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The 7 Biggest Problems Facing Science, According to 270 Scientists

posted by martyb on Monday July 18 2016, @02:47AM   
from the What's-up-Doc? dept.

AnonTechie writes:

The scientific process, in its ideal form, is elegant: Ask a question, set up an objective test, and get an answer. Repeat. Science is rarely practiced to that ideal. But Copernicus believed in that ideal. So did the rocket scientists behind the moon landing.

But nowadays, our respondents told us, the process is riddled with conflict. Scientists say they're forced to prioritize self-preservation over pursuing the best questions and uncovering meaningful truths.

Today, scientists' success often isn't measured by the quality of their questions or the rigor of their methods. It's instead measured by how much grant money they win, the number of studies they publish, and how they spin their findings to appeal to the public.

Scientists often learn more from studies that fail. But failed studies can mean career death. So instead, they're incentivized to generate positive results they can publish. And the phrase "publish or perish" hangs over nearly every decision. It's a nagging whisper, like a Jedi's path to the dark side.

"Over time the most successful people will be those who can best exploit the system," Paul Smaldino, a cognitive science professor at University of California Merced, says.

Many scientists have had enough. They want to break this cycle of perverse incentives and rewards. They are going through a period of introspection, hopeful that the end result will yield stronger scientific institutions. In our survey and interviews, they offered a wide variety of ideas for improving the scientific process and bringing it closer to its ideal form.

Before we jump in, some caveats to keep in mind: Our survey was not a scientific poll. For one, the respondents disproportionately hailed from the biomedical and social sciences and English-speaking communities.

Many of the responses did, however, vividly illustrate the challenges and perverse incentives that scientists across fields face. And they are a valuable starting point for a deeper look at dysfunction in science today.

The 7 problems identified are:

1) Academia has a huge money problem
2) Too many studies are poorly designed
3) Replicating results is crucial — and rare
4) Peer review is broken
5) Too much science is locked behind paywalls
6) Science is poorly communicated
7) Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful

It seems to me, that, much of this is already known to most scientists. However, this cycle of publish or perish continues unabated. What do you think should be done to change this mindset ?

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process

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Original Submission

• Scientific Method (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @03:21AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @03:21AM (#375943)

  Ask a question, set up an objective test, and get an answer. Repeat.

  The key is that you ask an actually interesting question. Since the 1940s philosophy of science has been pretty much dropped from the science curriculum and replaced with an approach that permits (and encourages) pseudoscience come up with by statisticians. Since they offer a method that has zero problem with answering worthless questions, and this is easier, people are trained to set up everything to answer worthless questions (Does the drug do absolutely nothing? Are two groups of people samples from populations with the exact same properties?, etc). This is a huge misunderstanding of how science works.

  Instead you need to spend the effort to ask an interesting question. Usually this means thinking really hard about what you think may be going on. Next, deducing a precise set of observations you should see if your explanation is correct (or at least in the ballpark). Then you need to set those deduced predictions as the null hypotheses.

  In the physical sciences, the usual result of an improvement in experimental design, instrumentation, or numerical mass of data, is to increase the difficulty of the “observational hurdle” which the physical theory of interest must successfully surmount; whereas, in psychology and some of the allied behavior sciences, the usual effect of such improvement in experimental precision is to provide an easier hurdle for the theory to surmount. Hence what we would normally think of as improvements in our experimental method tend (when predictions materialize) to yield stronger corroboration of the theory in physics, since to remain unrefuted the theory must have survived a more difficult test; by contrast, such experimental improvement in psychology typically results in a weaker corroboration of the theory, since it has now been required to survive a more lenient test [3] [9] [10].

  http://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/pdf0609/Meehl_1967.pdf [ups-tlse.fr]

  This reversal of null hypothesis choice is by far the worst thing that happened in the 300 or so years since science became a thing. Ronald Fisher was partly responsible, but even he tried to stop this late in his life:

  "We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort."

  http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf [york.ac.uk]

  We are no longer in danger of this. It came to pass decades ago for many areas of research and is slowly growing to replace all instances of science with pseudoscience. Any discussion of the problems facing science that fails to put this null hypothesis reversal first and foremost by a wide margin is going to be a red herring. Sure, there are other issues, but none are close to as damaging as this one.

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