Science Losing Credibility As Large Amounts Of Research Shown To Be False

[LC]

Second, your phrase drastic conclusions immediately shows your existing prejudice against the scientific studies. Your attitude is to question an established long term results based on a couple samples that are questionable. While this might be productive if you were an expert in the field, for non-expert it shows a prejudice against the experts in the field.

 

I think it shows healthy skepticism. Which based on the examples from this article, and the word of two "experts" (former NEMJ editor-in-chiefs), seems warranted.

 

In fact, my conclusions are not so drastic. As I just posted:

it's possible to have a more nuanced conclusion: perhaps there are some risks with vaccinations that we may not even be aware of because scientists may have been coerced into withholding data (or other reasons). Does that mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater? Not necessarily.

Again, not a broad-sweeping conclusion, but a skeptical one.

 

And frankly, what does being an "expert" have to do with it? Here is what Carl Sagan wrote about appeals to authority:

 

One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

[Liberty]

So it's possible to have a more nuanced conclusion: perhaps there are some risks with vaccinations that we may not even be aware of because scientists may have been coerced into withholding data (or other reasons). Does that mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater? Not necessarily.

 

I'm not saying that's not possible, I'm saying show me the (credible) evidence. So far I haven't seen it, while I see massive, massive, massive evidence that the world is much, much better thanks to vaccines and that they are incredibly safe compared to even things like seatbelts and stairs.

 

And I don't even believe that vaccines are 100% safe. It's possible that some people have rare allergic reactions or whatever. But they're much, much, much safer than not being vaccinated. And most of the "controversies" that the anti-vaxxers still harp about have been debunked long ago, they just never update to new evidence so it's pointless (ie. some ingredient that they don't like gets removed from some country decades ago, no statistical change happened, showing that the ingredient wasn't causing whatever they're blaming on, etc. Or they keep spreading the misinformation that vaccines actually inject people with functional viruses and that you can catch the disease from the vaccine, like it's the middle-ages or something).

 

People love to talk about the incentives of scientists in keeping things quiet and having a massive conspiration, etc. These people have no understanding of how things work, and of how hard large-scale conspirations are to actually keep quiet for long when the data is open. Scientists love to prove others wrong (maybe not always within the same group, but between competing organizations, or young blood vs. old guard), and anyone who proved either a big conspiration or proved that something is a big problem and should be changed (helping make things safer for everyone) would probably get a pulitzer or a nobel, or at least high recognition.

 

It's the non-scientific minds who dont actually understand how things work that have the biggest motivation: Fear. They used to be afraid of witchcraft, and now they're afraid of science they don't understand.

[rukawa]

The main article that has driven all of this is this one:

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&type=printable

 

And of course there is the Reproducibility Project where they were unable to reproduce something like 64% of research findings in psychology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

 

My cousin is a neurologist. He was a researcher at one point. The professor he was under was publishing a lot of bogus results because a biological test was being done incorrectly. This was because the professor was not an expert in the test and had basically told a bunch of grad students to develop the test on their own by reading research papers. My cousin showed the test results to experts on this test. They immediately knew that the results were garbage. The professor was extremely angry. My cousin had to leave the group and the professor continues to publish garbage.

 

These stories are not unusual...everytime I talk to anyone in academia I hear variations on this theme. Its also not unusual outside academia...I worked at OTPP and they had tonnes of bullshit financial models. My view is that whenever money is involved and someones empire is at stake, people will take shit sandwiches and sell them as filet mignon.

 

Anyways I like this site:

https://forbetterscience.com/

 

And for climate science this one is excellent:

https://scienceofdoom.com/

 

The truly sad thing about all of this is the most probable outcome when a lot of the scientific rot is exposed is not better science but instead empowerment of people who are even worse like the anti-vaxxers, chinese medicine people etc. As much as I am skeptical about a lot of science, I am a billion times more skeptical about astrology, Chinese medicine, naturopathy, and the links between autism and vaccines etc. This thread is a good example of the screwed up dynamic.

[Jurgis]

And frankly, what does being an "expert" have to do with it?

 

"Expert" is not just appeal to authority. Unfortunately, like nafregnum said, science is now so complex that somebody outside the field cannot understand all the data, all the studies, the variables, the possible interactions of variables, the statistics used, and the significance of such. What I will give you is that even within the field not everyone understands this and/or can summarize the data, evidence, studies, point out the questionable spots, etc. But for people outside the field it is simply impossible (unless you are a genius and/or spend couple of years studying the field) to do that.

 

So, yeah, you can either rely on the accepted majority opinion based on long term studies and their results. Or you can decide that you will take the opinion of couple minority studies and possible effects of data mismanagement (which don't necessarily even support minority hypothesis). Or you can have a weighted opinion. IMO someone like Liberty has a weighted opinion. Someone like your original article doesn't.

 

If you still believe this is "appeal to authority", so be it. If you still believe that you can have a better weighting about the pro/con/tampered/non-tampered studies without being inside the field and understanding it thoroughly than relying way more on the established long term expert opinion, then I disagree with you.

