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Comment by j_maffe | Hacker News Reader

I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.

Show me someone that questions the scientific method. You would be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person who does. When people criticize "science" they are almost always criticizing academia. Getting pedantic isn't very helpful.

I don't know I think pointing out that OP is talking about academia can help with finding actual root causes. It wasn't a way to criticize the notion in any way. Using two things like science and academia interchangeably is not a minute detail IMO

Feyerabend, for one, but that's getting quite above you...

That would have been a better comment without the dig. I suspect the person you're replying to would find "Against Method" interesting (assuming they haven't already read it).

I don't want to be pedantic or argumentative, but I think you've created a straw-man of the comment you're replying to.

scientific institutions != scientific method

Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.

>Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.

For some. For others its national labs, like Los Alamos or NASA centers. In those, the culture is very different.

>Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.

That's an opinion. Industry does a lot more worthwhile science than academia, and does it without tax money, in my opinion.

Was the transistor invented by academia? You can argue that's engineering, rather than science. In my opinion the difference is semantics.

Apart from the fact that you seriously overestimate the amount of science being done in industry, you seem to also underestimate the amount of government assistance industry receives for doing this research (and more development), either through tax breaks or direct grants.

I agree that industry does a lot of worthwhile science, and maybe more than academia, but I was talking about 'prestige', not 'productivity'.

sure, but in practice when people use the word science (as in "trust the science"), they mostly mean research happening in academia

...which is unfortunate, and worth pointing out that academia is not the only conductor of scientific research.

I think the takeaway is that the scientific method is great, but since science is necessarily conducted by humans, the economic incentives within context of "doing science" also need to be correct for good science to get done.

(Currently, it seems like, this is very often not the case. Hence, your trust in current-science-as-conducted should be correspondingly lower. Lots of variation by field, probably, too.)

(Though then again maybe you shouldn't even believe anything until you see it having actual real effects in your day to day life?)

Any method that ignores the limitations of the instruments of production is indeed very flawed

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