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Comment by kjrose | Hacker News Reader

From my time working within an academic environment, I can attest this is absolutely true. Especially since the gatekeepers (older professors, etc) have a general interest to see these older articles cited more and referenced. It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work. It's also why the general public's knowledge of how science works needs to be adjusted. Science is not a "100% correct" or "100% not correct" thing, and unfortunately I've seen too many institutions and individuals use that myth to try and push an agenda.

It's a combination of institutional momentum, combined with the fact that a specific narrative is politically expedient. The unfortunate thing is bad decisions, made off of bad science, regardless of the reasons external to the science, generally lead to bad outcomes.

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As Max Planck observed, science advances one funeral at a time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

I think we need to make the clear distinction between "Science" - the application of the Scientific Method, and "Academia" - the set of institutions, processes, and people who should be applying the scientific method, but are actually just trying to make a living in a messed-up system like the rest of us.

Science is always right in the long term.

Academia can be very wrong for a very long time.

> Science is always right in the long term.

... may I suggest, "application of the Scientific Method has worked better than other alternatives, so far"

Is this true though? Wouldn't it be rather boring if the standard model continues work? In the end, Josephson won. Even the example that the author here mentions with breast cancer-vs-skin cancer was eventually discovered to be wrong. The main question is the time scale.

>It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work

While I agree it's not malicious, I'd say the reason it works this way is that there is a financial incentive to have it work this way.

It is not finance. There are a lot of motivations which are based on ego or prestige. Scholarship is unfortunately often based on competition - but the standards of winning are different from that of oil tycoons. Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works.

> Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works

Why not? Given that only people with the 'correct' views get tenure to begin with, it doesn't surprise me at all that while there is plenty of ego and prestige, I'd classify it as bickering among priests. Point remains, only people who are indoctrinated and interested in advancing the interests of the church get to be priests to begin with.

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