 

Good luck

[LC]

 

I'm not saying that's not possible, I'm saying show me the (credible) evidence. So far I haven't seen it, while I see massive, massive, massive evidence that the world is much, much better thanks to vaccines and that they are incredibly safe compared to even things like seatbelts and stairs.

The issue isn't about vaccines, it is a broader issue about the state of scientific research.

 

Rukawa has posted some above in his post, highlighting this broader issue.

The original article contains other examples in the same vein (e.g. http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-014-0014-5).

 

In terms of vaccines, we (along with most rational individuals) both agree that the net benefits outweigh the individual risks.

 

The issue is that there appears to have been instances where evidence was removed from studies suggesting that risks do in fact exist:

https://www.nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BSEM-2011.pdf  (evidence begins on pg. 3)

http://web.archive.org/web/20140826171415/http://www.translationalneurodegeneration.com/content/pdf/2047-9158-3-16.pdf

 

[Liberty]

 

I'm not saying that's not possible, I'm saying show me the (credible) evidence. So far I haven't seen it, while I see massive, massive, massive evidence that the world is much, much better thanks to vaccines and that they are incredibly safe compared to even things like seatbelts and stairs.

The issue isn't about vaccines, it is a broader issue about the state of scientific research.

 

Rukawa has posted some above in his post, highlighting this broader issue.

The original article contains other examples in the same vein (e.g. http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-014-0014-5).

 

In terms of vaccines, we (along with most rational individuals) both agree that the net benefits outweigh the individual risks.

 

The issue is that there appears to have been instances where evidence was removed from studies suggesting that risks do in fact exist:

https://www.nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BSEM-2011.pdf  (evidence begins on pg. 3)

http://web.archive.org/web/20140826171415/http://www.translationalneurodegeneration.com/content/pdf/2047-9158-3-16.pdf

 

The issue of the links I posted was mostly vaccines. As for science in general, see my first post in this thread for my opinion.

[LC]

I think there's always been bad studies and that many things take a while to incrementally become more and more confirmed, but now with the internet, every one of these things can be spread far and wide and we get bombarded with it. 20 years ago, where would you hear about these things? You think they were covered in the evening news or the morning paper? It's a bit similar to how people think violence and crime has gone up overall because they're so much more exposed to it than before 24-hour cable news, while actual facts show that it has been going down overall.

 

Scrutiny is good, finding mistakes is good. Let's just not draw the wrong conclusions from this.

 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Indeed, the increased scrutiny is good.

 

And to a bunch of investors, this scrutiny can have monetary consequences, if pharma/agrotech/etc. companies are found complicit and liable.

 

Take a look at the whistleblower settlements from this one law firm alone:

http://morganverkamp.com/our-clients/

 

Here are a few of the medical-related settlements:

 

UNITED STATES EX REL. GALE V. OMNICARE, INC.

Result: Settled in 2014 for $124,000,000

 

UNITED STATES EX REL. HUTCHESON V. BLACKSTONE MEDICAL, INC.

Result: Settled in 2012 for $30,000,000

 

STATE OF TEXAS EX REL. GALMINES V. NOVARTIS PHARMACEUTICALS

Result: Partially settled in 2012 for $19,900,000

 

UNITED STATES EX REL. AUSTIN V. NOVARTIS

Result: Settled in 2010 for $237,000,000

 

Most of these are related to illegal kickback schemes. But I don't think anyone would be surprising if certain research studies were influenced by big pharma to their benefit.

 

In terms of conclusions, I have no problem with saying "I don't know". Like I said, I personally am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I am acknowledging there are perverse influences in these fields. It is a risk, and that risk should be kept in mind when making medical decisions, investment decisions, decisions about what to put in your body, etc.

[tripleoptician]

Interesting discussion - I'd like to add my two cents as a physician regarding the quotes from the two physicians that were editors of the NEJM and the general state of pharmaceutical influence in medicine.

The NEJM is considered the most prestigious journal in the world of medical publications and research. Regardless of the website's clear anti-science/corruption slant, I think these quotes have significant meaning. Many doctors (including myself) far prefer the practice of medicine to the grind of rigorous scientific analysis and research. To achieve such a high posting in the most prestigious journal,  the 2 editors likely had a keen interest in research and would generally have a tendency towards viewing medical research in favourable terms rather than with a significant critical lens during their career. To see them make fairly strongly worded statements against the current state of research and Dr. Angell's active lecturing and writings around the perils of medical research should speak volumes.As physicians, I believe there is a combination of lack of insight, apathy and limited alternatives to Big Pharma influence that continues to allow pharmaceutical industries to have significant influence over doctors and their prescribing practices.

 

1. In regards to lack of insight, many physicians are confident, Type A individuals. In the last 2 decades, we all learn in medical school that interacting with the pharmaceutical reps and the industry will likely lead to some form of bias in our prescribing practices. I think most doctors believe that the pharmaceutical industry does have the ability to bias physicians, but it just doesn't affect THEM. It is the classic example of polling a sample set about if they are above average, average or poor drivers that leads to the vast majority claiming they are above average. Most physicians believe others are less objective and that is whom the industry reaps their benefits off of, not them. On a fundamental business level, we know that capital expenditures on physician interactions wouldn't occur unless the company is seeing an objective ROI on aggregate. So my only choice as a practicing physician is to totally avoid pharmaceutical reps given that I could never be intellectually honest enough to know if I am being influenced.

