How do we ensure that research is reproducible? by Bruce Charlton. The bureaucratized model of government science funding in place since WWII is a very different creature from what went before.
[In] professional science… the typical researcher feels free to indulge in unrestrained careerism, while blandly assuming that the ‘systems’ of science will somehow transmute the dross of his own contribution into the gold of truth. It does not: hence the preponderance of irreproducible publications.
Scientists are puppets:
There is a massive evasion of responsibility at work. Scientists have allowed themselves to become mere puppets of external forces. The choice of research topic is dictated by the availability of funding, the methods are dictated by fashion, analysis and publication are dictated by considerations of security and status. The ‘scientist’ is merely a passive responder to such imposed factors.
Honesty and truth-finding are not rewarded much, and often negatively. Horn tooting is much more valuable, careerwise.
Science itself is now organized in groups; groups for which obedience is far more highly prized than truth-seeking and truth-speaking – indeed strict honesty is feared as likely to upset the apple cart; to derail ‘the team’ from its collective track of self-proclaimed progress.
Hype and spin are the order of the day; with even the most routine and mediocre bits of ‘stamp collecting’ medical research touting itself as a cure for cancer, ageing and (perhaps?) death itself. … but at the cost of downgrading to insignificance those scientists who are either modest, or simply uninterested in their own prestige and instead devoted to their subject – to their work.
Peer review is corrupted.
The most pernicious of these responsibility-evading ‘systems’ is peer-review; which is now often believed to be the very essence of science.
Yet throughout the great days of science there was no peer review. Decisions were made by individual people. There was no closed-shop of opinion-formers who could include or exclude ideas and evidence by fiat.
This mess is used to justify the Green’s attempt to rule the world (when they control people’s energy use in every country, on the excuse of carbon emissions, they are most of the way there). Toxic.
hat-tip Matthew
