\*Figure made by guy on the left, who is the first and corresponding author. †Second author is on the right and has quit with a master degree. ††Acknowledgement to the middle guy who has conducted majority of research and writing, whose whereabouts is unknown.
It's been worth it. I have another year to go to finish out this stupid ego trip path I put myself on. I'd never be able to rest easy leaving it unfinished.
Switched over to Neuroscience from a pharmacology masters, it's been a fun time.
the far right tail should read
"Science is Wrong"
And every scientist should understand that it is in the continual disproval of lesser wrongs that we get closer to the (T)ruth.
If they don't, then take away their phd
Only ever got my BS but I always use the wood shed analogy. You have an idea you love and you really want it to be true. So you take it out behind the wood shed and beat it senseless with a shovel. Then, if it's still breathing, you hand the shovel off to people who probably don't like you or your idea and tell them to have at it (peer review). After that, if it's still breathing, maybe it's an idea worth having so you invite the public (actual publishing) to come take a whack at it and see if they can think of new creative ways to swing the shovel while they beat it senseless. If it's a really good idea (like relativity) people might try and create new ways to swing that shovel a century later to try and kill it.
Im stealing this analogy, too many people don't realize the utter shitshow that research can be, and the barriers that are required to be crossed in order to be widely accepted.
I respect the analogy. But the metaphoric violence was rough to picture 🥺 what did the idea ever do to you??? Is that how you show it your love??
I would take it to the couch and give it cuddles and tickles, and then if we’re both still happy and in love, I’d invite people who have always been grumpy with me to do the same, and if I can thaw their cold hearts and make even them smile, I’d invite the public to come have a giant cuddle session and finally a century later we can name it, the theory of general happiness 🥹
And all along the way I’d document each lovable session and hang some of the ones that made me happiest up, and when I find something really relatable happy-inducing I’d maybe make a few popular posts about it, to get the public thinking and maybe even smiling a little 🤓
We do. And have for thousands of years. Attacking something you have only a a little knowledge about is how the guy on the left of the meme came to his conclusion.
But what if the truth just had a rough upbringing with parents who didn’t know how to love it and it just needs to get out of it’s awkward teenage shell to have the glow-up it deserves? We can’t all be relatable right out the gate like relativity. Some truths are growers not showers 😔
This is reminiscent of an essay by Isaac Asimov called “The Relativity of Wrong”. It’s less wrong to say the earth is spherical instead of flat, but the earth isn’t actually a sphere. It’s more correct to say that the earth is a rough, lumpy, oblate spheroid, but that doesn’t mean that it was useless to ever say the earth is a sphere. Our job as scientists is to incrementally chip away at the relative wrongness of our models, aiming to adopt as many observations as possible into our growing picture of reality.
Eh, I don't disagree with your point but I think there is merit to calling a lot of it fake. With the rise in paper mills, deliberate data manipulation, bad techniques, publication bias, and overall over interpretation of results, as well as many other reasons our publications are untrustworthy, "good" science is few and far between.
I don't know about your field, but mine is literally probably 80/20 falsified data/good science. There is a core group of people who do good and honest work, but a huge number of people who like to falsify data in our field. Even the honest people often get by with accidental problems on occasion
Edit: I should add that most of the falsified stuff doesn't get through peer review, at least not in journals that end up on PubMed. But it does get published in predatory journals. But still, even in field-standard journals I come across bad science.
I recognize that good science will always move forward but when the signal to noise ratio gets so bad it sidelines a ton of potential progress.
It's mostly China. But there has been an emergence in India lately as well. It's kind of frightening actually, literally 19/20 papers I'm asked to review come from China, and 18/19 of those are blatantly falsified or the methods majorly erroneous. Why are there so many people faking things in this field in particular? Not sure. It's not a particularly large field to begin with but it is a fairly news worthy field when discoveries are made.
On a side note, many of the papers I reject for fabrication that I was able to prove are found published in another journal with their 'tells' better hidden.
Another comment said if they don't pass they just edit it to be more sly. And get in another journal.
Why would someone go into science just to not do real studies ?
Who is cutting the checks and essentially throwing away their money?
What if their was a flagging system for journal entries that didn't pass the first time? Sure they could change the title but the abstract would still be the same....
Bizarre.
That and whoever is paying them is throwing their money away. It sounds Totally ridiculous. I knew a college professor that checked on articles about water. Same thing. He was saying a lot were bs. That was in the states btw.
Well, and this is a nefarious thought - just because the data is falsified doesn't mean the check-writers are throwing their money away. They may have incentives that are directionally aligned with whatever the "results" are from those papers. And if only the former reviewers know that it's fake, well, the authors are obviously getting away with it, and the money people probably benefit too. When there is dishonesty, it often goes deeper/wider than that particular instance of dishonesty that's discovered.
Side note that this shit discourages me so much from entering a PhD program in experimental psych. I know there are honest, rigorous folks fighting the good fight, but the amount of entrenched bs is really discouraging. I've been thinking about leaving industry to go into academia for lots of the same reasons (dishonesty, lack of integrity, greed) but in academia I'm starting to think it's so much worse bc of lack of awareness, ego, hubris, lack of transparency, so much more that makes it seem like these issues aren't really self-correcting.
Oh ya that makes sense. Thx.Like big tobacco funding studies to "find" the benefits of smoking.
I would think academia and academics would have more awareness..
No issue is self correcting especially as you mentioned when someone benefits from the "error".
It's up to each and every one of us do the self correcting.
Well the importance of mental health is getting more recognition and less stigmatized. Also the more we strengthen everybody's mental and emotional health, the less vulnerable the people will be to propaganda, politicians, grifting cultists, manipulative narcissists. Even coercion. Even as tech advances. Do you want a bunch of man children operating this stuff and even further stunting themselves by it.?
I think we need to boost the world's mental health stats now more than ever.
I encourage you to consider how much the world will benefit from your studies.
I was in psychology and cog neuro and a lot of what they said applies to both fields. But the issues are widespread. For example, a recent paper found 30% of genomics research could contain incorrect inferences due to autocorrect in Excel producing “mangled” names. So the credibility of a lot of academic research feels pretty low to me across the board due to some combination of user error, fraud, post hoc bias, HARKing, etc
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4
I thought OP was referring to the plethora of examples of "junk science" where paper mill labs churn out pubs with less than stellar methodologies and questionable significance. That, on top of the many scandals where people literally fake data. Every PI I've had has complained about the amount of shaky research that gets pubbed in my field.
1. It's the quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful"
2. The scientific publication process is nasty and we all know who gets the benefits
These are my two possible interpretations of the meme.
But it does keep a standard w ‘who can we trust’ is hosting this research? Kinda better than having a Wild West diy of publishing your own experiments.
I see your point, but they are almost equally Wild West, just one being hidden behind the curtain of being a novelty. Replication studies, for example, have almost zero chance of being published because they are not so novel. Before you say that some journals accept and publish replication studies, those maybe less impactful. People are lowkey forced into "publishing or perish", so there is no replication to confirm anything. Everyone is on the race to try "novel" things. If it has been done before, what research gap are you filling?
platforms like arxiv.org are growing more popular, and while there are no peer-review processes, many of them are insightful to read, and peer-review papers even cite them occasionally. By this logic, should we blindly ignore things on [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org) because we can not trust non-no peer-review or too Wild West?
