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Comment by quonn | Hacker News Reader

> It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

The problem is that in the current system (based on publishing as much as possible quickly and at prestigious conferences) there are few incentives to do this. Instead people learn to game the system. Academics need to relax a bit, but they can't, since there is so much competition.

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After Peter Higgs won his Nobel Prize he said some great stuff on this subject, the idea that he wouldn't be allowed the time to do work like his anymore. Please google at your leisure.

I see this narrative about the current publish-or-perish system quite often.

How is the current system of academic incentives different from the system of a few decades ago?

In my view there are a couple of factors involved. First, it's my impression that it keeps getting more and more competitive. Job security is being whittled away.

Second, we've left the century of physics and entered the century of biology. Most of what you read about, regarding the "reproducibility crisis" and so forth, has to do with the medical and behavioral sciences, which have grown in relation to the physical sciences. It's to the point where, when somebody generalizes about "science research," it's likely to be about life science, and a few of us physical scientists realize that we're an insignificant exception.

I wouldn't say that life science is better or worse than physical science, but that it introduces a new set of problems that may take a few decades to address. One difference is that the life sciences seem more dependent (for now at least) on weak statistics.

Disclosure: I'm a physicist in industry.

The pressures are perhaps greater now than when Feynman started out in science, partly because so much of the academic career path is more rigid and formulaic than it used to be. Still, human nature being what it is, the temptation to cut corners has always been (and likely will always be) there.

This.

Somewhere there was drawn a line - education for work, and education for science.

Nearly everyone think both are the same. Leading to thinking publish or perish being ok even if it's shit work.

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