 

2. Apathy may not be the best term to use, but it is what occurs in the current state of medicine where the growth in knowledge, research and evidence based medicine is so huge that it becomes overwhelming. I practice as an inpatient hospitalist which essentially cares for majority of medical inpatients in the hospital for  infections, cancer, strokes, heart attacks, GI issues, bowel obstructions and elderly failure to cope among a thousand other potential diagnoses. It would be impossible for me to critical appraise every piece of research that came out on stroke management, let alone the other myriad of illnesses I manage. This of course also applies to family doctors/general practitioners who interact with the majority of patients at some level.

I do my best to stay current on key aspects of medical care. My typical resources include:

 

a) attending conferences that are always sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and physician presenters often have relationships with pharmaceutical companies either in a research capacity or for providing paid lectures. In Canada at least, it is very difficult to get adequate sponsorship of an event with government money in order to reduce bias at the event. The health care system is already over-burdened with cost.

 

b) adjust my practicing behaviour to updated expert opinion of the sub-specialist doctors (cardiologist, gastroenterologist, neurologist etc) in how the practice their specialty. This assumes they are adjusting their core area of practice to current objective evidence based medicine. The difficulty here is specialists often do have some form of industry attachment as lecturers or researchers and may be suffering from a lack of insight as per point 1.

 

c) review broad based data-systems such as UptoDate which is compiling expert opinion with panel reviews of current medical research to provide suggested approaches and evidence with a graded level of objective evidence (1A implies rigorous double blinded studies that were well powered and significant p-values). This is the closest I have to an effective resource, but it is still potentially skewed as all expert contributors have potential bias as per b) above, although it is hopefully diluted given the review is done by a panel.

 

d) Rely on tried/tested medications that are now generic and well studied given they have been around for long periods. This means you are not benefiting from potential new wonder drugs, but the safety profile is likely higher. I lean this way in prescribing practices, but we have to acknowledge when medications like lipitor or ace inhibitors have shown clear all cause mortality benefits in certain patient populations. If I would have waited till the evidence became clearer, patients may have died by an error of omission.

 

3) Finally the lack of a better alternative is a huge one. The cost and time of quality medical research makes it quite prohibitive for governments or non-profit institutions to embark on independent research not skewed by drug companies. Who else can take on the R+D expense to create the drug and then independently study it to find out it is ineffective against placebo? The opportunity cost and risk is immense and significant profitability when done in a basket approach is the only way to expect drug innovation to occur. No drug company will study old drugs or generics. They won't study non-pharmaceutical treatments for the same diseases. They will always find their best ways to adjust the data set to try and squeak out a positive finding, just like companies will try to massage and adjust earnings.

 

This discussion doesn't even take into consideration how drug recommendations rarely have an adjustment of age. The bulk of drugs are prescribed to the elderly and they are at the highest risk of polypharmacy and drug complications. Research is done on the 60 yo old and the results applied to a 90 year old - does that sound reasonable? I hope that the next wave of medical innovation is not in the medications, but in the delivery of health care via AI to reduce the error rate that is inherent in the process. I think building a better mousetrap is far superior to the small incremental improvements that drug companies are making on their previous generation drugs these days. Anyway, thanks for reading my rant on the world of medicine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[lschmidt]

Speaking to the original article, it is more than a little ironic that an online piece that decries the corruption of science due to corporate and political bias makes use of cherry-picked examples and an intellectual agenda to selectively spin a narrative. Basically, an intellectually biased article is crying foul that science suffers from intellectual/financial/political bias.

 

This is an indication that we should step back and be aware of the human nuances in scientific research. Statistics are imperfect, clinical trials cannot prove a hypothesis very easily on their own, and conflicts of interest are very difficult to avoid in the scientific process given the immutable nature of human psychology. But each scientific study is a small brushstroke in a larger canvas, and there is no better method of moving closer to the true canvas in time. Patching together a story (such as this article did) to promulgate an ideological agenda doesn't serve the truth well, but a more nuanced view of the ultimate direction of science and medicine might. That being said, the confluence of biases and conflicts of interest are ever-present, with such articles being far from an exception.

 

BTW - all of tripleoptician's points are insightful and worth reading

 

(this post written by someone who IS an expert in clinical research studies)

[rukawa]

As for science in general, see my first post in this thread for my opinion.

 

I read it. Part of the problem here is I don't have a time machine. Now I am a loser in life in many ways and so I have this tendency to believe the world is a worse place now than it was before. I am almost certainly wrong though because I don't have any experience of the past.

 

That said my feeling is that in science things are worse today than they used to be. Actually I would make it even broader...throughout all institutions things are worse. People are more dishonest, more selfish, bigger assholes. And the money corrupts everything. The personal morality is gone. I mean there is this different group morality that is better like on race and gender. But on the very basic things like how you treat others, whether you are honest...something has gone wrong.

