Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

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There's a well known paper from 2005 - "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" John P. A. Ioannidis https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Assuming that that paper is not false, it highlights lots of areas/reasons why things can go wrong.

Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the 'scientific method' is the best we've got. "How do you get people to discover reliable knowledge without getting sidetracked by bias, bribes, career incentives, corporations or politics" is actually a very hard problem to solve. The cobbled together bunch of institutions, practices and traditions that we call 'the scientific method' needs to be understood for what it is - a patchy, error prone but just about servicable method for fighting our own biases and shortcomings.

Always good to look for ways to improve it I guess but overly cynical or overly optimistic takes on it don't help much. We need to have a realistic view of it.

The difference versus acedemia of old is that science used to be the hobby of rich gentlemen who were under no financial pressures to pay their mortgage and feed their families. Nowadays, I have no doubt everyone is in their field because they love it and want to further it, but if you have to choose between unemployment or taking on projects that you didn't choose most can live with the latter.

So the solution is to somehow decouple it again. Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business. Sure, that's obviously open to exploitation in a new way, but we only need one major discovery for the whole thing to be worth it which we can't get with small incremental research.

> Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business.

Personally, I favor the opposite—stop awarding universities the "indirect costs" part of grant awards unless they agree to cap the hiring of grant-seeking investigators. The number of grant applicants needs to be balanced with the supply of public funds, and I don't think the public is willing to pay much more than they already are. And I say this as someone who is currently grant-funded.

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