012-03-27 05:38 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  My view of it is that there aren't that many basic concepts to discover in the back of your garage. Particle accelerators, high-field NMR machines, electron or AFM microscopes, huge ground-based or orbital telescopes are needed to make the next discoveries in their respective fields because the easy stuff, that could be seen with bubble chambers, low-field magnets, optical microscopes and small telescopes was already discovered. It's a matter of diminishing returns.
  Scientists have been doing their jobs for hundreds of years, no one is going to discover an improved version of the laws of gravitation with a 100 dollar telescope. What may come out of observing dark matter was obtained with multi-million dollar equipment, collaborative effort and brilliant minds going over and over the same thing.
  Granted, there may be things to discover that can still be attained in a garage. In hindsight everything is easy, but if no one is looking, there may still be amazing things still to observe in your kitchen lab. But expecting the cure for problems of the world to come out of a bunch of semi-amateur scientists is betting on the wrong horse... it may happen in a field or two, but it won't be the future of science.
4. Re:Back to the Garage by the+gnat · 2012-03-27 05:53 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Your best hope for home science is in bio
  It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein.) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.
  The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.
  at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day
  I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.
  The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.
5. Re:Back to the Garage by vlm · 2012-03-27 07:09 · Score: 1
  
  Get some petri dishes, and try to purify a line of bacteria or protists or whatever from your backyard. Then using some mostly off the shelf gear figure out the optimum growth conditions. Or... do enviro research. Remember when MTBE was "new" well figure out how many ppm a off the shelf back yard fungi line can tolerate. Or modern pink slime.
  Basically, you can do stuff at home that is not "profitable".
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
6. Re:Back to the Garage by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 07:17 · Score: 0
  
  Politics flew us to the moon using science... Religion flew us into buildings using science. - Me The key here is not that science is used... it's for what ends.
some issues only in life sciences, some insoluble by bcrowell · 2012-03-27 05:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

A lot of the issues discussed here are only relevant in the life sciences, and especially in medicine. Retractions are not a big phenomenon in the physical sciences. Ditto for publication bias (refusal by journals to publish negative results or failed attempts to replicate published results). This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand. There are many, many very talented people who would like to spend their careers doing fundamental scientific research. The number of such people is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of jobs available. This isn't a new phenomenon, although in the past the problem may have been hidden more, because, e.g., up until about 1950, only white, affluent, European and American males were considered prospects for a career in science.

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OP is broken by Improv · 2012-03-27 05:16 · Score: 2

The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.

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For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
1. Re:OP is broken by Nidi62 · 2012-03-27 05:28 · Score: 2
  
  The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better.
  This is what I was thinking. Perhaps along with this, it is simply easier with today's technology to identify faulty or incorrect (whether intentionally or not) research? Communication is easier, so more people can look at your data, your analysis, your conclusions, and with a larger audience, the more likely it is that any incongruity will catch someone's eye. 100 years ago there was a much smaller audience for scientific research, and it could take a long time (months, if not years) for any interested party to get data from a researcher or recreate a research project. Now it can be done in a matter of hours. The larger the audience, the more difficult it is to fool them.
  
  --
  The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
2. Re:OP is broken by jeffmeden · 2012-03-27 06:01 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
  In my head the summary read "Modern science is dysfuctional, claims several modern scientists. See attached scientific statistics for details."
3. Re:OP is broken by asylumx · 2012-03-27 06:48 · Score: 1
  
  Wish I had a mod point! Great observation!
It's just CAPITALism at work by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:19 · Score: 0

Capital = money. Much of the modern world is capitalism, so, we're all slaves to money and those who control it. What's not to understand here?
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by vlm · 2012-03-27 05:21 · Score: 1

Could be that physical sciences have about two or three generations more experience with the concept of pounding the data set with computers for statistical analysis. Maybe give the soft sciences another generation or two?
A big factor might be that datasets are no longer handwritten in a lab notebook on the experimenters desk, but are living on flash drives, DVD-Rs, dropbox, ftp sites...