 

Science started out different. It was an amateur endevour. There was little incentive to be dishonest. There just weren't big rewards in science. Benjamin Franklin didn't play around with kites to win a research grant...he did it because he thought it was fun and really cool.

 

Americans were very lucky. You had WW2 and the influx of European scientists from societies that were at the height of their cultural and intellectual sophistication. These guys didn't just know science...they knew history, philosophy, literature. The had a fully grounding in the Western classical tradition. And though Christianity was dying...there was a Christian morality at the personal level that was still there. You lucked out in getting all the best Europe had to offer. And then on top of that you heavily funded science. And even better you had this influx of poor, striving immigrants from Eastern Europe (I am thinking of Russian Jews) from which you get your Feynman's, Glashow's, in the second generation. So immediately post WW2 you have the perfect mix and you get some amazing science.

 

But its almost like the very thing that enable you to produce so much (massive research grants) is also the thing that corrupted the foundations the success was built on (scientific morality, intrinsic interest, wide intellectual education, strong philosophical background).

 

And so we go from guys like Schrodinger, Godel, Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi who could discuss Emmanuel Kant in one sentence and Green's functions in the next. To Feynman, who though he had no philosophical understanding, did at least understand physics and mathematics thoroughly...not just the math but also the history of physics.

 

And finally you get to the present day where a researcher is very narrowly educated, highly technical and not only doesn't know anything outside his narrow sub-specialty but often doesn't even know the history of his own discipline. But worse he is a careerist. He doesn't learn how to do good science. He learns how to play the game. How to suck up the right people. Develop the right network. Play dirty. And follow the prevailing fads.

 

The culmination of all this is the corrupt asshole university professor. He has an army of graduate students. He has thousands of publications. He has an extensive social network of people he has collaborated with and they all help each other: they only cite each others papers...never anyone outside their network, they try to prevent any paper from competing groups from getting through peer review (because of course they have friends on the editorial boards of major journals), in peer review they often push authors to cite people from their network even though the citations aren't relevant, they follow the latest fad, they overhype their research and so it goes.

 

Its all a big game. And often the worst rise to the top. This isn't just true in science though. In the criminal justice system the game is the same. Prosecutors don't care about justice, they care about how many convictions they get.

 

Here is an example of the type of thing I am talking about. My friend submitted a paper to a conference proceeding. When they got to the conference, the same paper with different wording but exactly the same values, same idea was presented before them. Someone had given their paper to a competing group which had plagiarized the results. Complete plagarism. My friend wasn't able to present. The supervisor of my friend then spent about two years workings slowly through back-channels to get this asshole bigshot professor to stop plagiarizing my friend's work.

 

Now you may ask: Why the hell didn't he just accuse the big shot professor of plagarism. The reason is that he professor was very powerful. He had friends on grant committees, conference heads, editorial boards etc. So the professor was afraid of blow back and he had to proceed very slowly and carefully. For a long time they couldn't get published in major journals because the big shot had friends at the journals. We had to publish in other journals.

[Jurgis]

Since some of the posts went towards medicine, I'll post the following article that I found rather interesting:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/

 

IMO it's a well written article and possibly useful to some people who commented above. I appreciate comments of tripleoptician and lschmidt from the field.

 

This article is only partially related to the original topic of this thread.

[rukawa]

Its not just science!! The rot is everywhere.

 

Basically it comes down to this. You create this metric. Then you reward people with money and whatever if they maximize the metric. So people game the metric. David Simon called it juking the stats. The money and the metric corrupt the system.

 

With science, its grants based on citations and papers published.

 

With criminal justice system, its promotions based on number of convictions for DAs or for cops its promotions based on arrests.

 

In education, its rewarding teachers based on test scores.

 

With doctors, its getting money based on number of operations performed or procedures done.

 

With finance, its traders getting rewarded based on profits...and so they take huge risks and blow up banks.

 

See the thing is...to get the rewards you don't have to produce something of value. That is what people figured out. You just need to learn how to game the system.

 

Science is no different than any other field. Power and money corrupt. Introducing so much money to science has corrupted it.

 

All of this takes time to happen. In the beginning most people are not corrupt and the system is good. It make even be better than before since the metric and rewards push people to work harder. But slowly a few people learn how to game the system and their power increases. As time goes on the worst rise up. And so you have a mix of people but as you go higher people get more and more corrupt.

 

The ironic thing about this is that most people don't want to be bad. But they eventually become bad because they feel like fools for being honest.

[Liberty]

As for science in general, see my first post in this thread for my opinion.

 

I read it. Part of the problem here is I don't have a time machine. Now I am a loser in life in many ways and so I have this tendency to believe the world is a worse place now than it was before. I am almost certainly wrong though because I don't have any experience of the past.

