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Ask Slashdot: Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong?
azaris writes: Recent revelations of heavily policy-driven or even falsified science have raised concern in the general public, but especially in the scientific community itself. It's not purely a question of political or commercial interference either (as is often claimed when it comes to e.g. climate research) — scientists themselves are increasingly incentivized to game the system for improved career prospects, more funding, or simply because they perceive everyone else to do it, too. Even discounting outright fraud or manipulation of data, the widespread use of methodologies known to be invalid plagues many fields and is leading to an increasing inability to reproduce recent findings (the so-called crisis of reproducibility) that puts the very basis of our reliance on scientific research results at risk. Of course, one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting, but the problem appears to be getting worse before it gets better.
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
Stop watching idiots.
Once you get past the hype, the media stories, the click bait; and learn how to actually read scientific papers, they seem about as accurate as they've ever been. The second half of this paper discusses the difficulties, and that was decades ago.
Also worth recognizing that science papers are not an attempt to define absolute truth, and people who use it as such (saying, "this paper says X, therefore X is true") are likely to be disappointed. Science papers are essentially correspondence between scientists, saying "hey, look what I did and how it turned out." It's a form of dialectic, and a good one, but not every paper will be equally good, or even true......nor is it intended to be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Companies and politicians are more interested in looking good and in getting the snazzy release announcement / photo op then releasing accurate, neutral data to the public. An announcement will be heavily promoted / advertised and people will remember those ads more then they will remember the tiny retraction issues three weeks later.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
There are more scientists today at work than at any other time in the past. They produce better results than at any time in the past. Better tools and education have improved things to the human race in general and scientists in particular.
So if we assume that scientists are just as likely as a percentage to falsify work, we can safely assume that with more scientists today at work, and the good results better than previous results, there are more errors today and they appear to be more obvious.
The increasingly vocal minority promoting no-holds-barred free market capitalism creates a race to the bottom in many fields - it's not only limited to employment, banking, etc. It started years ago with the 'publish or perish' mentality and has progressed now to where various political factions essentially 'buy off' people with college degrees (I won't call them scientists) to get up in front of people and publicly throw support behind their positions, often using sketchy numbers or questionable methods of data analysis. These days everything has to have a profit motive, and science is no different. People have learned that the best way to argue with someone who comes armed with solid facts is to invent your own facts and make them difficult or impossible to prove, hence confusing the hell out of everyone until nobody cares anymore.
The post attempts to criticize scientists using assumptions not scientifically examined themselves. "Increasing inability," "appears to be," "as is often claimed," "increasingly incentivized," "widespread." Such terms don't even pass muster on Wikipedia, let alone actual scientific journals.
Really? Show me the data. Like a scientist. Is the number of retracted articles increasing in a statistically significant way? Is there a statistically significant change in the types of funding incentives? What is the level at which you call something "widespread?" Prove to me that science itself is actually getting things "wrong" at any rate higher than before. But if you want to attack science, you need to do it on their terms.
Phrasing the question in this way shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It assumes a narrative and then rapid-links a bunch of anecdotes before asking a direct question about the character of an entire profession.
The structure of University research is a huge part of this. Researchers don't care about truth or quality of their research. They care about keeping their jobs and their pay, which means several things:
1) Publishing something that's "interesting" is more important than being accurate.
2) Giving your funding providers the results they want is more important than being accurate.
3) Null-hypotheses get avoided at all costs, so results are fabricated to avoid that case.
As long as these goals are present and more important to scientists and the scientific community at large than doing actual science, this will always be a serious problem.
We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.
Yes, I realize that's a bit of cherry-picking examples but all too often logical fallacies are used to justify when these things happen. I'd suggest it's an ethics crisis rather than a science crisis.
Math is THE science. Everything is about provability and reproducibility.
No.
Math, for all of its beauty and power, is not a science. Why? Because it does not rely on experimental observations to arrive at conclusions. Instead, it relies on axioms extended by logical reasoning.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Sweden had 5,142 researchers in R&D per capita in 2011, and the United States had 3,978. That's a ratio of 1.29 (approximately), so if we infer anything it should be that a culture that is warm to science produces more scientists and better results. I suppose we *could* pretend that there's a home advantage. We could also blame our compilers when our code has error, our lathes when we make milling mistakes, and our hammers when we miss the nail and hit ourselves. Point being, maybe we're doing it wrong by simultaneously having an anti-intellectual culture while somehow (don't ask me how) leading our laypersons to feel compelled to condescend using science they don't know.
If we want to improve, then we need to continue to make discussion of science fun. We need to continue to make sure people know that it's okay to be wrong. We need to only make the necessary mandatory, and never make people feel that we're forcing more upon them. What is necessary should become more advanced as technology advances, and casual discussion is already becoming more advanced. Aside from all this, we can only wait and hope that we don't end up with a government that hates science or businesses that intentionally corrupt it while we have a population that doesn't do either. Unfortunately, that previous sentence is a serious concern.