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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Sure. But remember also that the standard “science” is largely a broken model. Academia sucks. It’s honestly bad. It’s overflowing with papers that are misleading, irrelevant, or fraudulent due to a mix of poor stats knowledge, bad incentives, and a failure to organize effectively.

While people praise the scientific method, the majority of achievements we attribute to “science” are not derived from guess and check grad students doing their thing.

The standard paper is not very good. And a lot of the reason is that our scientific model is largely designed to find tiny effect sizes. Which is fine for like… medical stuff. But the juice is in large effect sizes. Stuff so obvious you don’t really need the stats to evaluate it. It doesn’t really matter if you followed the scientific method or not when you discover penicillin. It just works, clearly. And you can demonstrate it working again.

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Right. In historical context the scientific method was a huge improvement over the previous method of understanding the world, which was mostly religion.

But today, academia is a victim of organizational and political capture, making it less competitive for talent.

People struggle to differentiate the scientific method and the lifecycle of academia.

In some ways academia is akin to a religion or cult that sprang up around the scientific method, and the cult has now diverged as far from the seed as far right christianity has from jesus’s teachings

Oh come on, have some perspective: academia has millions more people to slaughter before they catch up with the cult of Christianity.

https://apholt.com/2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusad...

John Shertzer Hittell– Estimates 1,000,000 total dead for the crusades to the East covering the period from 1095 to 1291.

“In the two centuries of this warfare one million persons had been slain, but it had not been without some compensations.” John Shertzer Hittell, A Brief History of Culture (1874), p.137.

[...]

John M. Robertson– Estimates 9,000,000 total dead for the crusades to the East covering the period from 1095 to 1291.

“It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries from the first crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished, in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of human beings, at least half of them Christians. Misery and chronic pestilence had slain most; but the mere carnage had been stupendous.” John M. Robertson, A Short History of Christianity (1902), p. 278.

You might be stuck in an argumentative mode of thought, it seems like you replied to an interpretation of my comment that left out some salient details.

If you have some salient details about millions of people being slaughtered by academia, then please post them!

Otherwise my point stands that your comparison is ridiculous, because religion has killed millions more people than academia, despite Jesus's teachings and the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" commandment.

Religion has diverged vastly and diabolically further from the teachings of Jesus than academia has from the scientific method. There's no comparison.

You're being extremely anti-intellectual while whitewashing and rationalizing the slaughter of millions of innocent people, misery, carnage, and chronic pestilence, if you think academia is anywhere near as bad a cult as Christianity.

He compared it to a cult. Not all cults have killed millions of people. But many cults do stray very far from the original stated reason for the cult existing. For example some cults will treat their members like free labor and claim the goal is to make everyone happy through hard work and lack of worry about money. But then the leader will get a lot of money and start buying nice things for himself.

Buying a nice car with other people's labor isn't as bad as killing millions of people but it is straying very far from the original declared mission.

You seem to believe that murder is the metric that can be used to measure how well an organization is doing as far as following their mission.

I remain convinced that the correct model for science is a) serious hobbyists and b) patronage for the really talented. It would weed out the careerists, at least. You just can't make a "science factory" and expect to produce discoveries like cogs. It's stupid to even try.

I think you can. That’s basically corporate research teams.

The problem with academia is that it’s comprised of people who are held hostage until they find something. Just terrible incentives.

I think the search for tiny effects and the belief that they should drive treatment, is one of the biggest things wrong with medical research. Doctors will put millions of people on a pill that hits a vital metabolic pathway, for life, based on tiny (to my thinking) statistically significant (i.e. only a 5% chance they aren't based on a real effect) results.

These days I only believe large effects- like smoking causes heart disease

Medical standards aren’t that bad. It’s just a complicated system with lots of interacting effects that only work for specific circumstances. Coupled with the fact that many medicines are not cures, but something that makes you die slower.

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