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"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Crowd Fund Biomed Research by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 05:28 · Score: 1, Interesting

How about we apply the Kickstarter model that is improving the gaming industry to Biomed research, all we need is a platform that connects people with various ailments to the researchers interested in developing treatments and doing basic science related to those particular illnesses.
There can be some mandatory requirements like not being able to patent the results ( or being able to patent shorter periods of time) of the research and making sure that it's published i in an open access journal like PlosONE. This way we eliminate the incentive for the researchers to gain advantages with unfair techniques and also encourage new talent to join the industry.
I'm sure there's lots of researchers with great leads and ideas that just don't get enough funding from the pharma companies because they won't bring revenues in the short term, this is especially true for drugs with patents that are expired but might have different new applications and treatments that use materials which are not patentable.
There's lots of similarities with the gaming industry if you draw analogies between big pharma and publishers, maybe the solution is the same, cut the middleman.
1. Re:Crowd Fund Biomed Research by stillnotelf · 2012-03-27 07:15 · Score: 1
  
  We already did this to a large extent. Surely you've heard of the Komen foundation? When they're not getting in trouble for political mishaps, they fund a TON of cancer research via private donations. Similar groups exist for most first-world chronic diseases, although there isn't a lot of public-private funding of this sort for third-world infectious diseases (that I'm aware of).
2. Re:Crowd Fund Biomed Research by stillnotelf · 2012-03-27 07:16 · Score: 1
  
  We already *do* this....
Re: Sounds Like Climate Science by thomasw_lrd · 2012-03-27 05:35 · Score: 0

1. Create alarmist theory to get funded.
2. Create data to support theory
3. Profit!!!
We finally solved the ???? problem.

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21st Century Renaissance Man
Journals can't verify articles by Hentes · 2012-03-27 05:47 · Score: 1

You can't expect journals to vrify the claims of a paper. That's the job of the scientific community, to try to replicate the results and see what happens. Of course, accepting unreplicated results as facts is a serious problem in some sciences.
1. Re:Journals can't verify articles by green1 · 2012-03-27 06:34 · Score: 2
  
  One of the big problems I've been hearing about recently is that many journals refuse to publish replication papers, which means nobody wants to replicate the results of any paper to see if the original author was correct, because they themselves won't be able to publish it.
  Replication is one of the most important part of the scientific process, it's how you find liars, cheats, and actual errors. If you discourage people from trying to replicate other's experiments you harm the whole scientific process.
2. Re:Journals can't verify articles by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 09:07 · Score: 0
  
  Worse, it is extra hard to publish results that conflict with the first to publish.
Praise science by schrodingersGato · 2012-03-27 05:52 · Score: 1

Dishonesty has become a real problem in science. Some recent cases (Judy Mikovits, Luk Van Parijs, and Dipak K. Das (aka the red-wine researcher)) reveal some serious misconduct from high profile researchers. Certainly, part of this is due to the increased pressure on scientific researchers. The other part of this is generational. Cheating and misconduct are certainly more prevalent .in younger generations (or perhaps its always been this way and they are just not quite as clever).
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by ColdWetDog · 2012-03-27 05:52 · Score: 1

Perhaps, but bioinfomatics is an up and coming field. The big, big problem is the inherent variability of biologic systems and our rather primitive understanding of same. The other problem is we're shotgunning science - we spend an enormous amount of money to study human biology (poorly, in general) whilst we should really be spending money on the back end - bugs and worms and the like that we might be able to understand better.
There are good reasons for this, of course, and 'science' doesn't really care. If we spend the next 100 years running around in the wrong direction, then figure it all out, well, that's science. Nobody said we had to understand life, the Universe and everything in our lifetimes.

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Pseudo-scientist make .... by OldHawk777 · 2012-03-27 05:54 · Score: 1

The primary work of pseudo-scientist is to make faux-science for personal, religious, corporate, and government purposes.
Sort of like the Iran-science of tits-&-earthquake relativity, USA proof of poof Iraq-WMDs, EU ..., RU ..., CN ....
Highly certified people accept lies as personally essential. Highly qualified people accept proof/truth as life critical.

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Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Not "slanderous" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:22 · Score: 0

The claims were written, so they can't be slander. They are unlikely to be libelous either, since they seem to have been made in good faith with a factual basis.
That's Why They're Peer Reviewed! by oh_my_080980980 · 2012-03-27 06:25 · Score: 1

The problem is not with a the papers submitted. The problem is with the editorial board not taking time to peer review the articles and simply rubber stamping them for publication. Seems to me these journals wanted to jump on the sensationalism band wagon to get greater publicity.
1. Re:That's Why They're Peer Reviewed! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 15:19 · Score: 0
  
