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> There's just a very big gap between how science should be done and what capital owners want from science

It was "a team from Bayer Healthcare" who "tried to replicate the results of basic cancer studies," failed, "and kicked off a media storm questioning the legitimacy of cancer science—and science in general" [1]. The "capital owners" looking out for their own buck are performing more effectively, narrowly speaking, than academia.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/01/fighting-cancers-crisis-confid...

Even if that's true, that only science that can have a profit motive slapped on it can be done effectively in the current system is a problem. If only such science were done, then we would have different crises of science to deal with because profit seeking is at odds with much science, in particular basic research.

It's also quite obviously the case that profit seeking research has incentives to be bad science in other ways.

> It's also quite obviously the case that profit seeking research has incentives to be bad science in other ways

I agree. My point is the Marxist framework is a bad one for modern science.

We have endowed academics and ones working for private institutions and getting grants from public bodies run by scientists. Privately-financed biotech companies founded by academics taking moon shots and getting acquired by marketing and distribution powerhouses. Even delineating who is "capital" and who is "labour" quickly becomes pedantic more than useful.

> My broader point is the Marxian framework is a bad one for modern science.

I will concede that it's reasonable to think it's an incomplete and limited framework, but I have to take issue with calling it bad. For example, I think this starting point is more productive than the premises of this report.

> Privately-financed biotech companies founded by academics taking moon shots and getting acquired by marketing and distribution powerhouses. Even delineating who is "capital" and who is "labour" quickly becomes pedantic more than useful.

In this example it's plain to me that VCs are capital and entrepreneurs are labor. That's usually the game in such moonshots. Here we can analyze what sort of science is being done through this relationship through a Marxian lens too. VC's want to make big bets with potentially astronomical upside. That means only certain kinds of science will ever be done in this way. Yea, this kind of science is probably more replicable on average, but what about something like Theranos? This sort of science funding has its own problems with inefficient and incomplete allocation of resources.

I'm not a hardcore Marxist; I don't think you can reduce the world to one grand theory based on hot takes inspired by Hegel, but I think it's a more powerful tool than most care to admit.

I do not see much need for delineation. In today's world, every higher-level employee can be analyzed just fine from both sides:

- she is exploited, i.e., forced to act in a profit-maximizing way (in particular, short-term profit). Each other behavior will be penalized (no career, no tenure, ...).

- she is exploiting, i.e., forces her workforce to act in way that they maximize her profit.

Your original thesis just got completely destroyed and now you are bring up unrelated speculative issues not explored in the article.

Just admit that the marxist analysis doesn't hold much water in this case. That doesn't mean it is never useful, just that you might need to think a bit before applying it.

> Your original thesis just got completely destroyed

You're really set off by the word M__x, aren't you?

It certainly seems true that the owners of capital are suffering from the reproducibility crisis as much as anyone is. What 'danharaj is arguing, I think, is that the owners of capital are not well-placed to solve it.

The very nature of capitalism is that people who produce monetizable results should be rewarded for that work, and that people who don't shouldn't. This is fundamentally incompatible with doing science in a reproducible way: paying for positive results and not negative ones gets you p-hacking as an emergent effect. Of course the capitalists don't want to pay for non-reproducible positive results, hence the firestorm. But they more strongly don't want to pay for negative results.

The capital owners in the science industries will probably end up doing something sort of like what the capital owners in the software engineering industries have done: begrudgingly accepted that a non-capitalist approach (open source development across multiple companies without proprietary advantage) produces better results for everyone, and figured out a way to kind of support it. Much like the capital owners in the software engineering industries, they still won't be very effective at it. Their nature will be to still try to extract proprietary advantage when possible, to cut costs per the tragedy of the comments, etc., and so this model will only work well when funded by companies rich enough that they can allow themselves not to show an immediate return on their sponsorship.

Also capital owners would preferably not pay at all and have you work for free. They cannot approach this ideal only because the workers are not constrained spatially (like serfs) not forced (like slaves) to work for them. Sometimes they ate forced due to economic factors to do labour at marginal gain or even loss...