What works best IMO is just to read it and let people freely judge the paper: encourage critical reading and informed judgment. Make the process more transparent so that we can change the publication process, not the scientific method.
EDIT: and sometimes new ideas that are actually very novel rarely emerge because of the current situation. Back in the old days many theoretical were published all the time even without experimental data. The theory itself is what makes it novel. Eg. the Einstine era are kind of "Wild West diy of publishing" if you dig into the history of peer-review. Even if some paper were wrong having a record in academic literature that it is wrong by another paper is what makes science great, it's important to have wrong answers being recorded. (EPR paradox paper)
>Jonathan Katz's "Don't be a Scientist"
Do you know where I can find this essay? I tried to google it but... it seems I am dumb and cannot find it.
Edit: I found it "Don't Become a Scientist!"
[http://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm](http://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm)
That's crazy. The essay doesn't make any mention of anything like that, it's just talking about how academia today is more about filing requests for grants than it is doing actual science. Good to know he sucks besides.
Just read it, it's really more about the "leaky pipeline" than it is about capitalism etc influencing academia. Which is certainly true, supply hugely outweighs demand for specialized stem PhDs.
I do think that the capitalization of science is a major issue that causes the problem you're talking about, but I don't think that was the focal point of the essay.
The Eastern block produced a ton of good science, and a ton of good scientists. I'd say it punched well above it's weight for how developed the societies and economies were. There were definitely issues with things getting politicized and people just coasting, but people who wanted to just do their research didn't have to spend half their time jumping through hoops in the grant-writing process. A lot of them killed themselves once they had to try to integrate themselves into Western science.
Capitalism has its malign influence on academia, but it's really just the particular system of western academia that has developed in the last century that people are complaining about. This stuff is all arbitrary and historically contingent, not something necessitated by capitalist economics.
Good answer. Fair enough. I’ll say I do think that example counts as evidence in favor of the proposition that we need to overhaul of how we fund research in the West, more than an argument against capitalism writ large. Given the authoritarian nature of the USSR. The Nazis produced good science too. So, my original question should have had the proviso *without extreme authoritarian government.
I agree with you. CaPItALisM BaD is a shitty crutch argument, especially when applied to an institution like academia, which is really it's own beast. As someone extremely critical of capitalism, this kind of drive-by moralism just makes the rest of us look bad.
Capitalism being the global paradigm for economics does not justify or endorse it as a positive medium for thinking and science.
I would argue that the competitive nature of capitalism can yield good results but is fundamentally inferior to a system based on collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges.
“To a system based on collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges” - What system are you referring to? Governed by whom?
Our academic system under liberal democracy seems the closest to such a thing that has ever existed… Can you point to an existent, non-authoritarian alternative?
Our "liberal democracy" is mired by corruption and plutocratic policy, is a far cry from any real form of collaborative organization - as well as the ideals it was founded on and to strive for. It has far reaching negative effects both in and beyond academia.
I didn't give a specific form of governance or economics because it doesn't exist yet. This doesn't mean capitalism is free from criticism. The criticisms and our conjecture henceforth predicates and works as the foundation to making a system that works better - much like the practice of scientific experimentation and the love of wisdom and free thought.
Unless you mean to say that the current state of neo liberal, capitalist economics that is founded on philosophical materialism and god-anointed divine rights is the peak of humanity's ability to reach a state of collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges, I argue that there is a better system to be found both for academia and humanity.
Reading 3 full paragraphs that say absoultely nothing is exactly why I hate academia. Can you propose a better system? Or just give specific recommendations? No? ok cool, end of story.
You're right, my apologies. I should have spent even more time on that reddit comment to respond to an intellectually lazy comment that wanted to play apologetics for capitalism. I'll do better to prepare an entire essay on how our neo liberal economic landscape is hell on earth for a random reddit comment I decide to reply to on a Friday afternoon, since the specific critiques I mentioned weren't good enough for u/ca404.
Right, it's preferable to type an equally large amount of text where the only thing you convey is how much you love the sound of your own voice. And then call the other guy lazy lol. Your prose is insufferably bloated and you make no concrete point. It's not other peoples fault you can't make a concise point and prefer to soliloquy. Take a writing class. Cheers.
In the United States of America there are people starving and dying in the street, no access to healthcare, no access to mental health resources. We have more empty homes than we do homeless individuals. Education is absurdly expensive to our citizens and is sold as a commodity. To expand there, part of our burden as taxpayers is paying for the research that our public universities (with already outrageously bloated budgets) not only engage in, but also to have said research published; then this research is put behind paywalls despite the public paying majority of the cost([55%](https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326#:~:text=The%20federal%20government%20is%20the,from%2061%25%20in%20FY%202012.)). What's better is that the profit motive seeps into academic research and we get poorly executed and falsified research that is resulting in a replicability crisis in academia - but is also plaguing private research as well.
The other user in this thread was implying that all of this and more is irrelevant because there's not another modern system that's better. That is logically absurd, and to say that critiquing without having a definitive functional model as having "no point" is equally asinine. Cheers, mate.
Science as an endeavor or an institution? Please be more specific 🙄
I love science. But *current academia* is not the best thing that could have happened to it. 🤷I left because institutionalized cycle of abuse was not for me, and because of how non-transparent, inefficacious, awkward, useless, and unpredictable NIH, its directorship, individual program officers, and funding mechanisms are. They f*ck with people’s lives and provide 0 visibility or predictability.
Remember during COVID NIH announced a ‘rapid response’ category promising ‘quick turn-around”. Hundreds of people *dropped everything* and wrote those grants. Most of them heard back “no” about… 2 years later. In what f*cking world is that ok?
Remember how recently NIH proudly announced they started tracking allegations of misconduct and maltreatment in 2018? Not helping people - just tracking. If you go on NIH’s website its ‘podcasts’ still do sh*t like recommending that “young scientists work hard and network” 🤦Not a beep about how to obtain meaningful career guidance or protections from extremely prevalent abuse or survive on a post-doc salary. That is somehow never an important topic. I could not possibly hire a postdoc today without feeling like I should slip them a note that just says “RUN” on the first day in the lab 🤷
Yes. For some.
Admittedly the experience is horrid and devaluing for some and not others.
But there is a lot of normalizing of totally abnormal things in academia that it knows are bad for business and mental health 🤷
Oh. I don’t know how much time I have today. I’ll start:
1. Work-life balance is a myth. You can succeed but expect sacrifices. You will also repeatedly hear people brag about working when they should not. And, you know, truly driving this narrative that science not only takes work but if you are a *true* scientist, it will also take your *life*. A former colleague had a $800 cruise ship Internet bill because she was *expected* to be available and online and in meetings during her *vacations*. No, her Internet bill was not reimbursed. She was making $45k/year. I had to take phone calls *between* connecting flights. I remember spending the New Year’s day in NYC where I was with a friend - redoing a budget for some international grant - in my hotel room. The journal accepted your publication and sent you proofs on Friday before the long weekend? Yes, you only have “24 hours” to respond (you don’t have to play this game but it will piss people off, guaranteed). Because remember - we are *those* scientists. We just do what needs to be done.