  BS
  Peer review is not done by the journals but by scientists themselves. The last time I reviewed a paper I got 10 days to do it. In these 10 days I can read the paper and check their logic, writing style and significance of the result. I can also check whether enough information is given to repeat the work. What I cannot do is to actually repeat the experiments.
  I have neither the material, equipment nor people to repeat it. And if I did, it would take a year if all works out, not 10 days.
  The PR system implies trust that people are not faking things. Most people would not, but some will. Some of such cheating may be found out eventually (after some years). However, the real problem is that publishing is only one aspect of a scientist career. Many people will work really hard for years, yet it is in the nature of experiments that many will fail. And in some fields, publishing failures does not give you enough impact to survive.
  This system is rotten, but until it gets fixed, there will be a rather large incentive to fake data. Several classic works in my field are books which were published at the beginning of last century. These are long-winded works that took the author perhaps 10-20 years to write. Such a comprehensive study of a topic is impossible today. Most students do not even have the patience to read it. I am not suggesting we go back to that. However, I do want to suggest to some of the people in this thread that not communicating your work for several years does not mean that you are bad at science, nor bad at communicating it. It may be you are just driven to perfect your brilliant idea and life's work. I know some people like that, and it is a shame they are not valued more.
  I also know several people who are not scientist, yet thrive in the current system as they are very good at writing reviews (mostly about other peoples work) with alarmist or exaggerated claims. Politics and public simply loves these guys.
  Another thing I want to mention for the people who think that science is expensive: In most western universities and institutes, a staggering amount of money goes to regulation, administration, buildings and security. The overhead is ridiculous. In most institutions, for every scientist (mostly on temporary and badly paid jobs) there are 1 or 2 people (from cleaners to secretaries) that have permanent jobs with very good benefits. In some countries, regulations on for example GMOs require that in addition to the 2 students, there are 2 officials watching whether they work safely with the plants. Guess what these people get paid....
  The whole system is over-regulated. I rather had society give us a big bag of money and lock us in ivory towers (Anathema-like), instead of the current mess it is (yes, I do think such elitism is preferable).
  End of rant...
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:27 · Score: 0

"Could be that physical sciences have about two or three generations more experience with the concept of pounding the data set with computers for statistical analysis. Maybe give the soft sciences another generation or two?"

Student's t-test was invented in 1908 so that the Guinness brewery could monitor the quality of their stout. Food scientists have been doing statistics ever since. Statistics is old hat for biologists.
Even at the basest level by Cazekiel · 2012-03-27 06:45 · Score: 1

Considering how many misinformed people there are on the internet, there are lots of people who aren't even taking a basic science requirement in school at the time they post random bull in youtube comments, their blogs, their facebooks, etc. all of which, while not an influential public claim to scientific research, creates loads of other spout-off-the-mouth misinformed folk who read the ridiculous e-diatribes. Crap is made up on spot it seems, all reactionary and without an ounce of "I might be wrong..." added. Like I said, not someone from actual influence, but when you have a YT vid of an E! TV feature on Snooki turn into scientific debate, it gets scary. People just like to think "I'm RIGHT!" all the time and will turn opinion into fact (which, I admit, I sometimes fall victim to. :P).
A real scientist, homegrown, self-taught or MIT-learned needs to have a serious sense of humility, because so many conjectures made can turn out the exact opposite of what was theorized.

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You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Re:Sounds Like Climate Science by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 06:59 · Score: 0

You've just been Climate Scienced!
"Dissenters shall be silenced."
Meta-sensationalism by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 07:13 · Score: 0

Breaking, life-altering, all-important news: People sometimes sensationalize things!
Penalty for fraud & deception by grep_rocks · 2012-03-27 07:31 · Score: 1

What baffles me is why aren't the authors of retracted articles punished in some way? At a research lab I worked at the prominent researcher proclaimed the discovery of a new particle that made a big splash in the news - when you looked at the details, he wasn't even the first guy to claim it, it is just that the original claim had marginal statistical significance, he just claimed he got a bigger signal - he got lots of citations, but no-one could repeat the experiment and when you looked closer at what he did to get the signal he just told some poor post-doc to keep refitting the data with different cuts until he found a signal. Well in any event the guy still runs his lab, and he pretty much tries to screw anyone who disagrees with him through his position on funding committees - so nobody fucks with him. Given that I think the funding process need to be reformed, with more reviewers and anonymous grant submissions - the funding system can be gamed to lock people out you have a grudge against and that keeps people in fear of people allowing them to get away with crappy sensationalist science.
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 07:52 · Score: 0