I'm pretty sure this is not accurate.

Issues with reproducibility have been discovered independently in a number of different scientific disciplines going back to the 1990s at least. This was then covered in a New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer, published in 2010 [1]. It included the phrase "decline effect", coined by a researcher studying ESP in the 1930s.

A great deal of the research described in that article is academic in nature. The article also alludes to the contributory influence of funding as one of the causes of this phenomenon:

"The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for." ... "In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology."

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wear...

Academia too is subject to the laws of capitalism. It is not some siloed-off eden of labour working for itself. Anyone working in academia can attest to the same pressures you see in the free market, whether it be short termism or maddening bureaucracy.

I think this is pretty self evident, but the issue is that let's say you have some system where economic forces are removed. Essentially a researcher basic income in one scenario. This would suddenly massively incentivize people towards this direction since it's basically a career path that guarantees a stable livelihood, which is something that's extremely rare today. Well you need to ensure there's nobody just completely gaming the system and so inextricably you'll end up with some sort of qualifier for results. And now suddenly you've done nothing but kick the can since this new qualifier is what's going to be gamed.

Maybe the biggest problem is what you mention, but in another direction. For whatever reason there seems to be extremely little interest in the private direct funding of science. In times past the aristocracy would often fund scientific research on all sorts of topics. Today the practice seems to have all but disappeared, certainly if we measure relative ratios of the practice.

Small correction. A basic income is guaranteed no matter what; there’s no means testing or anything like that. You can’t game the system because there’s nothing to game: you get the money regardless. You seem to be describing the system we have now, where you’re paid for results.

I think what the parent is saying is that with a basic income only for researchers that creates a scenario where ‘Well you need to ensure there's nobody just completely gaming the system and so inextricably you'll end up with some sort of qualifier for results.’ That you don’t have ‘fake researchers’ gaming the ‘basic income only for researchers’ reward.

A universal basic income is guaranteed no matter what; but it's certainly possible to have basic income schemes that are not universal but limited to some (small) subpopulation, and the criteria for being in that subpopulation can be gamed.

I don't see why you would want to solve this with a researcher basic income (and overhead/bureaucracy of figuring out who is a researcher) and not the simpler solution of an actual universal basic income.

Simpler but still more expensive by far, and I suppose the ROI would be far smaller.

> and not the simpler solution of an actual universal basic income

Eliminating fossil fuel use is also simple. But there's another dimension to this problem, called "political viability", which I feel you're overlooking.

I don't think a $10-20k/yr UBI is anywhere close to the actual cost of allowing individuals to conduct meaningful scientific studies.

Grad students seem to make it work, somehow.

Fair point and even I managed to live off of and conduct research on 25k/yr in grad school. Though much of that cost was also offset by access to facilities, labs, equipment, and supplies. Would love to see more public access to these sorts of resources.

> For whatever reason there seems to be extremely little interest in the private direct funding of science.

Too much income equality. You can't have Rockefeller University without Rockefeller.

While we're talking political economy, I was thinking that academia tends towards a degenerate form resembling subsistence agriculture: defending a small patch of turf and making just enough meaning to support a career. Even if the raw economic incentive is removed (e.g "publish or perish") there is sufficient ego investment to preserve this pattern.

You might enjoy the book, The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren, Newton, and the Story of a Scientific Revolution.

The book is set around 1660, as the center of the scientific universe shifted from Italy to England. Interestingly, the formation of the Royal Society occurred in the midst of the English Civil war. Not only economic forces, but military forces and political forces had a dramatic impact on shaping what became the formalization of of the scientific method, and peer review process.

Consider that the very existence of Oxford (and other universities) hung on the arbitrary conceptions of military generals and the political implications of their decisions.

The reproducibility crisis is most severe in the social sciences. Hard sciences like physics are on much firmer ground, and conflating the two is clownish. Social science research is funded almost entirely by the government[1].

