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by silicaroach
1578 days ago
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This perfectly describes the current state of academia. The belief in treating academia like a business to promote 'efficiency' and 'accountability' leads to all the ills you see in business. The bottom line is that you should be extremely distrustful of anything aggressively promoted as 'scientific consensus'. If an idea is successful, whether correct or not, then as in business people will blindly support it to 'get a piece of the pie'. As an example, machine learning is replete with incremental, incorrect, and false papers all riding on the success of a few genuine results. The most successful academics are not the smartest or best researchers, they are those best at marketing their results. |
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I wonder whether articles like this are driven in part by the same copycat effect described above. People love to complain about their workplace. Although the article identifies real problems, it is lean on evidence for the magnitude of their impacts. Many of the citations are to other opinion pieces. It's certainly worth improving things where we can, but the sky is not falling either.
For example, the abstract leads with "If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity." Which sounds serious. But based on articles posted to Hacker News previously, 1–10% of scientists (excluding countries with direct cash payments for accepted articles) fabricate or falsify data, which is a typical percentage of bad actors in most groups. The other 90% still appear able to serve as quality control in the usual way. People can tell if an article is likely to be b.s. with about 70% accuracy based only on its description, not even reading it. I think any defects in science feel more severe than they really are because science has been so successful that our expectations are now sky-high.
I do emphatically agree that promoting altruistic and ethical norms should be a focus of scientific institutions. Major discoveries will arise from curiosity and serendipity, as they always have, they cannot be predicted in a proposal's Gantt chart.