[chromacity]

I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).

Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.

[pjdesno]

I would point out that most products are useless, and either fail or replace other products which weren't any worse. None of which prevented me from cashing my paychecks for the first half of my career when I worked in private industry.

Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.

[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]

Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.

[rain-princess]

Hey I have also called research a marketplace for ideas before! cool.

[thayne]

There are dubious results published in every subject, including math and physics (whether theoretical or experimental). The difference is that such results are less likely to be widely cited and accepted by the field. For math and theoretical physics, the reader can (assuming sufficient knowledge and skill) verify the result themselves, so if your proof is incorrect or not rigorous enough, you won't get cited. For experimental physics, it is more common for different teams to reproduce a result, or verify a result using a different method, so papers aren't usually widely cited unless they have been independently verified. Part of that is cultural, part of that is attempting to reproduce results is relatively straightforward compared to say experiments involving human subjects, and part if is because results are usually quantitative, so "we did the same thing as paper X, but with more precision" is still interesting enough to be published.

[kmaitreys]

Great take. I have seen the discussion on this often gets turned into a hard vs soft science debate where in actuality it's just simply about money.

[stogot]

I track these across all fields. It’s money and prestige and arrogance and ignorance and “keep my job” and more