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Comment by kanzure | Hacker News Reader

> I have to tell stories too because if I don't....

Sounds like reputation afforded to academia (professors) might be inappropriate. Besides, science shouldn't be judged by reputation but by fact and result. The idea of evaluating the quality of an idea by one's social standing is sort of odd... for someone who should be preaching science.

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This is what you get when you introduce market mechanisms into research institutions. If the researchers have to solicit external sources of finance, they effectively become (part time) sales people.

As the financial sources are by definition external, the people behind them have no clue about the actual research. So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? They necessarily have to tell stories.

I agree with this 100%. I'm a data scientist that works with large demographics and just putting data out there to people does nothing. You have to tell a story around it and give it context for it to make any sense to most people. The most important part is sticking to objective statements about the data and then justifying the actions that are a result of new data.

> So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work?

Maybe the problem is that the science won't work and they're trying to spin it otherwise.

Sometimes you have to spend resources before you can reach a conclusion, which is is a risk. People are always looking for low risk/high reward investments, and when they're unable to evaluate an investment for themselves they incentivize optimistic proposals.

This is pretty idealistic. Humans use reputation to judge everything. Even if we could bend human nature in this one area, how would it work? Who is really in a position to judge cutting edge research? Only other good researchers can really understand and judge someone's research. How do you tell who the good researchers are without reputation? How do you know how much each person is contributing to each insight? You quickly see that the same group of people need to judge each other and then you are at the whim of social dynamics and bias of the group.

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