 

That said my feeling is that in science things are worse today than they used to be. Actually I would make it even broader...throughout all institutions things are worse. People are more dishonest, more selfish, bigger assholes. And the money corrupts everything. The personal morality is gone. I mean there is this different group morality that is better like on race and gender. But on the very basic things like how you treat others, whether you are honest...something has gone wrong.

 

Science started out different. It was an amateur endevour. There was little incentive to be dishonest. There just weren't big rewards in science. Benjamin Franklin didn't play around with kites to win a research grant...he did it because he thought it was fun and really cool.

 

Americans were very lucky. You had WW2 and the influx of European scientists from societies that were at the height of their cultural and intellectual sophistication. These guys didn't just know science...they knew history, philosophy, literature. The had a fully grounding in the Western classical tradition. And though Christianity was dying...there was a Christian morality at the personal level that was still there. You lucked out in getting all the best Europe had to offer. And then on top of that you heavily funded science. And even better you had this influx of poor, striving immigrants from Eastern Europe (I am thinking of Russian Jews) from which you get your Feynman's, Glashow's, in the second generation. So immediately post WW2 you have the perfect mix and you get some amazing science.

 

But its almost like the very thing that enable you to produce so much (massive research grants) is also the thing that corrupted the foundations the success was built on (scientific morality, intrinsic interest, wide intellectual education, strong philosophical background).

 

And so we go from guys like Schrodinger, Godel, Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi who could discuss Emmanuel Kant in one sentence and Green's functions in the next. To Feynman, who though he had no philosophical understanding, did at least understand physics and mathematics thoroughly...not just the math but also the history of physics.

 

And finally you get to the present day where a researcher is very narrowly educated, highly technical and not only doesn't know anything outside his narrow sub-specialty but often doesn't even know the history of his own discipline. But worse he is a careerist. He doesn't learn how to do good science. He learns how to play the game. How to suck up the right people. Develop the right network. Play dirty. And follow the prevailing fads.

 

The culmination of all this is the corrupt asshole university professor. He has an army of graduate students. He has thousands of publications. He has an extensive social network of people he has collaborated with and they all help each other: they only cite each others papers...never anyone outside their network, they try to prevent any paper from competing groups from getting through peer review (because of course they have friends on the editorial boards of major journals), in peer review they often push authors to cite people from their network even though the citations aren't relevant, they follow the latest fad, they overhype their research and so it goes.

 

Its all a big game. And often the worst rise to the top. This isn't just true in science though. In the criminal justice system the game is the same. Prosecutors don't care about justice, they care about how many convictions they get.

 

Here is an example of the type of thing I am talking about. My friend submitted a paper to a conference proceeding. When they got to the conference, the same paper with different wording but exactly the same values, same idea was presented before them. Someone had given their paper to a competing group which had plagiarized the results. Complete plagarism. My friend wasn't able to present. The supervisor of my friend then spent about two years workings slowly through back-channels to get this asshole bigshot professor to stop plagiarizing my friend's work.

 

Now you may ask: Why the hell didn't he just accuse the big shot professor of plagarism. The reason is that he professor was very powerful. He had friends on grant committees, conference heads, editorial boards etc. So the professor was afraid of blow back and he had to proceed very slowly and carefully. For a long time they couldn't get published in major journals because the big shot had friends at the journals. We had to publish in other journals.

 

As I said, sample bias.

[stahleyp]

I'd have to agree with ruka.

 

Anyone who doesn't think money corrupts is naive.

 

As a bit of aside with corruption. I wonder what the country/world would look like if the world governments couldn't take on debt. Individuals and corporations could though but not governments. I think a big reason for this game playing is due to this.

 

A couple of examples. If the government couldn't create debt, colleges wouldn't (most likely) have federal loans. If there were no federal loans, they couldn't charge as much (there is no rock to get the blood from).

 

Or, if the government didn't pay out the wazoo for medicine, the pharmaceuticals companies couldn't charge as much and couldn't pay so much for sales reps.

 

If the government couldn't create debt, bailouts (probably) wouldn't happen. Wealth inequality would be less, I'd imagine too.

 

I don't doubt the economy wouldn't grow as fast (and we'd miss out on some technologies) but I think the world would be on much more stable ground.

[Jurgis]

I agree with Liberty. Sample bias and recency bias (you know bad apple examples from now, but you don't know the bad apple examples from Newton's time... oh wait didn't he and his students fight with Leibniz like heck? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy )

 

There are tons of great researchers nowadays who do it for love of science. There are great researchers who achieve spectacular results possibly comparable to greats in the past. There are great professors that teach and guide students as well if not better than the past ones did.

 

However, yeah, there is increasing specialization - the "easy" knowledge is all discovered and the new achievements require more and more esoteric specialization and understanding of very limited domains to great depth. It is no longer possible to be polymath to great extent. Some people still are somewhat, but not a lot.

 

Sometimes there's also a "new" field in which you can discover somewhat "easy" knowledge like computer science in 1940-1970s or so. But that's somewhat rare.

[SharperDingaan]

We learnt from the financial crisis that all you had to do to get a good rating on a bond securitization, was bribe the bond rating agency. Not by giving them an envelope, but by agreeing to pay them a large fee for their services/research. Do we really think that academia is any different?