It's a nice story you've got there, but the reason there is a replication crisis in the softer sciences is not due to the evil capitalists of the marxist imagination. In fact, much of it is due to cultural marxist insistence on outcomes conforming to political correctness, as well as uncritical acceptance of politically conforming work. See the ongoing fight against the idea of a high genetic basis for adult IQ.

All of this is obvious enough: capitalists aren't interested in non-reproducable results unless it is obviating them from blame for a given externality. But that sort of research is a small fraction of overall research (and should absolutely be done by impartial third parties.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science

Maybe none of this ideological bullshit is the real issue? Maybe the major problem is that hard vs soft sciences are subject to different experimental controls and confounding factors, not to mention standards of rigor. If you claim to discover a new particle your n will be in the billions, and a whole community will analyze your results with a fine comb. Meanwhile if you make a claim about implicit bias or the nutritional value of coffee it’s based on tiny samples with huge variability.

It’d be cool if your and the other poster’s ideological spat could try to not use science as the battleground, or at least eliminate more likely issues before going there. Social sciences are hardly even science from the perspective of a chemist or physicist, there’s no need to delve into petty ideology. Methodology is a much richer source of hurdles to overcome than old and sad debates.

> It’d be cool if your and the other poster’s ideological spat could try to not use science as the battleground, or at least eliminate more likely issues before going there.

I don't disagree. A big part of the problem is the social sciences claiming the mantel of science (often just statistics layered over tiny samples, as you point out), in order to imply some sort of impartiality and precision on par with the hard (i.e. real) sciences.

Unfortunately, and I say this sincerely, I believe the ideological nature of the social sciences since the 60s has been responsible for a huge amount of uncritical acceptance of bad (false) work as well as preventing a lot of unpopular good (true) work. I don't know how to deal with that fact other than stating so forthrightly, which, unfortunately from the perspective of science, carries necessary ideological freight with it.

>Social sciences are hardly even science from the perspective of a chemist or physicist

A chemist or a physicist still have hard time dealing with particle assemblies of say 100-100000 particles. For several last centuries they learnt to deal with [aggregate properties of] assemblies on the scale of 10e20+ particles. Only during last century they came to pretty good understanding of 1 particle.

In social sciences this is Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (ie. they are real social science today, not some professor in an office). This is the scale where aggregate properties appear, and they start to be able to drill down from it.

> Hard sciences like physics are on much firmer ground, and conflating the two is clownish.

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

> It's a nice story you've got there, but the reason there is a replication crisis in the softer sciences is not due to the evil capitalists of the marxist imagination.

You understand literally nothing about Marxism. For example, "capitalist" isn't a moral designation, it is a description of an economic agent's role in an economic relationship. Capital owners have access to resources and they give permission to laborers to use those resources. That's it.

> cultural marxist

You can't be serious.

> See the ongoing fight against the idea of a high genetic basis for adult IQ.

This plays out more in the public sphere than in scientific communities. It's also the case that a few popular intellectuals try to sell psychometric science as saying more than it actually does about how social policies should be designed. This, again, happens moreso outside of scientific circles.

Pharmaceutical companies influence research according to [1] to gain support for their medicines.

Studying economic factors underlying social activity isnt by itself Marxist. This methodology is adopted in support of different political positions. In fact, many free-market economists also do this and get accused of 'economics imperialism' by social science faculty who want to study other factors.

Another point made in [1] is the blame isnt just on companies but people being influenced.

[1]https://medium.com/@drjasonfung/the-corruption-of-evidence-b...

Marx!? Marx can teach us very little about economics and almost nothing about science. Science is NOT “a relationship between capital and labor”.

If you see everything through a such a strong lens, you see very little.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents, which never lead anywhere new. I know the GP pointed there, but that's no reason to follow the pointer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough but I was reacting to the clearly idealogical. To suggest Marx has something to add in this issue is both provocative and ridiculous. To entertain drivel this degrades HN.

As I tried to explain, it's a matter of degree. If a comment contains both bait and substance, it falls to the rest of us not to take the bait, since doing that guarantees a useless tangent or worse. The acceptable options are either (1) react to the substance, or (2) don't react.

Getting triggered happens to everyone but is not an act of intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html