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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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?

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...

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...

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.

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