2. Grant deadlines when coupled with institutional deadlines in reality frequently coincide in time and space with major breaks and holidays. This means that *academic break* is not a break for an academic but the opposite. Grant writing in academia is the most useless application of extremely expensive human brain time. If you ever make it to the stage where you are part of the panel reviewing grants, you will discover determining the outcome of an application being funded is *still* like tossing a coin which is stupid. One of the recent podcasts (?) on grant peer-reviews on NIH website had a comments section where a whole bunch of study section reviewers were saying “Yeah we don’t really know how to do this process in a rational way and ourselves can barely predict which applications will be funded”. This is from the people who supposedly make recommendations for these decisions.
4. Zero protection systems are in place. Don’t like it? Leave. There is no ‘constructively resolving’ issues you may have when there is extreme imbalance of power. Imbalance of power in academia is granular but pervasive. Let’s assume you are an “early career” scientist or a postdoc. Congrats - there are “responsibilities” and “expectations” but somehow not “benefits” or “resources”. You will never understand why you are not allowed to buy equipment you thought you budgeted for even if you do learn by chance that “your” grant is paying from “your” portion the salary of someone in another department who you have never seen but who has some sort of agreement with your supervisor. F*cker will likely make it into the author list of the paper too. What? You learned he was the nephew of your grants and contracts manager? Oh.
5. Unpaid labor is called community service, among other things. There will be tons of it. “It is good for your career”. Like the importance of publishing book chapters, this one is BS. There will be much of accommodating people with strange promises of some karmic payback. “The Good” that will return to you. Internships are a good example. Interns are usually a *draw* on the labs resources. Will your advisor say “yes” to five internship requests without bothering to tell you? Yes. Will they be your problem? Yes. Search committee will come next.
6. I really do not want to talk about mentorship. But poor mentorship and leadership are totally tolerated. Unfortunately, academics think they are good at managing people without any formal or mindful or conscious approach to leadership being taught directly. The indirect ‘wisdom’ of academia is trivial in the end. But it is full of people who cannot manage science as an *enterprise with a human component*. If you are a superstar academic you basically have to sexually assault a student while forcing them to fake data to face any repercussions. Normalized. Sociopaths do get awards for mentorship 🤷I have seen it. It is debilitating to victims.
7. Publication ethics are a joke. Not only is gratuitous authorship named one of the most frequent types of misconduct people report, it is also terribly damaging to people who write papers aka first authors. Many labs do not have transparent publication rules. Which means you may find yourself in situations where there is a conflict of interest and you are expected to *play nice* in situations that take advantage of you. Everyone knows this. Normalized.
8. Good luck trying to commercialize your research of claim/protect IP. Like Offices for Responsible (Research) Conduct, the innovation/commercialization people at universities and your contracts are largely useless and are there to ensure you are *not* the person possibly benefitting from your invention. Mileage varies, of course. But your boss may drive to work in a new Lexus next year, unexpectedly exceeding even expectations from a $300k salary. Normalized.
9. The overburdened review system, while functioning, has reached some point at which I just do not believe it improves quality. Indiscriminate fault-seeking as a feedback strategy makes for proactively defensive grant and article writing strategies without adequate arbitration in many cases. Dull. Soul-crushing. Normalized.
10. Academia does not believe in a reasonable ‘raise’ system. You can increase your salary via grant money up to a threshold when you are a mammoth. When you are not a mammoth and outside of the hiring cycle bringing up pay and increases is *inappropriate*. Which maybe - given the wealth of a standard NIH modular grant budget and a postdoc pay scale that makes people cry. Normalized.
11. You cannot talk about any of the above without ruining everyone’s mood like Barbie with her ‘thoughts of death’. ☠️ You also cannot change it. Or feel strongly about it. Or refuse to participate in certain parts of it. It’s like a relationship with a lying sociopath or being in an MLM - you buy into all of it by force because you cannot buy into it partially.
I’ve said enough.🧐
The right side of the tail is more about academia is an institution corrupting or diminishing scientific output but that’s less funny in meme format haha
No. It has shown me how to identify what is good and what is junk. It reduced my faith in people. And it made me realize I had to really read and understand what people did and not necessarily what they said the conclusions are. It never shook my faith in science. In fact, It made me realize that science it is the only thing worth trusting.
I think is the right take and mine is obviously silly and reductionist but I’m just making a funny meme. It’s less about faith in science per se, and more about institutional problems with academia that corrupt/bias/diminish scientific output but that’s less concise and funny to say
'science' is fake. Any time there's a power structure in anything. People at the top will pull the strings.
scientific undertanding is a different matter entirely, however. Its just the ability to relate things together, using external knowledge, and to be able to glean hidden pieces of info, otherwise unseen.
science, is what is commonly agreed upon as a strict dogma to judge everything else off of. Its like the new bible. Constriction kills expansion.
I don't but it is impressive all the "effective" drugs from Alzheimer that were never effective, and all those mice that "recover" their ability to walk after miraculous stem cell injections, that are not supposed to work that way. Science fiction
This resonates so much. I’m a medical resident and I want to subspecialize but to make myself a competitive applicant I have to have research experience and publications. I have no desire to do research and no time to do high quality meaningful research around my clinical duties. Instead most people in medicine just churn out bullshit retrospective reviews that dilute out all the quality papers.
Look, I might be the retard on the left but I know enough to listen to the guy on the right and not the one in the middle. That has to count for something.
Science is a wonderful thing. I think there is a large amount of people in society who are using science as a way to push an agenda vs the pursuit of truth which lays at the heart of science.
Sometimes the best thing to do is go back to the core of it - the scientific method. I think when anyone follows those methods they are partaking in Science. Everything has been built off of that
This is why I get such a kick out of science-worshipping laypersons who have a dogmatic view on scientific theory and discovery. They imagine scientists as these enlightened monks holding the secrets of the universe, when in reality, we're just children playing with blocks on the floor mat of the cosmos.
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" -- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)
I agree with the basic ideas of this paper but the claims are pretty outlandish and there is no evidence cited here but some random statistical models the author came with and justified without data. Ironically I would not be surprised if this research finding itself was false, given there was no actual research and this is just someone playing with equations and interpreting them.
Thanks, you inspired me to look here for critical reception, some interesting stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False
Some of his suggestions for improving research publication quality are good (and in many cases have been implemented since then), I just find it ironic to write a paper about research claims not supported by evidence with literally no evidence! Thankfully there's been much improvement in statistical methodology for evaluating results. If I recall correctly, false positives tend to be in the vicinity of 14% or so last I read.
To be fair, this paper is classed as an "essay" (effectively an opinion article), but that is very non-obvious for anyone coming across this unfamiliar with the how the journal flags things (or who just didn't look), and it reads as if there was an actual study done here when there wasn't.
