[SwedishExpat]

My wife is an academic and is repeatedly raising the issue of the replication crisis in medical fields too. This is an issue across all of academia and isn't just an issue with flawed statistics but pressures to publish, a lack of replication in the peer review process, a lack of replication by subsequent work building on that original research, using more tools like Machine Learning, etc...

Metascience is a growing field at many top universities because of this issue and the belief that modern science may be very flawed right now.

[stillwithit]

Lectures are cheaper than actual education.

So we ram language constructs into people’s brains, which we started doing centuries ago to preserve knowledge.

Yet it comes with none of the warnings by the long dead mathematicians who initially built out statistical tooling[1]. Statistical tools are intentionally crude to help communicate the complexity of stats and yet we build society on crude leaky abstraction. Not out the obvious day to day right in front of our faces.

Modern science isn’t flawed. Society is. Boomers and GenX are proper gold star for nothings who lucked into living in the only country that could manufacture anything after WW2. They dismantled the New Deal that propped them up and made us their serfs.

They didn’t fight the war or build the economy. They have no muscle memory for doing anything “real”. They went to college (much less rigorous in the 50-70s), memorized the cliff notes and recited the catechisms. Neither generation struggled materially as any generation before them (yes yes distributions, ranges, gradients of truth; relative to material conditions before 1950s).

New generation comes along with no awareness of that time and doesn’t feel much obligation to status quo. GenX and Boomers are big mad about it, never mind they walked away from religious life. This time the future will stick to our script.

Society wants less to do with their hyper industrialized life due to war time manufacturing habits they had rammed down their throats by a much more imperialist society of decades gone.

We keep letting people who cheered on conquest of other countries to stay ahead of them keep running things. Everyone is too apathetic to tell grandpa it’s time for hospice. We let elders implicitly engage in ageism against youth.

Everyone is acting shocked the old warlords are looking for idiot soldiers to serve their fiefdoms? All they knew for their formative years was war time …hustle. Embedded deep.

Stop with the meta bullshit. Day to day life is just this. The abstract mental models are not helping. They’re distractions apathetic people escape into to avoid reality. Boomers down to apathetic centrists who love their material privilege despite the environmental toll… this culture is a joke

[1] Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty https://a.co/d/agWe8LT

[SwedishExpat]

> Modern science isn’t flawed

Yes, it is. A lot of the issues found in modern science with replicable studies comes down to the publish-or-peril approach. If you have academics on temporary postdocs having to publish X papers to get an extension, find a new postdoc, or maybe get a professorship then you're going to have issues. Add to this the lack of incentives to replicate papers under this stress and people build up on top of them rather than validating them first. Especially when the studies are expensive/time-consuming with MRI machines etc.

> Stop with the meta bullshit

The impact bad research has both financially and in society is huge. For example the issue recently with Alzheimer's where loads of work was built up on a 2006 seminal study that wasn't replicable (because of academic fraud). Finding incentives to catch bad science early is important.

I have no idea what the rest of your message is about.

[stillwithit]

We humans are soooo good at fixing systemic issues. Surely we’ll eradicate this decades old issue at great cost, plus the same old costs, and new costs; it’ll be just as tidy and a big win as your tidy little post puts it. It’s so simple it needs but a paragraph to explain, afterall. Really, no greed or other perverted incentives will creep up as the process moves on and government loses interest again.

The rest of my post was to suggest where the flawed incentives come from; educationally outdated meat suits and apathetic voting public who think they’re off the hook to society. Elder politicians enable such perverse incentives because they care about fiat currency flow, not science. Ignore it and dig into vacuous meta theory because the public is kowtowed by threats by the seniles

It’s amazing to me how many think choices today are guaranteed to matter tomorrow. You have no idea if what you say is possible given the state changes that occur constantly reshaping global society

In the end you’re peddling high minded BS

We can’t get the world to agree on climate change. Surely we’ll keep all hackneyed science from propagating, certainly we’ll keep the costs from ballooning to serve any perverse incentives that pop up as the public lacks any real command of the political system and it’s pork spending

Sure, sure. Musk will have a full colony on Mars first

[lupusreal]

Statistics?