Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist? (arstechnica.com)
Loren Chorley writes: After reading about a new surge in the trend for citizen science (also known as community science, civic science or networked science), I was intrigued by the idea and wondered if there are websites that do this in a crowd sourced and open sourced manner. I know sites like YouTube allow people to show off their scientific experiments, but they don't facilitate uploading all their data or linking studies together to draw more advanced conclusions, or making methodologies like you'd see in academia straight forward and available through a simple interface. What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already? Do you, Slashdot, think this is something useful, or that people are interested in? Or would the potential for fraud and misinformation be too great?
Unfortunately, that is pretty accurate. Science is a pretty complicated thing in that it requires you to understand why the scientific method works and everything else tried so far fails. You usually do that on a concrete subject and often in the context of a PhD. Just reading up on it is not enough, you have to see it work and have to see the alternatives fail to really understand why it is the only way to do things. Yes, that takes several years of working on one or a small set of closely related problems, but it is neccessary.
Now, this "Citizen Science" is pretty universally not Science. In the words of the great Feynman, this is "Cargo Cult Science" where people try to follow the rituals without understanding and then expect scientific results to manifest. That does not work. Copying the language, copying the rituals (doing measurements and experiments, papers, conferences, workshops, titles, etc.) does absolutely nothing to make something scientific.
The second thing "Citizen Scientists" usually fool themselves about is how slow scientific work almost universally is and how little you typically have to show for a lot of work. Hence they often try do do things faster and that universally fails. Because the thing is, if you have a little, incremental, but scientifically sound result, this result will basically stand forever.
Bottom line: Science is really hard, but it is really easy to fool yourself into thinking you are doing Science when nothing of the sort is true. Also, don't get me wrong, there are lots of people with PhDs and quite a few with professorships, that do not qualify as scientists. But there are basically no people without that PhD that do qualify. It is a necessary step, but not a sufficient one. Yes, I know some people do not want to hear that. Bit these are all people without that PhD, that want to cut that corner. That does not work. And yes, I also realize that this makes Science a club that is very hard to get into. That is unfortunate, and if there were any other known way to do it, I would be all for it. But there is not. There are just a lot of ways to fool yourself because you only see what you were missing in insight when you have gotten it. That is unfortunate as well, but it is how reality presents itself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, we have government-sponsored research to thank for your being able to share that comment with us. Without government-funded science for both peaceful and military purposes you wouldn't have computer to type your comment on, nor an internet or World Wide Web to transmit it over. You not only wouldn't have a smart phone, you wouldn't have a cell phone, or any phone at all for that matter. Or even electricity, most likely.
You can't rely on wealthy investors and venture capitalists to fund science for which there is not a clear application, customer, or business model, especially if that business model does not lead to profitability or an IPO in a relatively short period of time. Thirty years ago the first web browser was still two years away. The first web browser that anybody has heard of was still five years away. The only networking business case for the rabble that anybody really imagined was dial-up service à la Prodigy, Compuserv, and America Online -- and those services largely kept customers inside their walled gardens and made it difficult or impossible to access the internet itself. Even after Mosaic appeared in 1993 (a government-funded effort, by the way) and people started to get their first taste of the web as we know it, it was still years before private investment grew significantly because people needed to get online for any of it to matter, and doing that required both public investment and new business models.
The usual suspects were first on the scene, of course: The first time I encountered a camgirl with a live video stream was in 1996....