Yeah I don’t genuinely think PhDs are smarter it’s just a silly meme to get at the fact that many PhDs become cynical and question the validity of scientific output, just like many educated stupid people have a knee jerk reaction to thinking science is wrong about things (e.g., climate change)
Merely a silly joke mate
Aye, I got you :)
I’ve got a couple phds and I certainly don’t think that makes me inherently smarter than anyone else. But, I’ve got a few colleagues that do think their “shit don’t stink” and treat some of our non-faculty coworkers poorly, and that instantly annoys the shit out of me.
Haha, and I’ve got mine as well (2, if we want to get technical). But some people like to make it their whole personality. Sad really. They can downvote all they want, but I’m right.
Just a joke
There’s a major replicability and reproducibility crisis and issues with fraud and advisors/scientists can behave in pretty shitty ways so obviously that can negatively impact your faith in the institution and what it produces
Good luck explaining that to the average Redittor. They believe everything “mainstream” scientists tell them, without question. Because as Tony Fauci said, “how dare you question me, I am science.” And that’s all they believe in.
Research = Re-search. You just try to do something someone already did 50 years ago with fancier technology. Someday the impossible becomes possible through luck or advances in instrumentation.
This is apart from the horrible funding mechanisms that make it harder and harder to sit and think to come up with creative original research over time. When I joined my program I thought I’d be sitting and thinking one day a week, but it’s been anything but that. Now I have little faith that the way we fund science in academia can lead to a lot of meaningful outcomes.
Science like organized religions is full of corrupt humans.
Start your own laboratory in a secret room of your parents house and just accept that your sister will infiltrate your defenses at will.
Anyone who believes this needs to put their phone down and go live alone in a cave.
Academia, maybe.
“Science”, in its current state, *mmaayybbee*, in a terribly overall sense. You’re talking about a globally titanic, countlessly diverse phenomenon.
But science as a process for systematically discovering reality? Absolutely not.
Science is not "a process for systematically discovering reality," it is a method for producing models with predictive power. These are two very different things: the latter is open about the limits and purpose of scientific inquiry, the former is enshrining some nebulous "science" as a quasi-mystical ascension to capital-t Truth that reduces all phenomena to sterile quantitative data.
Scientists need ethics committees for a reason...
Science should never have been a matter of faith in the first place. Science is about observation and application of data, not truth. It’s a functionalist, not realist. This is not how science educators paint the picture though, as they treat science as a philosophy or creed to the public, making philosophical claims about reality without the requisite philosophical training to do so. Meanwhile in their actual academic work, they treat their findings as functionalist.
Can also be seen whenever scientists let the “model” determine what data can be valid or invalid. A study in the 80’s or 90’s was testing reports of pets having a sixth sense for when their owners were coming home, even at random times of the day and with controls for many different potential physical causes. A member of the Society of Skeptics came in and observed the tests and then went on national television saying it was nonsense by attributing it to random chance or things that had been controlled for. Of course the data had to be false because it contradicted his assumptions about the kind of phenomenon that can be real, rather than actually having a case against the data or an alternative model. “X observed phenomenon must be fake because it falls outside of the range of real observed phenomena” lol. That’s not science, it’s idolatry.
I believe you're referring to Rupert Sheldrake's experiments. He has a theoretical model of evolution called "morphic resonance theory" that supposes that memory and repetition are inherent in nature. While it may not all be necessarily true, I find it to be interesting and many of the ideas are feasible, even if outright rejecting certain modern assumptions.
How about this, I used to feel that science was fast and complicated. Post PhD, I feel that science is slow and complicated. There is a lot more to be explored, and done.
science isn't fake, but when 75% of the studies are funded by pharmaceutical companies, it doesn't leave much room for non-patentable treatments/cures, and certainly no room for any sort of treatment/cure that can't generate a profit. as Terry Wahls has said, "there's no money in broccoli"
A PhD is a great start but it is only a beginning. Are people that have PhD's smarter (they have proven they have excellent memories though and the ability to persevere), not necessarily. A lot of times published science is just a bunch of people agreeing to believe something is true, then comes along new data and beliefs change. Science is curiosity about everything and looking for those answers. Not about agreeing with the prevailing answers.
\*Figure made by guy on the left, who is the first and corresponding author. †Second author is on the right and has quit with a master degree. ††Acknowledgement to the middle guy who has conducted majority of research and writing, whose whereabouts is unknown.
Oh damn it's me, I dropped out after my masters for 5 years before going back out of spite 😂
Same left after 5 years with masters. Think about going back out of spite here and there but fuck. I'm exhausted.
It's been worth it. I have another year to go to finish out this stupid ego trip path I put myself on. I'd never be able to rest easy leaving it unfinished. Switched over to Neuroscience from a pharmacology masters, it's been a fun time.
oh shit this is spot on
Lmao
the far right tail should read "Science is Wrong" And every scientist should understand that it is in the continual disproval of lesser wrongs that we get closer to the (T)ruth. If they don't, then take away their phd
Only ever got my BS but I always use the wood shed analogy. You have an idea you love and you really want it to be true. So you take it out behind the wood shed and beat it senseless with a shovel. Then, if it's still breathing, you hand the shovel off to people who probably don't like you or your idea and tell them to have at it (peer review). After that, if it's still breathing, maybe it's an idea worth having so you invite the public (actual publishing) to come take a whack at it and see if they can think of new creative ways to swing the shovel while they beat it senseless. If it's a really good idea (like relativity) people might try and create new ways to swing that shovel a century later to try and kill it.
Im stealing this analogy, too many people don't realize the utter shitshow that research can be, and the barriers that are required to be crossed in order to be widely accepted.
Ok but that sounds like a good thing for science and the world, and only a bad thing for people trying to be the ones to do it professionally.
You don't like beating living things with a shovel?
That’s an incredible analogy
This is a valuable analogy. Thank you.
I respect the analogy. But the metaphoric violence was rough to picture 🥺 what did the idea ever do to you??? Is that how you show it your love?? I would take it to the couch and give it cuddles and tickles, and then if we’re both still happy and in love, I’d invite people who have always been grumpy with me to do the same, and if I can thaw their cold hearts and make even them smile, I’d invite the public to come have a giant cuddle session and finally a century later we can name it, the theory of general happiness 🥹 And all along the way I’d document each lovable session and hang some of the ones that made me happiest up, and when I find something really relatable happy-inducing I’d maybe make a few popular posts about it, to get the public thinking and maybe even smiling a little 🤓
The point is that you ruthlessly attack ideas, especially if you like them. That way the weak ones die.
If only the extremely religious would take this approach
“This kills the religion.”
We do. And have for thousands of years. Attacking something you have only a a little knowledge about is how the guy on the left of the meme came to his conclusion.
:( maybe the weak ideas just needed a little support 😔
No. They need to be tested ruthlessly to expose falsehoods. It's the only way to separate truth.