 

The reality though is that there is very little we can do about it.

 

SD 

[rukawa]

I agree with Liberty. Sample bias and recency bias (you know bad apple examples from now, but you don't know the bad apple examples from Newton's time... oh wait didn't he and his students fight with Leibniz like heck? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy )

 

The reproducibility project isn't sample bias. They attempted to reproduce 100 studies and could only reproduce 36%.

 

The example of Newton vs Leibniz was not fraud. It was a priority dispute. Newton didn't outright lie. Neither did Leibniz. In fact I can't think of a single case of scientific fraud before WW2, or scientific plagarism.

 

There are tons of great researchers nowadays who do it for love of science. There are great researchers who achieve spectacular results possibly comparable to greats in the past. There are great professors that teach and guide students as well if not better than the past ones did.

 

Sure there are. I am not really disputing that. There will always be brilliant researchers who do remarkable work.

 

But balanced with the that are a lot of very corrupt people in positions of power doing a lot of damage.

 

Anyways lets take one good example of a brilliant man doing remarkable work and what happened to him which I think is pretty instructive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

 

Perelman is quoted in an article in The New Yorker saying that he is disappointed with the ethical standards of the field of mathematics. The article implies that Perelman refers particularly to the efforts of Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau to downplay Perelman's role in the proof and play up the work of Cao and Zhu. Perelman added, "I can't say I'm outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest."[21] He has also said that "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."[21]

[rukawa]

The reality though is that there is very little we can do about it.

 

We as posters on an investing forum can't probably do a lot. But we as a society can pretty easily fix this problem.

 

The whole problem originates from professors competing for grant money. But I don't really understand why they need it or why they need to have power over armies of graduate students. Newton didn't have a graduate student army, Shannon didn't, Einstein didn't, Darwin didn't, Maxwell didn't. If we managed to have science before without the grant system, without peer review, grad students slaves why do we need it today?

 

Instead of funding professors...directly fund young researchers and let them work on their own ideas. And instead of using graduate student armies to do things they have no business doing...why not get professionals to do it instead. Professional programmers, professional technicians, lab techs etc. The whole system is utterly without logic and reason. Its inefficient, corrupt and stupidly run. Graduate students are amateurs and so they are never really that good at whatever technical task they are assigned to. And every 4-5 years they leave, often without leaving any real documentation of their methods and you a new group has to somehow relearn everything.

 

Graduate students aren't trained in lab methods, programming. I would guess that 50% of the poor quality of science is just do to graduate students not really knowing what the fuck they are doing.

 

And finally we should get rid of the whole Phd and postdoc system which is really just a slave system to serve a bunch of corrupt lazy old professors who should do their own fucking work.

[SharperDingaan]

Academia relies on the fact that it is far easier to go around the problem, than fix it.

 

In the business stream it is possible to do either a DBA (Doctor of Business Administration), or a PhD (Some Business Discipline). The PhD is expected to add to the global knowledge on a narrow subject area, and pursue fortune and glory for self and university by way of a Noble prize. The DBA is that odious fart in the presence of the Pope; zero interest in benefiting their fellow man, fortune and glory for self only - via an IPO (Microsoft Facebook, etc.), and the nerve to simply BUY the university (name on the business school). Across North-America, there are maybe 1 in 75 spots/year for those f@#g vandals! - at best.

 

Build and own Microsoft, or restructure an academic faculty? - its a petty easy choice.

Worse still - if you were starting from the ground up you'd make the whole thing on-line and simply sell shares in it; same as you would make a new bank - entirely virtual. Buy 100 shares of Harvard 'virtual', & frame them up - along with your degree. No different to a Louis Vuitton offering a cheaper line of the same quality goods. Scandalous!

 

So instead, change goes around them - & nothing really changes.

Real change happens at the business incubators, not the universities - they just get in the way.

 

SD 

 

       

 

 

 

[Jurgis]

Real change happens at the business incubators, not the universities - they just get in the way.     

 

Yeah, sure. Google for example. Oh wait.

[rukawa]

So instead, change goes around them - & nothing really changes.

Real change happens at the business incubators, not the universities - they just get in the way

 

Ok. So how do you fund the following types of situations?

 

Internet

 

The development of the internet occurred over about a 30-40 year long period during which a number of prototype networks were tested by academics in universities. The reason the internet works so well is that it is well-engineered and the reason its well-engineered is that academics played with various networks for 30-40 years when they were commercially non-viable and figured out through trial and error how to make good ones. How do you fund a 30-40 year research effort with zero payoff, zero users through business incubators. VC's will laugh at you.

 

Electricity and Magnetism

 

The understanding of electricity and magnetism occurred as a result of research by scientists, amateurs, and others over a >150 year period during which there were basically zero practical applications. Electrification only really start with Edison. Faraday's research was funded by government. Heaviside was funded by his parents. Ampere by a university. But all of what we take for granted today (think everything that runs off electricity) required that painstaking research.

