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?

Comments

Lots of them.

[HornWumpus]

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

Re:Lots of them.

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Lots of them.

[Jahta]

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

I know this was tagged as "funny", but it's disturbingly close to the truth. At a recent Flat Earth Convention (yes, really) the folks seemed to genuinely believe they were doing legitimate science to "prove" that the earth isn't round. They regard folks who do actual peer-reviewed science as part of some "conspiracy by the elite" and therefore not to be trusted.

Re:Lots of them.

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "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."

It's interesting to watch you guys work yourselves towards the "no, not possible" answer. It seems to me that this conclusion is completely dictated by your mindset that there are no serious challenges to textbook theories which have to date already been proposed. With such a starting point, crowdsourcing would struggle insofar as it would fail to focus on those ideas which are most worthy of our attention. But, a review of critiques of modern science would reveal that actually critics are aware of numerous serious challenges which academics have refused to investigate, and it stands to reason that these are the areas where crowdsourcing can provide tremendous societal value -- by transforming informationally disordered topics into publishable topics through a process of identifying unexpected vindications and aggregating (and prioritizing) pre-existing coherent arguments.

It does not take a scientist to do that -- just somebody who is willing to take the time to read and then subsequently track the controversy over many years.

At least, that is the point I made in my own answer a bit further down in this same thread.

Re:Lots of them.

[oh_my_080980980]

So to sum up, you do not know what the fuck you are talking about.

Science is hard? Science is only done at the PHD level?

What you and the OP are talking about is conducting E-X-P-E-R-I-M-E-N-T-S.

Yes Virginia, ANYONE can do it. Little kids in grade school do them. Students in high school do them. Yup even undergraduate students do them.

The complexity and sophistication of the experiment will depend on your level of understanding of the subject of investigation and access to equipment. Thus some may be rudimentary, but they are still experiments; it's still science.

Move along Potsy.

Zooniverse

[bjorniac]

Check out Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/ - there's a lot of projects that are helped by citizen science. A nice platform where human powered processing can contribute. I don't think there's the kind of review etc you're asking for, but it does have a very nice interface for building your own project, contributing to others etc.

Citizen Science Tahoe

[mspohr]

Here's one active effort:
https://citizensciencetahoe.or...

They have an app for "citizens" to collect data about water quality at Lake Tahoe. They post the results on the web site.

Well, there's HamSci

[dtmos]

While it's not general-purpose, there is Ham radio Science Citizen Investigation, "a platform for the publicity and promotion of projects that are consistent with the following objectives:

        Advance scientific research and understanding through amateur radio activities;
        Encourage the development of new technologies to support this research; and
        Provide educational opportunities for the amateur community and the general public."

If you are looking for a more universal organization, you might look at this organization's means and methods for some ideas.

ALL science should be citizen science

[mi]

With the possible exception for militarily-applicable research, no science should be government-sponsored. At all.

Re:ALL science should be citizen science

[Squirmy McPhee]

With the possible exception for militarily-applicable research, no science should be government-sponsored. At all.

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....

And real scientists, too!

[Okian Warrior]

Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.

The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.

And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.

Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.

Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along with the *real* scientists who wrote the paper.

(St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.)

I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos that did brilliant technical comparisons of techniques or materials. One in particular - that I can't find at the moment - had everything one would need for a paper: background, hypothesis, test, measurement, and results. It would make a typical paper in materials science, except it was in video format. It was simple, concise, and had a clear result. (Update: it's here.)

If you want a platform for citizen science, you might try Hackaday.io. They are trying to start an actual scientific journal to collect some of the results that amateurs are coming up with, The Hackaday Journal of What You Don't Know.

Whether the journal goes anywhere is anybody's guess, but the .io system has a lot of cool scientific projects that might make for good research. Such as this one, or this one.

It's an excellent question, Loren

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Hi, Loren. I am going through the responses to your thoughtful question, and am sort of imagining your reaction as unimpressed by the answers (please correct me if I am wrong).

The fact of the matter is that we live in a unique time insofar as we have more access to information and wisdom from crowds than ever before. You might imagine that this explosion of resources should have some disruptive effect upon the way that science is done today -- something that mirrors what Amazon did to e-commerce when it commercialized the long tail ... the argument being that since specialist scientists are essentially laypeople outside of their specializations, it's conceivable that "the crowd" can outperform these specialist communities when it comes to problem-solving tasks which involve a great amount of synthesis and generalist knowledge (which is honestly not today highly valued in academia). If you've had any of these thoughts, then realize that you are not completely alone: In fact, Rob Spencer at Pfizer has I think very well documented that the crowd can indeed be mined for solutions to some of the most challenging technical challenges. Pfizer has been doing just that for some years already, and they claim that the approach works.

Before continuing, I want to differentiate the two fundamentally different types of "citizen science". It can be either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down citizen science is just laypeople doing the legwork for some pre-existing academic work (many of the answers refer to this sort of work). I would argue that the far more interesting vision for citizen science involves enlisting the support of crowds towards solving certain problems which the critics of modern science have argued academia is itself struggling to address, and I call this approach "bottom-up". For the rest of this post, I will specifically focus upon bottom-up citizen science.

I would argue that learning the most common and most poignant critiques of modern science must be the first step towards designing a citizen science crowdsourcing platform, for the simple reason that laypeople are never going to completely replace the specialist. What you really want to achieve with these sorts of projects is a synergistic effect from combining the wisdom of crowds with the power of specialist science. An approach which fixes one or more observable problems with modern science could produce such an effect. But, like I said, to be sure that you are in the right ballpark, you have to become an expert in critiques of modern science. This first step is actually the one which Slashdotters seem to have the most difficulty with, and it is likely the reason why the answers to your question are not so great (sorry guys, downvote me if you must, but I am being honest).

If this is seeming too vague to be actionable, it may be useful to dig into a specific example. One very serious problem with the modern science approach is the infamous "publish or perish" problem:

Dear EPFL, I am writing to state that, after four years of hard but enjoyable PhD work at this school, I am planning to quit my thesis in January, just a few months shy of completion ...

While I could give a multitude of reasons for leaving my studies – some more concrete, others more abstract – the essential motivation stems from my personal conclusion that I’ve lost faith in today’s academia as being something that brings a positive benefit to the world/societies we live in. Rather, I’m starting to think of it as a big money vacuum that takes in grants and spits out nebulous results, fueled by people whose main concerns are not to advance knowledge and to effect positive change, though they may talk of such things, but to build their CVs and to propel/maintain their car

The most cynical thing I've ever heard...

[HornWumpus]

Life is like a big long meeting, nothing gets done and nobody's opinion gets changed.

Re:Let's be real, this is a terrible idea.

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Pfizer claims to already be using crowdsourcing to solve long-tail problems, so somewhere between your "absolutely not" and their "yes, we're already doing it" is the right answer.

Re:Open Science Framework

[VeryFluffyBunny]

AC, you beat me to it! :)

Yes, Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/

Allows researchers to upload their data, methods, algorithms/calculations, etc.. Allows anyone else to check and report errors/problems and suggest improvements. Open data can also be re-purposed but that may be an open temptation to indulge in p-hacking.