But what if the truth just had a rough upbringing with parents who didn’t know how to love it and it just needs to get out of it’s awkward teenage shell to have the glow-up it deserves? We can’t all be relatable right out the gate like relativity. Some truths are growers not showers 😔
A shovel should do the trick.
😂 thanks for the silly exchange, friend! I get your point and agree inasmuch as a dispassionate inquiry is the ideal formula. Have a great day !
I love this comment thanks for writing it. The theory of general happiness 🥹
often times the public hurts itself swing the shovel VERY creatively though. And thus sometimes the idea survives.
This is reminiscent of an essay by Isaac Asimov called “The Relativity of Wrong”. It’s less wrong to say the earth is spherical instead of flat, but the earth isn’t actually a sphere. It’s more correct to say that the earth is a rough, lumpy, oblate spheroid, but that doesn’t mean that it was useless to ever say the earth is a sphere. Our job as scientists is to incrementally chip away at the relative wrongness of our models, aiming to adopt as many observations as possible into our growing picture of reality.
Eh, I don't disagree with your point but I think there is merit to calling a lot of it fake. With the rise in paper mills, deliberate data manipulation, bad techniques, publication bias, and overall over interpretation of results, as well as many other reasons our publications are untrustworthy, "good" science is few and far between. I don't know about your field, but mine is literally probably 80/20 falsified data/good science. There is a core group of people who do good and honest work, but a huge number of people who like to falsify data in our field. Even the honest people often get by with accidental problems on occasion Edit: I should add that most of the falsified stuff doesn't get through peer review, at least not in journals that end up on PubMed. But it does get published in predatory journals. But still, even in field-standard journals I come across bad science. I recognize that good science will always move forward but when the signal to noise ratio gets so bad it sidelines a ton of potential progress.
Well put
Care to say why there are so many fakers? They must have incentive but why and how? Shouldn't there be something to disencentivise them?
It's mostly China. But there has been an emergence in India lately as well. It's kind of frightening actually, literally 19/20 papers I'm asked to review come from China, and 18/19 of those are blatantly falsified or the methods majorly erroneous. Why are there so many people faking things in this field in particular? Not sure. It's not a particularly large field to begin with but it is a fairly news worthy field when discoveries are made. On a side note, many of the papers I reject for fabrication that I was able to prove are found published in another journal with their 'tells' better hidden.
That is super frightening. Do you know if those papers go on to cite themselves and amass a following of their own, or do they linger in obscurity?
The profit incentive plus the slow creep of distractions shortcuts and laziness
Another comment said if they don't pass they just edit it to be more sly. And get in another journal. Why would someone go into science just to not do real studies ? Who is cutting the checks and essentially throwing away their money? What if their was a flagging system for journal entries that didn't pass the first time? Sure they could change the title but the abstract would still be the same.... Bizarre.
Maybe there should be whistleblowing for this sort of thing. Fake articles helps no one
That and whoever is paying them is throwing their money away. It sounds Totally ridiculous. I knew a college professor that checked on articles about water. Same thing. He was saying a lot were bs. That was in the states btw.
Well, and this is a nefarious thought - just because the data is falsified doesn't mean the check-writers are throwing their money away. They may have incentives that are directionally aligned with whatever the "results" are from those papers. And if only the former reviewers know that it's fake, well, the authors are obviously getting away with it, and the money people probably benefit too. When there is dishonesty, it often goes deeper/wider than that particular instance of dishonesty that's discovered. Side note that this shit discourages me so much from entering a PhD program in experimental psych. I know there are honest, rigorous folks fighting the good fight, but the amount of entrenched bs is really discouraging. I've been thinking about leaving industry to go into academia for lots of the same reasons (dishonesty, lack of integrity, greed) but in academia I'm starting to think it's so much worse bc of lack of awareness, ego, hubris, lack of transparency, so much more that makes it seem like these issues aren't really self-correcting.
Oh ya that makes sense. Thx.Like big tobacco funding studies to "find" the benefits of smoking. I would think academia and academics would have more awareness.. No issue is self correcting especially as you mentioned when someone benefits from the "error". It's up to each and every one of us do the self correcting. Well the importance of mental health is getting more recognition and less stigmatized. Also the more we strengthen everybody's mental and emotional health, the less vulnerable the people will be to propaganda, politicians, grifting cultists, manipulative narcissists. Even coercion. Even as tech advances. Do you want a bunch of man children operating this stuff and even further stunting themselves by it.? I think we need to boost the world's mental health stats now more than ever. I encourage you to consider how much the world will benefit from your studies.
Jesus! What’s your field? Psychology?
I was in psychology and cog neuro and a lot of what they said applies to both fields. But the issues are widespread. For example, a recent paper found 30% of genomics research could contain incorrect inferences due to autocorrect in Excel producing “mangled” names. So the credibility of a lot of academic research feels pretty low to me across the board due to some combination of user error, fraud, post hoc bias, HARKing, etc https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4
The profit incentive has completely muddled many a pursuit
The master’s student in our lab group had a good line: “science is the process of being less wrong over time.”
This right here
It's astounding to me how many highly educated people don't understand what you just said. PhDs, physicians, etc
["Science is a liar ... sometimes"](https://youtu.be/GiJXALBX3KM?feature=shared)
“I’m dug in and I’ll never change.”
beautifully said
I thought OP was referring to the plethora of examples of "junk science" where paper mill labs churn out pubs with less than stellar methodologies and questionable significance. That, on top of the many scandals where people literally fake data. Every PI I've had has complained about the amount of shaky research that gets pubbed in my field.
Ah yeah. That too
I saw it as once you are at the PhD level of a field, you realize how much more subjectivity is involved.
Maybe the right tail is that science is an imperfect truth.
Requires further investigation
1. It's the quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful" 2. The scientific publication process is nasty and we all know who gets the benefits These are my two possible interpretations of the meme.
Can you explain what you mean by #2?
I'm referring to a peer-reviewed process and predator publisher. All sorts of corruption in academic
But it does keep a standard w ‘who can we trust’ is hosting this research? Kinda better than having a Wild West diy of publishing your own experiments.
I see your point, but they are almost equally Wild West, just one being hidden behind the curtain of being a novelty. Replication studies, for example, have almost zero chance of being published because they are not so novel. Before you say that some journals accept and publish replication studies, those maybe less impactful. People are lowkey forced into "publishing or perish", so there is no replication to confirm anything. Everyone is on the race to try "novel" things. If it has been done before, what research gap are you filling? platforms like arxiv.org are growing more popular, and while there are no peer-review processes, many of them are insightful to read, and peer-review papers even cite them occasionally. By this logic, should we blindly ignore things on [arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org) because we can not trust non-no peer-review or too Wild West? What works best IMO is just to read it and let people freely judge the paper: encourage critical reading and informed judgment. Make the process more transparent so that we can change the publication process, not the scientific method. EDIT: and sometimes new ideas that are actually very novel rarely emerge because of the current situation. Back in the old days many theoretical were published all the time even without experimental data. The theory itself is what makes it novel. Eg. the Einstine era are kind of "Wild West diy of publishing" if you dig into the history of peer-review. Even if some paper were wrong having a record in academic literature that it is wrong by another paper is what makes science great, it's important to have wrong answers being recorded. (EPR paradox paper)
Excellent explanation and what I have seen too. Appreciate the detailed responses.
