> what needs to change in the education process so studies are better designed
Remove politics, free kidnapped and gagged science.
Remove politics, free kidnapped and gagged science.
Politics just adds some spin onto that. Education, I just don't think that's even a possible solution. The math involved in some of these fancier statistical techniques can be devilishly hard to get right, and it's often simply asking too much to expect someone to be an expert at both that and molecular biology. You could argue that that means people should look for competent co-authors to cover that side of things. But, see above - current incentive structures don't really favor the researcher who says, "I know! Let's bring on some nerd whose only job is to find reasons why we shouldn't publish!"
After all they are serving to the advance of science also (and saving thousands of expensive hours of research to other). If you want to promote it, just create incentives.
Otherwise, If the cheater wins in a 95% of the times and the verifier does not have anything to gain (and will damage their own research by the time invested on this) after a while only cheaters remain [1]. At middle term, all research tend towards a sort of expensive shamanism in well illuminated white rooms.
[1] (And of course the non cheaters will be actively blocked from this point).
Are they? If your proposed project does not align with current politics, no funding for you.
Nutrition? Would be surprising if there's much political distortion there but there's lots of really bad methodologies, partly because it's hard to get good data (people are bad at reliably writing down what they eat).
Social bot/misinformation research? Basically just politics masquerading as science. Methodologies are invariably bogus and conclusions are clearly determined before any 'research' is done.
Epidemiology? A mix of bad incentives and ideological distortion. The focus on policy advice isn't really scientific, and their policies somehow always end up requiring massive state intervention in people's private lives. This isn't something that falls naturally out of the science (which is unreliable anyway) but more the fact that they don't even consider any other possibilities.
The above three are pretty bad fields. There are plenty of better ones. Computer science is mostly OK. AI and cryptography are slightly dubious. Stuff like databases or computer graphics are fine. So IMO it doesn't make sense to talk about research or academia in general, or it does but only when discussing the universal incentive problems. Some fields just seem naturally resistant to political game playing because they don't have much/any impact on social policy to begin with. Obviously I mean politics as in democratic politics here, not the more mundane everyday departmental politics.
That needs the remotion of taxation. I agree.