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if someone cared enough about my research to even replicate it let alone disprove it I’d be losing my shit
I’ll find it and put it on your doorstep.
What’s it about?
silly lil algae :3
(tbh it’s been a good decade since i was working on projects leading to publication. I’ve been stuck in manufacturing/industry hell. send help)
Having your findings disproven isn’t failing though right? You still added to the body of knowledge because we know more stuff. I’m not a scientist though so I could be wrong. Pseudoscientists add nothing and just do harm though.
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Meanwhile, Higher Education research be like:
- publishes good quality research on the efficacy of an advising methodology
- immediately gets ripped to shreds by professors from schools using other advising methods
- only research that gets unchallenged is stuff like “some advising is much better than no advising” or "people have different learning styles
- academic advising will never be a career due to the lack of consensus
“boy i wish anyone bothered to even skim my paper to make sure i didn’t make an obvious math error”
I really don’t like this “no true scotsman” flavored meme, the profit incentive destroys valuable research by limiting resources to replications of past experiments (as soon as something is profitable, you must not disprove it for a fear of retaliation from companies promoting said something), this is systemic, not an individual level problem, get rid of “bad scientists” and more will be propped up.
I do like the sentiment of the meme though, more more replication is needed.
There’s really only failing, then learning, then death
My kids have me listening to way too much Disney music lately…
If you challenge my findings, it will hurt my profits
FTFY.
I found this publication in the British Medical Journal interesting about how evidence-based medicine is undermined by financial incentives. Science is the best institution we have for understanding the truth, but it’s far from incorruptible. It’s especially disappointing that the companies profiting from a product are in many instances the ones doing the studies to prove their safety and effectiveness. The corporate capture of the governmental agencies tasked with regulating them is also quite concerning, as is the state of academia.
All my homies love meta science
We need to push more for good science because a lot of times there is a ton of pressure to produce research and go along with the current established theories instead of being able to challenge them.
Have you ever seen the history of science? Left is absolutely not true to the point that we’ve had to wait for powerful scientists to die to get the progress they’ve held back entered to record.
I can see how this would be the case judging by the boomers around me. Do you have any examples?
A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.
Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.
Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.
The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.
Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.
Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.
Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.
So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.
Not to mention all the bs around science publishing, like not publishing negative results
Ideally? Yes
But a modern scientific environment puts a lot of pressure to present your results better than they really are.
It damages good science a great deal
In my opinion, the obsession with being able to measure everything with numbers is the cause. And those numbers are inevitably converting d to units of money, because capitalism.
Yup, metrics kill it all
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I found god, disprove that betas!
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Have you read the bible?? Absolute proof 😎
Elves, trolls, orcs, dwarves, ents and hobbits are real! It says so on the holy book: The Lord Of The Rings.
You have the right energy but the wrong book, join my book club, the one and only true book club!
Do you guys have a new true book per week or is it more of a true book a month club?
It’s not a set schedule, every now and again someone from the club decides that we don’t know how to read correctly and opens up a new book club with his own version of the book, which is of course not the one true book.
I don’t know.
The whole thing sounds like it will lead into fights amongst true book clubs because the members of each will think theirs is the true book, not the other ones, and the fights might even be worse between the true book clubs that were originally the same. I all sounds kinda dangerous.
Plus, how would I know if the book of your true book club is in fact the one and only true book if there are other true book clubs which like you book also claim to have the one and only true book and its a different book?