"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings."
"Religion built Notre Dame. Science built Dachau."
This disease is not limited to biomedics. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 08:07 · Score: 0

The social sciences lead the pack in their elevation of academic and civic politics over actual scientific research. But it wasn't always so. IMO, everything went to shit around 1980.
Fried? by antdude · 2012-03-27 08:07 · Score: 0

Fried? :D

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Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by Hatta · 2012-03-27 08:08 · Score: 1

Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.
This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
If we understand just how valuable basic research is, then our scientists don't have to work as hard to justify their existence. Instead of spending time marketing themselves and their research, they can spend that time checking their work before publication. Nobody does good science when they are worried about being able to pay the mortgage.
In other words, you get what you pay for. If we decide we want a prosperous future, we need to invest in it now.

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Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 11:06 · Score: 0

Christianity has long had a heavy association with antisemitism. Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Martin Luther, author of "On the Jews and Their Lies", and referred him as an important reformer and antisemite in "Mein Kampf." Luther's work was the blueprint for Kristallnacht's murders, destruction of Jewish businesses, and burning of over 1,000 synagogues. It occurred on Luther's birthday. Whipping the majority christian German population, Lutheran and Catholic alike, into the murderous frenzy of the Holocaust was quite easy for Hitler and the Nazis. They used christianity to do it, and at the same time banned Darwin and works by other evolutionary biologists.

Science had nothing to do with Dachau. Religion, specifically christianity, did.
Science is a process, not a thing, damn it! by rocket+rancher · 2012-03-27 11:44 · Score: 1

And what is "Science" (must capitalize correctly) without scientists? Including unscrupulous ones?
Way to posit "no true scientist.".
Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
Wow, 12 mod points left, and I really wanted to mod you into oblivion. Instead, I'll just point out why you are wrong, and let some other mods go medieval on your ass. To answer your question, science is a process, not an artifact, so it doesn't matter if there are scientists around, unscrupulous or otherwise. It is a methodology, not a thing. If humans didn't exist, the process would still be there for some other species to discover and use. Since your premise is demonstrably false, your assertions founded on that premise are false, too -- including and especially your maladroit attempt to link science with religion via the deism argument.
Help, I'm being oppressed! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-27 15:39 · Score: 0

Trolls shall be modded down.
FTFY.
So far as I know, apart from Lindzen & Choi (2009), there has not been a rush of retractions in climate science journals. Now I could be wrong, and OP is free to educate us. But to hijack a discussion to post his own fabulist anti-science rant, is surely the very definition of a troll.
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by CAIMLAS · 2012-03-27 17:36 · Score: 1

This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
That's certainly a possible contributing factor. I will grant you that.
Or, quite simply, they're not rigorously exercising the scientific method, as you have to in a more provable field such as hard science. (There's a reason why it's called hard science, you know.) It seems like every other week we read about some study 'proving' some new scientific principle which is plagued with logical and procedural fallacy.

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~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Re:some issues only in life sciences, some insolub by bcrowell · 2012-03-28 03:55 · Score: 1

>>Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.

>This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
I disagree. One of the problems described in TFA is that there is a large number of researchers churning out papers that are either of low quality or simply unimportant. They're describing the life sciences, but this is also my experience in physics. There are already too many people scouring the same scientific hunting grounds at the same time.
The other reason I disagree is that I wasn't kidding about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Seriously. There are literally 10 to 100 times more people who would like these careers than there are jobs. It's simply not possible to scale up scientific research by a factor of 100. For example, the University of California system has 10 campuses. What are we going to do, build the UC system up to 1000 campuses?

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Science is politics and business by hessian · 2012-03-29 13:52 · Score: 1

"Science" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a product and a political statement.
If you don't already have an audience in mind for your research, who will pay for it? No one wants the truth -- we all want "truths" we can use.
If your sponsor is a Democrat, your science will be blue state science. If your sponsor is a pharmaceutical company, you may find yourself praising SSRIs. If you work for the government, torture = good. And so forth.
It's time we stopped pretending that science was anything but the work of humans, and funded by humans with different agendas. And as today's most interesting article shows us the effects are a polarization of the population from science.
There was a great thread about this on our forum which added another wrinkle. Science studies material. It's possible that not all of the universe is materiality. We may need to open our minds to keep our science from becoming controlled by only one voice in the debate.

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Futurist Traditionalism