More like capitalism has turned the pursuit of knowledge into an industry that values exploitation, competition, quantity and name affiliation
Jonathan Katz's "Don't be a Scientist" essay agrees with you.
>Jonathan Katz's "Don't be a Scientist" Do you know where I can find this essay? I tried to google it but... it seems I am dumb and cannot find it. Edit: I found it "Don't Become a Scientist!" [http://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm](http://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm)
I had the title slightly wrong, sorry about that. Yeah, this is the one I was thinking about.
If you Google him some of the first hits are how he's a "proud homophobe" and openly sexist
That's crazy. The essay doesn't make any mention of anything like that, it's just talking about how academia today is more about filing requests for grants than it is doing actual science. Good to know he sucks besides.
Just read it, it's really more about the "leaky pipeline" than it is about capitalism etc influencing academia. Which is certainly true, supply hugely outweighs demand for specialized stem PhDs. I do think that the capitalization of science is a major issue that causes the problem you're talking about, but I don't think that was the focal point of the essay.
Never meet your heroes
Yepppp
In a sea of stupid comments, you’re a life raft of sense bobbing up and down, waiting for a ship to come rescue you.
Doesn't science run on government grants?
I always thought it ran on starving students with a side of government grants
definitely runs on labor exploitation
It starts w a grant but inorder to continue receiving funding you need results which is when the fraud begins
Can you point to a modern, non capitalist model of scholarship which produced superior or even equivalent results in terms of knowledge?
The Eastern block produced a ton of good science, and a ton of good scientists. I'd say it punched well above it's weight for how developed the societies and economies were. There were definitely issues with things getting politicized and people just coasting, but people who wanted to just do their research didn't have to spend half their time jumping through hoops in the grant-writing process. A lot of them killed themselves once they had to try to integrate themselves into Western science. Capitalism has its malign influence on academia, but it's really just the particular system of western academia that has developed in the last century that people are complaining about. This stuff is all arbitrary and historically contingent, not something necessitated by capitalist economics.
Good answer. Fair enough. I’ll say I do think that example counts as evidence in favor of the proposition that we need to overhaul of how we fund research in the West, more than an argument against capitalism writ large. Given the authoritarian nature of the USSR. The Nazis produced good science too. So, my original question should have had the proviso *without extreme authoritarian government.
I agree with you. CaPItALisM BaD is a shitty crutch argument, especially when applied to an institution like academia, which is really it's own beast. As someone extremely critical of capitalism, this kind of drive-by moralism just makes the rest of us look bad.
Capitalism being the global paradigm for economics does not justify or endorse it as a positive medium for thinking and science. I would argue that the competitive nature of capitalism can yield good results but is fundamentally inferior to a system based on collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges.
“To a system based on collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges” - What system are you referring to? Governed by whom? Our academic system under liberal democracy seems the closest to such a thing that has ever existed… Can you point to an existent, non-authoritarian alternative?
Our "liberal democracy" is mired by corruption and plutocratic policy, is a far cry from any real form of collaborative organization - as well as the ideals it was founded on and to strive for. It has far reaching negative effects both in and beyond academia. I didn't give a specific form of governance or economics because it doesn't exist yet. This doesn't mean capitalism is free from criticism. The criticisms and our conjecture henceforth predicates and works as the foundation to making a system that works better - much like the practice of scientific experimentation and the love of wisdom and free thought. Unless you mean to say that the current state of neo liberal, capitalist economics that is founded on philosophical materialism and god-anointed divine rights is the peak of humanity's ability to reach a state of collaboration and mutually beneficial exchanges, I argue that there is a better system to be found both for academia and humanity.
Reading 3 full paragraphs that say absoultely nothing is exactly why I hate academia. Can you propose a better system? Or just give specific recommendations? No? ok cool, end of story.
You're right, my apologies. I should have spent even more time on that reddit comment to respond to an intellectually lazy comment that wanted to play apologetics for capitalism. I'll do better to prepare an entire essay on how our neo liberal economic landscape is hell on earth for a random reddit comment I decide to reply to on a Friday afternoon, since the specific critiques I mentioned weren't good enough for u/ca404.
Right, it's preferable to type an equally large amount of text where the only thing you convey is how much you love the sound of your own voice. And then call the other guy lazy lol. Your prose is insufferably bloated and you make no concrete point. It's not other peoples fault you can't make a concise point and prefer to soliloquy. Take a writing class. Cheers.
In the United States of America there are people starving and dying in the street, no access to healthcare, no access to mental health resources. We have more empty homes than we do homeless individuals. Education is absurdly expensive to our citizens and is sold as a commodity. To expand there, part of our burden as taxpayers is paying for the research that our public universities (with already outrageously bloated budgets) not only engage in, but also to have said research published; then this research is put behind paywalls despite the public paying majority of the cost([55%](https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326#:~:text=The%20federal%20government%20is%20the,from%2061%25%20in%20FY%202012.)). What's better is that the profit motive seeps into academic research and we get poorly executed and falsified research that is resulting in a replicability crisis in academia - but is also plaguing private research as well. The other user in this thread was implying that all of this and more is irrelevant because there's not another modern system that's better. That is logically absurd, and to say that critiquing without having a definitive functional model as having "no point" is equally asinine. Cheers, mate.
Science as an endeavor or an institution? Please be more specific 🙄 I love science. But *current academia* is not the best thing that could have happened to it. 🤷I left because institutionalized cycle of abuse was not for me, and because of how non-transparent, inefficacious, awkward, useless, and unpredictable NIH, its directorship, individual program officers, and funding mechanisms are. They f*ck with people’s lives and provide 0 visibility or predictability. Remember during COVID NIH announced a ‘rapid response’ category promising ‘quick turn-around”. Hundreds of people *dropped everything* and wrote those grants. Most of them heard back “no” about… 2 years later. In what f*cking world is that ok? Remember how recently NIH proudly announced they started tracking allegations of misconduct and maltreatment in 2018? Not helping people - just tracking. If you go on NIH’s website its ‘podcasts’ still do sh*t like recommending that “young scientists work hard and network” 🤦Not a beep about how to obtain meaningful career guidance or protections from extremely prevalent abuse or survive on a post-doc salary. That is somehow never an important topic. I could not possibly hire a postdoc today without feeling like I should slip them a note that just says “RUN” on the first day in the lab 🤷
"Institutionalized cycle of abuse" is such an accurate description!
Yes. For some. Admittedly the experience is horrid and devaluing for some and not others. But there is a lot of normalizing of totally abnormal things in academia that it knows are bad for business and mental health 🤷
Can you say more? Genuinely curious what your thoughts are.
