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Nautilus has an interesting rundown on how scientific fraud happens and what could possibly be done to correct it written in comic book form. It's a fun little read and oh so true.
The book that it is based on, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, is worth reading as well.
Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King's College London. His new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, explains the ideas in this comic, by Zach Weinersmith, in more detail, telling shocking stories of scientific error and misconduct. It also proposes an abundance of ideas for how to rescue science from its current malaise.
How many Soylentils here are in academia? Have you felt the pressure of "publish or perish"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @08:11AM (23 children)
This is why the anti-science movement is gaining traction. Even though most people don't understand the science itself, when there is enough fraud going on they do tend to pick up on it. People who can't tell what is good and what isn't tend to discount all of it as junk, which then allows the utter crackpots to gain a following, since they actually believe the garbage they spew.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Saturday August 01 2020, @10:22AM (22 children)
The main reason the anti-science movement is gaining traction is the crappy school system we use to "educate" our kids. We value obedience over inquisitiveness and rote learning over understanding. We never teach kids to evaluate the veracity of what we tell them to learn and instead praise them if they gobble up unquestioningly what we put in front of them. This means they never take the detour of learning - understanding - knowing and instead use the short path of learning by heart and believing. Not blaming the kids here, because that's not only what we reward, it also requires way less expense from them in terms of time and resources.
But it means that they cannot gauge the veracity of a claim. All they can is believe it. And this plays into the hands of charlatans and con-men as soon as (not if, not even when, but as soon as, because eventually, something we taught our kids as "truth" will be debunked, simply by virtue of teachers being biased and of course not knowing everything but not being shy to pretend they do), which in turn they will use as a reason to toss everything they learned and search for new "truths". Since they only know how to believe someone and never learned to test a claim, their logic now goes "I noticed that A is false, he tells me B, B is different from A, so B must be true".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 01 2020, @11:12AM (3 children)
Tell me how you measure me and I tell you how I'll behave.
"Teaching to the test", especially when funding depends on how the aggregate of score of the school looks like is as a perverse incentive as "your job depends on publishing".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:59PM
Just like "if you do management by numbers, I'll manage to supply you the numbers you want".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
Well isn't that the lesson you're being taught? You're an A+ kid.
Discipline is a way to root out the non-conformers. A filter for those who will put someone else's authority over their own. Well I guess it's for my own good, right? Hits self with whip.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 02 2020, @09:29PM
Functions very well in the free market, see the cobra effect [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @01:53PM (3 children)
When I was in school a bit over a decade ago, we learned about formal logic and critical thinking. Maybe common core changed that, but what you're saying doesn't smell right to me.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday August 01 2020, @03:20PM (2 children)
You did? Maybe something changed in the years since I left school, so there's maybe still hope? Where did you go to school? Public? Private?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @05:02PM (1 child)
Public school, in Michigan. Logic and rhetoric were part of both the English and math curriculum (or should that be curricula?), throughout middle and high school. I don't doubt that some schools are horrible, but mine weren't.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday August 03 2020, @02:55PM
Correct, currus, pl. curra, diminutive curricula. Vitae stays singular and is usually omitted.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:03PM (9 children)
"Settled science says masks
give a harmful sense of securityare the best thing to protect you and others, go wear one andwe'll give you a crackera Karen won't pepper spray you.""Science" as fed to the masses is just religion in another coat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @10:04PM
Idiocy is reserved for the brain dead. Good job zombie boy!
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday August 01 2020, @11:03PM (7 children)
What the hell is "settled science"? Science is never settled.
But thank you for giving us a pretty good demonstration what damage the public school system can do to a human mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @04:47AM (6 children)
I'll let you lead the debate on the Unsettled State of Physics. Go.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday August 03 2020, @01:22PM (5 children)
In physics, as in any science, we know what we know until we learn something that explains the things we observe better. For the longest time, we expected a planet to be inside the orbit of Mercury, simply due to how its orbit was behaving. There should have been some mass that makes it behave like it does, because without, it should not behave like it does. A planet Vulcan [wikipedia.org] was hypothezised, some claimed to have observed it but, as we do know now, of course they didnt.
Only when relativity was discovered and how it affects gravity, and how the sun's gravity well is the reason for Mercury's orbital oddities, we finally could put this to rest. For now.
Today, we observe that the universe doesn't behave like it should. It expands not as the matter that we observe would allow it to. In comes dark matter, and when that didn't suffice, dark energy. Does it exist? Or is it another Vulcan? Something that we expect because it's how we could explain what we observe within the reference frame of the model we consider "true". Maybe we will discover something in the future that suddenly explains the expansion oddities in a new way. Much like relativity did for another gravity phenomenon.
So no, physics is not "settled". We have an understanding of how it works, and for nearly all observed phenomena, it works pretty well. There are fringe cases, though, where it does not adequately explain what we observe.
But we're working on it.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Bot on Monday August 03 2020, @03:02PM (4 children)
Once you have discovered every law in the universe and reverse engineered all its history, and it all fits 100%, how do you demonstrate you have discovered all the discoverable? A. you can't. Therefore settled science is never absolute. For all practical purposes though, assertions like 'a brick will crush a light bulb' or "when reality differs from expectations, a leftie will declare reality wrong" are so invariable to be considered settled science.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:56AM (3 children)
Is there a chance we could at least try to keep politics out of science? Science and ideologies don't mix well.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 04 2020, @07:06AM (2 children)
Troll lives matter.
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(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:00PM (1 child)
Do we get to vote on that?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 06 2020, @07:05AM
It's a matter of basic principles so, no.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Sunday August 02 2020, @12:50AM (3 children)
As I mentioned via quotes here: https://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science [pdfernhout.net]
But to amplify your point on education, see David Goodstein's essay "The Big Crunch" from the 1994:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @04:49AM
Lol go to any department anywhere now. 90% Chinese. Tell me your theory again?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday August 03 2020, @01:09PM
It's worse than that. We don't sieve through the debris for diamonds. No child left behind, rings a bell? This is actually the last thing you need to get a child interested in education. Because kids ain't dumb. They are the masters at minmaxing, minimal effort for maximal gains. As soon as they notice that they can't fail, no matter how much they slack and, worse, that they don't gain anything out of trying to overachieve, and they figure that out pretty quickly, this is what they will do. They will stop trying to achieve because, well, why bother? Add the common practice of "teaching to the test" to the mix, where any question the kid might have that has nothing to do with what will be on the test gets squashed and any inquisitive bone the kid might still have gets broken, to the point where the kids eventually see that they should not ask question. What's wanted from them is to scoop up the information, barf it onto the test, after which they may as well forget everything again.
This is our school system.
If you don't give a fuck about your kids' education, don't expect them to do so.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday August 03 2020, @03:12PM
>because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us
bullshit of dazzling order of magnitude, I won me an internet because after trying to rationalise a reply I thought: who can come up with such a pyndaric flight of an explanation, it takes a lot of synaptic activity. Maybe a jew? and sure enough
>david goodstein
feel free to not believe me.
Account abandoned.