220 points by rntn 22 hours ago | 107 comments
85392_school 21 hours ago
drgo 6 hours ago
Voultapher 3 hours ago
And since we are talking about science reform, let's start with the much easier and cheaper preregistration [1] which helps massively with publication bias.
franktankbank 46 minutes ago
constantcrying 51 minutes ago
Incentives like these exist in basically all areas of work. Perform well and you get "job security, promotion and prestige". Yet somehow there is no decade long ongoing crisis in industry of corporations lying about their products. When these cases happens (obviously they do), corporations and individuals get punished.
How would you reform the system? More funding definitely is not the answer.
crabbone 1 hour ago
He advocated (very naively, as it appears today) for science as a human endeavor that has no reason for falsification. His justification was that scientists have nothing to lose from being proved wrong, and, as an example, he gave some University dean who published some works that were shown to be completely wrong in a course of few decades, but still retained his position in a university (because his approach was valid and he never attempted to manipulate the truth, he just made an honest error).
But, the more I think about how did we come to this, in many human activities it is often the case that whoever undertook such activities relied on their own wealth and not being incentivized to commercialize their discoveries. It was the aristocrats or monks or some other occupation that made their life affordable, and boring enough for them to look for challenge in art or science. Once science became professional, it started to be incentivized in the same way any other vocation is: make more of it--be paid more; make more immediately useful things--be paid more.
I don't know if we should return to the lords and monks system :) But I'm also doubtful that we can make good progress by pulling the levers on financial incentives of commercializing science.
jl6 20 hours ago
I would like to think that the truly important papers receive some sort of additional validation before people start to build lives and livelihoods on them, but I’ve also seen some pretty awful citation chains where an initial weak result gets overegged by downstream papers which drop mention of its limitations.
0cf8612b2e1e 18 hours ago
pedalpete 14 hours ago
I say "a form of Alzheimer's" because it is likely we are labelling a few different diseases as Alzheimer's.
superfish 16 hours ago
SoftTalker 12 hours ago
SonOfLilit 8 hours ago
jpeloquin 15 hours ago
yummypaint 4 hours ago