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RE: Science Under Attack

in #science7 years ago (edited)

If one can build a machine based on scientific theories and the machine works then it is all good. If not, well, tough luck.

This. You rarely see engineers blaming reality for not cooperating with a theory and then look expectantly at their machine to see if it has started working yet.

Even though engineering is applied science, it is also the ultimate Popperian test of theories, and thus in a way the most scientific field there is, together with the fields that test hypotheses in the engineering way.

Economists of any ilk need not apply.

Another thing: research by and from universities can be bought. If the results are not to a companies liking, the report will be buried and that university will have lost a source of income. Next time, the reports will look different, and "science" will have died a little more. Science is on order these days, partly because funding isn't independent and theories don't have to work anyway; all is fine as long as the requested story makes headlines.

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I can't upvote this enough. Some people though in the past few days have a really tough time grasping reality in regards to what really goes on within academia.

Great article: Richard Feynman had similar concerns

yeap. i posted it above in another thread

Great debate that must be had. My wife is finishing up a PhD in Chemistry. Same story. The name of the game is getting published and there are some very perverse incentives at work! She needs to cite these but in alot of them there is no value : non reproducible conclusions and overall trivial level of importance.
Getting published is more about who you know really and in some institutions there is a lot of strong arming to mention the higher ups as co-authors while they barely know the contents!

What do you think about open-access ? Will it help ?
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-european-leaders-call-immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers

I think open access will transform research in ways we have yet to fathom.

I am glad i get perspectives from people that actually went through the process and see how the politics of science are getting in their way. Most people critiquing on here have not even attempted to make a grant proposal and really witness what science is all about in academia.

She is cooking up her own posts hehe will let you know when she posts them!

Verifying our understanding by building something and by predicting events are the only benchmarks I know of. If a claim does not go through that process, then it has not become a part of our solid, reliable knowledge. The claim may have a lot of usefulness, to be sure, but it has not gone through the scientific method.

Going through the scientific method is also not an either-or thing. The more a result is replicated under more and more conditions, the more certainty we can have about its validity.

So, as I see it, most of the claims of the social sciences and humanities have not gone through the scientific method and so I don't consider them a part of the reliable collection of knowledge that has been accumulated over the last few centuries. So personally I'm not that much bothered by whether some social science study has been faked or not. The study procedure was not designed to produce reliable knowledge to begin with.

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