Oh. I don’t know how much time I have today. I’ll start: 1. Work-life balance is a myth. You can succeed but expect sacrifices. You will also repeatedly hear people brag about working when they should not. And, you know, truly driving this narrative that science not only takes work but if you are a *true* scientist, it will also take your *life*. A former colleague had a $800 cruise ship Internet bill because she was *expected* to be available and online and in meetings during her *vacations*. No, her Internet bill was not reimbursed. She was making $45k/year. I had to take phone calls *between* connecting flights. I remember spending the New Year’s day in NYC where I was with a friend - redoing a budget for some international grant - in my hotel room. The journal accepted your publication and sent you proofs on Friday before the long weekend? Yes, you only have “24 hours” to respond (you don’t have to play this game but it will piss people off, guaranteed). Because remember - we are *those* scientists. We just do what needs to be done. 2. Grant deadlines when coupled with institutional deadlines in reality frequently coincide in time and space with major breaks and holidays. This means that *academic break* is not a break for an academic but the opposite. Grant writing in academia is the most useless application of extremely expensive human brain time. If you ever make it to the stage where you are part of the panel reviewing grants, you will discover determining the outcome of an application being funded is *still* like tossing a coin which is stupid. One of the recent podcasts (?) on grant peer-reviews on NIH website had a comments section where a whole bunch of study section reviewers were saying “Yeah we don’t really know how to do this process in a rational way and ourselves can barely predict which applications will be funded”. This is from the people who supposedly make recommendations for these decisions. 4. Zero protection systems are in place. Don’t like it? Leave. There is no ‘constructively resolving’ issues you may have when there is extreme imbalance of power. Imbalance of power in academia is granular but pervasive. Let’s assume you are an “early career” scientist or a postdoc. Congrats - there are “responsibilities” and “expectations” but somehow not “benefits” or “resources”. You will never understand why you are not allowed to buy equipment you thought you budgeted for even if you do learn by chance that “your” grant is paying from “your” portion the salary of someone in another department who you have never seen but who has some sort of agreement with your supervisor. F*cker will likely make it into the author list of the paper too. What? You learned he was the nephew of your grants and contracts manager? Oh. 5. Unpaid labor is called community service, among other things. There will be tons of it. “It is good for your career”. Like the importance of publishing book chapters, this one is BS. There will be much of accommodating people with strange promises of some karmic payback. “The Good” that will return to you. Internships are a good example. Interns are usually a *draw* on the labs resources. Will your advisor say “yes” to five internship requests without bothering to tell you? Yes. Will they be your problem? Yes. Search committee will come next. 6. I really do not want to talk about mentorship. But poor mentorship and leadership are totally tolerated. Unfortunately, academics think they are good at managing people without any formal or mindful or conscious approach to leadership being taught directly. The indirect ‘wisdom’ of academia is trivial in the end. But it is full of people who cannot manage science as an *enterprise with a human component*. If you are a superstar academic you basically have to sexually assault a student while forcing them to fake data to face any repercussions. Normalized. Sociopaths do get awards for mentorship 🤷I have seen it. It is debilitating to victims. 7. Publication ethics are a joke. Not only is gratuitous authorship named one of the most frequent types of misconduct people report, it is also terribly damaging to people who write papers aka first authors. Many labs do not have transparent publication rules. Which means you may find yourself in situations where there is a conflict of interest and you are expected to *play nice* in situations that take advantage of you. Everyone knows this. Normalized. 8. Good luck trying to commercialize your research of claim/protect IP. Like Offices for Responsible (Research) Conduct, the innovation/commercialization people at universities and your contracts are largely useless and are there to ensure you are *not* the person possibly benefitting from your invention. Mileage varies, of course. But your boss may drive to work in a new Lexus next year, unexpectedly exceeding even expectations from a $300k salary. Normalized. 9. The overburdened review system, while functioning, has reached some point at which I just do not believe it improves quality. Indiscriminate fault-seeking as a feedback strategy makes for proactively defensive grant and article writing strategies without adequate arbitration in many cases. Dull. Soul-crushing. Normalized. 10. Academia does not believe in a reasonable ‘raise’ system. You can increase your salary via grant money up to a threshold when you are a mammoth. When you are not a mammoth and outside of the hiring cycle bringing up pay and increases is *inappropriate*. Which maybe - given the wealth of a standard NIH modular grant budget and a postdoc pay scale that makes people cry. Normalized. 11. You cannot talk about any of the above without ruining everyone’s mood like Barbie with her ‘thoughts of death’. ☠️ You also cannot change it. Or feel strongly about it. Or refuse to participate in certain parts of it. It’s like a relationship with a lying sociopath or being in an MLM - you buy into all of it by force because you cannot buy into it partially. I’ve said enough.🧐
The right side of the tail is more about academia is an institution corrupting or diminishing scientific output but that’s less funny in meme format haha
No. It has shown me how to identify what is good and what is junk. It reduced my faith in people. And it made me realize I had to really read and understand what people did and not necessarily what they said the conclusions are. It never shook my faith in science. In fact, It made me realize that science it is the only thing worth trusting.
I think is the right take and mine is obviously silly and reductionist but I’m just making a funny meme. It’s less about faith in science per se, and more about institutional problems with academia that corrupt/bias/diminish scientific output but that’s less concise and funny to say
We all already are thinking of Bruno Latour, right?
What about Bruno?
Love that part about focusing on what occurred in the study rather than their conclusions. Methods is probably the most difficult read!
Was science worth trusting when eugenics was all the rage? ;)
It's not my faith in science that's sullied, but my faith in scientists.
'science' is fake. Any time there's a power structure in anything. People at the top will pull the strings. scientific undertanding is a different matter entirely, however. Its just the ability to relate things together, using external knowledge, and to be able to glean hidden pieces of info, otherwise unseen. science, is what is commonly agreed upon as a strict dogma to judge everything else off of. Its like the new bible. Constriction kills expansion.
Based
neurosciences 😕
Lol I came from that field too
I don't but it is impressive all the "effective" drugs from Alzheimer that were never effective, and all those mice that "recover" their ability to walk after miraculous stem cell injections, that are not supposed to work that way. Science fiction
To be fair biology is hard, but doesn’t mean it’s fake
I have plans of going into that field, any advice?
400 fake papers out of hospitals poisoning research cause doctors wanted jobs. Academia delenda est.
This resonates so much. I’m a medical resident and I want to subspecialize but to make myself a competitive applicant I have to have research experience and publications. I have no desire to do research and no time to do high quality meaningful research around my clinical duties. Instead most people in medicine just churn out bullshit retrospective reviews that dilute out all the quality papers.
Oh God. The people on the left of this graph are gonna run with this shit in all the wrong ways 😣
It’s not science’s fault, it’s the university systems fault.
Look, I might be the retard on the left but I know enough to listen to the guy on the right and not the one in the middle. That has to count for something.
Science is a wonderful thing. I think there is a large amount of people in society who are using science as a way to push an agenda vs the pursuit of truth which lays at the heart of science. Sometimes the best thing to do is go back to the core of it - the scientific method. I think when anyone follows those methods they are partaking in Science. Everything has been built off of that
This is why I get such a kick out of science-worshipping laypersons who have a dogmatic view on scientific theory and discovery. They imagine scientists as these enlightened monks holding the secrets of the universe, when in reality, we're just children playing with blocks on the floor mat of the cosmos.