 

Standard Model

 

Now the standard model is an interesting one because it still has no practical applications but I am sure it will in the future. It  required enormous sums of money to figure out because of the need to built particle accelerators. To me the standard model is probably the pinnacle achievement of modern science and there is no way it would have been possible through a business incubator.

 

The whole VC/business incubator model is reliant on high quality research by scientists with zero payoff conducted over long periods of time. All that happens is that VC's exhaust all the easy ideas and then all you are left with is the ideas that require long periods of research.

[Guest Schwab711]

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/02/science-media-news/?utm_content=buffer971d7

[Jurgis]

Hmm, rukawa, I am confused now.  8) Your last post is very pro-university, your post earlier is very anti-university system. Can you clarify?  8)

 

Let me answer some of your points from previous post:

 

The whole problem originates from professors competing for grant money.

 

The geniuses from the past who you like so much also had to find funding. OK, they were not exactly today's grants, but they had to find either government/state/government-institution or private rich people funding (or be rich themselves). How is that different? In some cases such funding was easier to obtain, in some cases harder. In some cases the constraints on the funding were less, in some cases way more onerous.

 

But I don't really understand why they need it or why they need to have power over armies of graduate students.

 

You exaggerate there.

 

Newton didn't have a graduate student army, Shannon didn't, Einstein didn't, Darwin didn't, Maxwell didn't. If we managed to have science before without the grant system, without peer review, grad students slaves why do we need it today?

 

So you don't believe in multiplier effect from graduate students doing research? You don't believe in graduate students doing worthwhile research? I do. I'll go with Google example again.

 

Also, you seem to forget that graduate studies is studies. People who start at year one of graduate program don't know how to make good research yet (at least majority don't). At the end of graduate studies they do (majority do). So what you call "army" is really a way to teach young people to become researchers.

 

Instead of funding professors...directly fund young researchers and let them work on their own ideas.

 

And these young researchers will appear from where? From getting B.Sc.? You really believe that you can fund people to do research without them going to graduate school first? I disagree.

 

And instead of using graduate student armies to do things they have no business doing...why not get professionals to do it instead. Professional programmers, professional technicians, lab techs etc.

 

The whole system is utterly without logic and reason. Its inefficient, corrupt and stupidly run. Graduate students are amateurs and so they are never really that good at whatever technical task they are assigned to. And every 4-5 years they leave, often without leaving any real documentation of their methods and you a new group has to somehow relearn everything.

 

Graduate students aren't trained in lab methods, programming. I would guess that 50% of the poor quality of science is just do to graduate students not really knowing what the fuck they are doing.

 

And finally we should get rid of the whole Phd and postdoc system which is really just a slave system to serve a bunch of corrupt lazy old professors who should do their own fucking work.

 

Yes, some research results might be better if professors employed professionals instead of grad students. If you think that professors love having graduate students instead of professionals to do the work, then you are quite mistaken. It's headache for them too from that point of view.

 

However, we are going back to the fact that you have to have institutions that train people on how to do research. And the current system is just a solution for that. Maybe you disagree with the whole concept of such institution. I believe it is needed and I believe it mostly works.

 

Yeah, grad students are not necessarily well trained when they start working. Yeah, they don't necessarily know what they are doing. Yeah, when they become proficient, they graduate and leave. Yeah, these are the facts of life. Good professors and groups deal with that well. Bad ones don't. Some professors do hire professionals for some tasks. It is though expensive and thus limited to best professors and best institutions (MIT, Stanford, CMU).

 

I think you contradict yourself when you talk about professors doing their work themselves and then talking about them hiring professionals to do things. Professors doing the work themselves would just mean less progress and less results. You may think that's good. I don't agree. Professors hiring professionals would make things way more expensive for whoever is paying for the research. If money is available, then I'm all for it though.

 

BTW, what you argue for somewhat exists too, though in limited quantity. There are government research labs where researchers work themselves with some professionals on various research projects without student "army". There are private and industrial research labs. You may not like these for other reasons, but they also mostly follow the model that you like: "researchers working themselves with some professionals on various research projects". So we do have alternatives.

 

Finally, you have a lot of emotions against the system. I guess that you had bad experience with it. I'm sorry for that. I've had great experience with it and although I have not worked at the university after doing my degree, I still interact with people from there and have a lot of respect for them. It is not ideal system. It has issues. But I disagree that it's "utterly without logic and reason. Its inefficient, corrupt and stupidly run."

 

Good luck

[rukawa]

The geniuses from the past who you like so much also had to find funding. OK, they were not exactly today's grants, but they had to find either government/state/government-institution or private rich people funding (or be rich themselves). How is that different?

There isn't a single case I can think of, of anyones research direction being specified as a condition of funding. It wouldn't have been possible because no bureaucracy even existed to monitor them.

 

Hmm, rukawa, I am confused now.  8) Your last post is very pro-university, your post earlier is very anti-university system. Can you clarify?  8)

 

I believe that there is an important place for long term funding of research in our society. I just think our current model of doing in is inefficient, corrupt and stupid.

