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by kd1220
5311 days ago
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I experienced this mindset in my graduate studies. Many graduate advisors spend so much time writing grant proposals and hobnobbing with government project managers that they didn't care what result their experiments got, as long as it was positive. I lost interest in being a researcher primarily because it's no different than working at a company - except you get paid less. I never saw any researchers or students falsify or make up data, but often I saw experiments performed without defining a hypothesis first. The hypothesis was created a posteriori to match any interesting correlations that could be combed from the data. I felt like I was a marketer trying to find a reason to promote a product. This particular approach might be standard when dealing with in-vivo experiments (on human subjects). It's a time-intensive process and you can't just rerun the experiment like you can on an artificial system. However, I didn't feel like it was the correct way to do research. There's been renewed interest in recent years of creating a journal of failed experiments for various research areas, but it never seems to catch on. It would be invaluable, but there are too many egotistical people in academia who don't want to be associated with failure in any way. |
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