[light_hue_1]

None of the things you listed are bad or failures of academia.

1) Yeah, lots of people missed the crisis.

2) Yes, when funding doesn't come from the government it comes from industry. And then you need to find hypotheses that are interesting for industry.

3) That's how science works! You don't know what is true or false. You need to take your shot, see if the experiment you run works out. Sometimes you can be the smartest person in the world, put in the most work, but be in an area asking a question that doesn't pan out. It happens!

There are many ways to mitigate this. For example, you can often make experiments where it doesn't matter what the answer is. It's always interesting and publishable regardless of how the statistics work out. But, there is definitely luck involved, not just skill.

> Only a true saint would accept data that actually does NOT support their hypothesis because it makes it unlikely they will get a job in a very competitive market.

Only a scientist would! That's the game we play to discover new truths. And the vast majority of scientists do this.

Pretty much every idea that I have ever had is bad! Yet, somehow, I managed to get a PhD and now graduate many of my own PhD students. The trick is to learn to fail quickly, to ask the kinds of questions that are interesting no matter what, and to develop a sense for the types of questions that are more fertile.

[pevey]

Your take on the first two points is not uncommon and just underscores why academia is broken. The research being produced today is often of zero or negative value.

Your take on the last point is not so different from mine. I think you misunderstood. The incentive to change data to avoid a finding of no significance is very great. The risks are small. Yes, good science would be to report it accurately. It almost NEVER happens. It is widespread. More so than people think. These two dishonesty researchers are just the tip. A lot of people in academia are staying silent because they don't want people looking into their own research. False data is not the exception. It is endemic.

[light_hue_1]

> Your take on the first two points is not uncommon and just underscores why academia is broken. The research being produced today is often of zero or negative value.

That's objectively false. Batteries keep getting better. Cancer survival keeps going up. Computers keep getting faster. By almost any metric you pick, research in almost every single discipline is a massive life-changing success! Not just a success, a wild success.

> Your take on the last point is not so different from mine. I think you misunderstood. The incentive to change data to avoid a finding of no significance is very great. The risks are small. Yes, good science would be to report it accurately. It almost NEVER happens.

Nonsense. I've been a scientist for two decades at multiple universities. I've collaborated with hundreds of people. Never has anyone tweaked data on anything we've ever worked with. We usually do the opposite, find that something works and work as hard as possible to trash our own work so we can't publish it. We spend more time trying to disprove our own work before publishing it than getting any positive results.

> It is widespread. More so than people think. These two dishonesty researchers are just the tip. A lot of people in academia are staying silent because they don't want people looking into their own research. False data is not the exception. It is endemic.

That's a conspiracy theory just like aliens landing on the moon and vaccines causing autism. Somehow, hundreds of thousands of people work together to stay silent and not leak. People who frankly hate each other's guts and want nothing more to do than to disprove each other's theories and show they're superior. Please, this doesn't stand up to even the most basic scrutiny or thought.

Every scientist that I know wants to do science. Wants to be remembered for contributing to our understanding of the universe hundreds of years after they die. You don't do this by lying, you do it by doing the best work you possibly can.