 

There is also a historical element to this. The corruption of the system has taken a while to set in. For instance, when the internet was developed, what you had was a very small number of researchers with ample time and money and very little competition. That isn't the case today.

 

Instead of funding professors and creating a hierarchy, I favor funding smart researchers and letting them do whatever they want for a period of time. I would also fund a very sophisticated infrastructure which would include extensive programming libraries, technicians, engineers. Think Bell Labs but more of them. Researchers would able to take advantage of this infrastructure which would itself be extensively documented, improved and the costs cut over time.

 

And finally I would cut the number of researchers probably by 3/4ths. Instead of taking a lot of mediocre people who go to grad school because they don't know what they want to do with their lives, I would take a much smaller number of people who already have some interesting ideas they want to pursue.

 

And I would abolish peer review and just let people post directly to something like a preprint server and have allow any researcher to directly comment on research articles. Think CoBF except for research articles.

 

So you don't believe in multiplier effect from graduate students doing research? You don't believe in graduate students doing worthwhile research? I do. I'll go with Google example again.

 

Also, you seem to forget that graduate studies is studies. People who start at year one of graduate program don't know how to make good research yet (at least majority don't). At the end of graduate studies they do (majority do). So what you call "army" is really a way to teach young people to become researchers.

 

No I certainly don't believe in any multiplier effect. I think the opposite, that a lot of mediocre grad student crowd the research literature without a tremendous amount of garbage.

 

Also, you seem to forget that graduate studies is studies. People who start at year one of graduate program don't know how to make good research yet (at least majority don't). At the end of graduate studies they do (majority do). So what you call "army" is really a way to teach young people to become researchers.

 

I think it is possible, but extremely difficult to train people to do good research. And most of the best don't need to be trained...they just think long and hard about a problem over a very long period of time. But in the current system I would say the training is poor to non-existent.

 

And these young researchers will appear from where? From getting B.Sc.? You really believe that you can fund people to do research without them going to graduate school first? I disagree.

 

As I stated previously I think grad school researcher training is completely non-existent. And I think the best don't need to be trained.

 

But what about the non-geniuses...do they need to be trained? Sure I agree they do. But as I said the current system doesn't do that. Could you create a system that could systematically train researchers? Yes but it wouldn't be easy. And in the current system with the current forces at play, I would argue that its close to impossible.

 

The reason is that to train a researcher you need two qualities: a kind of unselfish nurturing quality that you get in a good teacher, very good teaching ability and simultaneously you want a person who is a brilliant researcher. Generally brilliant scientists are egotistical assholes and horrible teachers. But sometimes you get really brilliant guys who are simultaneously nice as well and excellent teachers. Its rare but possible. And in that case you have someone who can train a researcher. But that is very very very rare. Newton couldn't do it because he was an asshole. Maxwell couldn't because he was a poor teacher.

 

But when it does happen you get a special kind of magic...what Munger would call a lollapolloza effect.

 

Examples of this are Ernest Rutherford and Emmy Noether.

 

Anyways the current system is about as far from that as it is possible for me to imagine.

 

Finally, you have a lot of emotions against the system. I guess that you had bad experience with it. I'm sorry for that.

 

I didn't have a horrible experience. Mine was mediocre. I saw others which were much worse. But generally I have a poor opinion of some aspects of this society. There is this pervasive selfishness and individualism that is corrosive and it effects a lot of things. I don't just see it in academia...I think corporations are much worse.

 

Maybe you could summarize everything I have said with one line:

 

There are too many selfish assholes

[SharperDingaan]

A few points for the vandals  ;)

 

VC versus Ivory Tower are simply competing models .. & nobody likes competition.

All research is a project of some type - but in the real world, all projects need to demonstrate 'proof of concept' within a reasonable period of time. It used to be that the academic made the decision as to when an avenue of research should be abandoned, now its also the VC process. No commercial prospects, no $, no further research - competition.

 

We all 'gotta serve somebody' (Dylan).

Most university facilities, & much of the funding paying for those grad students, is publicly funded; the intent is to produce basic research that society can capitalize on (the annual $1 into the university + intellectual processing = $2-3 of 'intellectual value' out). Incubators & VC involvement is simply the next stage of the value chain (the $2-3 of 'intellectual value' + business processing = $8-10 of annual economic value out). Society gets lots of jobs, and if the average tax rate is 10% - that $10 of annual value created funds the next annual $1 ($10 value x 10% tax) invested in university research. Academics don't make the decisions, society does - more competition.     

 

Waste.

Of course not all university research is commercial (as pointed out), not all incubator research comes from universities either (blockchain). But very few dispute that academic research processes could use a ruthless review - from professor through to grad student. The well worn 'we found and rejected the cure for cancer' because we were looking for the 'cure to xxxxx', comes to mind. There is waste in VC as well, but at least it gets systematically market tested every day.

 

Hence it's not hard to see why the DBA is despised in academia, as they are highly visible disruptors.

OK to have them in the Olympics, if we really have to; but make them swim under time trial in a separate pool. Different rules, different payoffs, and no piles of money interfering with the pictures of that Noble prize ;D

 

Different strokes.

 

SD