Science Vigilante Calls Out Bogus Results in Prestigious Journals

Maybe culling the herd a bit would improve its quality. Maybe being forced out of the profession for misconduct would help prevent it. Maybe the bar needs to be raised a bit for entry so there's less competition and less pressure to cheat.

I think we should set standards and not be afraid to uphold them. This will probably result in fewer scientists, but maybe it will become clear where we are failing them earlier in their education and allow us to improve that process.

Pay the ones that produce good work? What is good work? Right now, that is decided by number of papers. That metric is gamed to death, that is what publish or perish culture did. Choose any other metric, it will be gamed too.

What if the PhD meant something such that having it was enough? That was all you needed, then you would just get paid to do science. Such a gatekeepeing would require graduating a lot fewer PhDs. How to do that is open: admit fewer? Or psd fewer? If the latter, maybe master out a lot more? Anyone that makes it through gets a guaranteed paycheck, but almost no one makes it through.

Where you are mistaken is that there are a large number of graduates because there is a large demand for research. There isn’t. A given professor needs N papers to get tenure. Say that N = c*k for c researchers and k papers. N is so large that c must be >2, so for the professor to get tenure, they need assistants. Where do they come from? Graduate students. What do those students do when they graduate? The professor doesn’t care because they have tenure now.

Research funding has been decreasing over time, which means N increases, which, counter-intuitively, means c increases, which starts a negative feedback loop because the amount of researchers competing for funding increases while the amount of funding available decreases, still further increasing the number of graduate students needed. That explains what you see.

I was doing a PhD in high energy experimental physics until I finally notice that the majority of my peers were not doing science, they were padding a resume.

Today we could stop doing high energy physics, both theory and experiments, for 50 years and we would not actually retard the progress of the field. We lack the engineering to build experiments better than the ones we have for any sane price and we are sitting around counting angels on pins. The brainpower that we are wasting on un-rigorous mathematics could be much better spent in any number of fields.

I dare you to read 100 papers in any field that you are familiar with and tell me that 95 of the papers aren't there just because someone needed to publish something. I've talked to people in astronomy, genetics, mechanical engineering and computer science and they all say the same thing.

We don't need more science, we need better science. The simplest way to do that is to do less of it. We won't even be hurting progress because you will be able to trust it, unlike today where if you try and synthesize an experiment from three papers you're pretty much guaranteed it won't work because the papers are either fraudulent, p-hacked, flat out wrong or not even wrong.

I don't see a proof in this statement - all I see is a belief. Many people believe that a sheer number of people engaged in professional science and requisite "publish or perish" job description is the cause of decreasing quality of scientific publications. Increasing the fraction of population with PhD have to run into Bell Curve limitations at some point.

Yes of course. As per "The Mythical Man-Month"[1] adding more people to a project doesn't speed id up - quite the opposite, slows it down.

Right now we have huge overhead in training and communication. Low s/n ratio follows. You can fix that gatekeeping science a bit better - pick more talented, better educated, harder working candidates, and train & finance & supply them better.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

It need not be the Gold Standard people, or those who believe in a pending vague apocalypse or collapse. Some insist that fuel injection systems with computer control are "less reliable" in spite of needing less maintenance and fewer replacements than older fuel dispersal systems. It resembles a "monkeysphere" sort of concept like a stereotypical communist refusing to see that the disappearance of every banker would cause real and major damage or an ideological counterpart objectivist not seeing that a complete disappearance of bueracrats would also cause real and major damage.

This isn't to say that current systems don't have deadweight, dysfunctions, and things which could be redone way better without the weight of inertia, legacy, and vested interests. The current cure may in fact be worse than the disease but that the cognitive "here be dragons" interferes with understanding a whole system and its alternatives.

I think calling a watch-dog or an independent peer-reviewer a vigilante is not inappropriate. It's a stylistic choice. I think it's important in literary education to be able to distinguish between what a word is and what cultural baggage it has (how it's used). Of course, where a word ends and its baggage begins is debatable, but it's a good debate to have.

Personally, I often find them a useful starting point on a topic. At best they capture the field at a moment in time, at worst their near useless. However, that’s just me not everyone in every field.

Good luck.

> I am excited by the business model of the journal, which is that its very small running costs (like Discrete Analysis, it uses the Scholastica platform, which charges $10 per submission, as well as a fixed annual charge of $250, and there are a few other costs such as archiving articles with CLOCKSS and having DOIs)...

[1] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/advances-in-combinat...