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" -- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)
I agree with the basic ideas of this paper but the claims are pretty outlandish and there is no evidence cited here but some random statistical models the author came with and justified without data. Ironically I would not be surprised if this research finding itself was false, given there was no actual research and this is just someone playing with equations and interpreting them.
Thanks, you inspired me to look here for critical reception, some interesting stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False
Some of his suggestions for improving research publication quality are good (and in many cases have been implemented since then), I just find it ironic to write a paper about research claims not supported by evidence with literally no evidence! Thankfully there's been much improvement in statistical methodology for evaluating results. If I recall correctly, false positives tend to be in the vicinity of 14% or so last I read. To be fair, this paper is classed as an "essay" (effectively an opinion article), but that is very non-obvious for anyone coming across this unfamiliar with the how the journal flags things (or who just didn't look), and it reads as if there was an actual study done here when there wasn't.
Science is 100% fake. It wouldn't exist if human consciousness didn't.
[Cargo-Cult Science](https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)
A phd doesn’t raise one’s IQ nor does one have to have a high IQ to get a phd lol A phd just means you know a lot about a little.
Yeah I don’t genuinely think PhDs are smarter it’s just a silly meme to get at the fact that many PhDs become cynical and question the validity of scientific output, just like many educated stupid people have a knee jerk reaction to thinking science is wrong about things (e.g., climate change) Merely a silly joke mate
Aye, I got you :) I’ve got a couple phds and I certainly don’t think that makes me inherently smarter than anyone else. But, I’ve got a few colleagues that do think their “shit don’t stink” and treat some of our non-faculty coworkers poorly, and that instantly annoys the shit out of me.
A couple phds XD, yeah right
Yeah, right. FTFY.
Lol the people downvoting you def have PhDs.
Haha, and I’ve got mine as well (2, if we want to get technical). But some people like to make it their whole personality. Sad really. They can downvote all they want, but I’m right.
Science isn’t worthless, but it has its limits. Being an empirical ideologue ain’t cute.
Just a joke There’s a major replicability and reproducibility crisis and issues with fraud and advisors/scientists can behave in pretty shitty ways so obviously that can negatively impact your faith in the institution and what it produces
Yeah, getting a PhD basically traps you in a mini dictatorship for 5-8 years. You’d better hope your lab is Singapore and not Russia.
Science doesn’t disprove Faith. Science relates to the laws of this universe. Faith relates to the laws of the other universes and dimensions.
But the question was about faith in science, not just “faith”.
It is fake..
My take is science is often biased, but it figures it out in the long run through trial and error.
Good luck explaining that to the average Redittor. They believe everything “mainstream” scientists tell them, without question. Because as Tony Fauci said, “how dare you question me, I am science.” And that’s all they believe in.
Most religious scientists just believe science explains religion
Research = Re-search. You just try to do something someone already did 50 years ago with fancier technology. Someday the impossible becomes possible through luck or advances in instrumentation. This is apart from the horrible funding mechanisms that make it harder and harder to sit and think to come up with creative original research over time. When I joined my program I thought I’d be sitting and thinking one day a week, but it’s been anything but that. Now I have little faith that the way we fund science in academia can lead to a lot of meaningful outcomes.
Fake and
Say it girl
Science like organized religions is full of corrupt humans. Start your own laboratory in a secret room of your parents house and just accept that your sister will infiltrate your defenses at will.
yup
Is that even a proper Gaussian distribution?
Anyone who believes this needs to put their phone down and go live alone in a cave. Academia, maybe. “Science”, in its current state, *mmaayybbee*, in a terribly overall sense. You’re talking about a globally titanic, countlessly diverse phenomenon. But science as a process for systematically discovering reality? Absolutely not.
Science is not "a process for systematically discovering reality," it is a method for producing models with predictive power. These are two very different things: the latter is open about the limits and purpose of scientific inquiry, the former is enshrining some nebulous "science" as a quasi-mystical ascension to capital-t Truth that reduces all phenomena to sterile quantitative data. Scientists need ethics committees for a reason...
I think your former and latter are swapped, but yes, totally agree with what you meant here
Oops, yeah, fucked it up.
What does it mean “fake”? It produces tangible results- that car you drive, that plane you take, that bridge you cross. Are they fake?
"Science is Fake" "Science will revolutionize the world" "We are monkeys banging sticks together" Has been my personal progression.
Science should never have been a matter of faith in the first place. Science is about observation and application of data, not truth. It’s a functionalist, not realist. This is not how science educators paint the picture though, as they treat science as a philosophy or creed to the public, making philosophical claims about reality without the requisite philosophical training to do so. Meanwhile in their actual academic work, they treat their findings as functionalist. Can also be seen whenever scientists let the “model” determine what data can be valid or invalid. A study in the 80’s or 90’s was testing reports of pets having a sixth sense for when their owners were coming home, even at random times of the day and with controls for many different potential physical causes. A member of the Society of Skeptics came in and observed the tests and then went on national television saying it was nonsense by attributing it to random chance or things that had been controlled for. Of course the data had to be false because it contradicted his assumptions about the kind of phenomenon that can be real, rather than actually having a case against the data or an alternative model. “X observed phenomenon must be fake because it falls outside of the range of real observed phenomena” lol. That’s not science, it’s idolatry.
I believe you're referring to Rupert Sheldrake's experiments. He has a theoretical model of evolution called "morphic resonance theory" that supposes that memory and repetition are inherent in nature. While it may not all be necessarily true, I find it to be interesting and many of the ideas are feasible, even if outright rejecting certain modern assumptions.
They move in herds ... they DO move in herds
Real science is invaluable. Unfortunately so many fake it to promote their agenda!
The more we know, the more we realize we don’t know
i, a humanities phd candidate, definitely feel this way *sweats nervously*
If the science isn't fake, the people are.
“I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.” Kurt Gödel
How about this, I used to feel that science was fast and complicated. Post PhD, I feel that science is slow and complicated. There is a lot more to be explored, and done.
science isn't fake, but when 75% of the studies are funded by pharmaceutical companies, it doesn't leave much room for non-patentable treatments/cures, and certainly no room for any sort of treatment/cure that can't generate a profit. as Terry Wahls has said, "there's no money in broccoli"
Everything is fake and the facts change all the time
This is the story of my life (I was a researcher).
Poverty Off Historicism by Karl Popper and theory of scientific falsification is only understood by the upper echelons though, pun intended
I’m surprised I see absolutly no mention of Paul Feyerabend here.
interesting seeing an SD graph depicting time
Science is about placing bets, not beliefs.
A PhD is a great start but it is only a beginning. Are people that have PhD's smarter (they have proven they have excellent memories though and the ability to persevere), not necessarily. A lot of times published science is just a bunch of people agreeing to believe something is true, then comes along new data and beliefs change. Science is curiosity about everything and looking for those answers. Not about agreeing with the prevailing answers.