Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
Well, global warming is the reality, and the contribution of hoomans that free more greenhouse gases has been theoreticly and qualitatively proposed by big baller Joseph Fourier.. 200 years ago.
Lab results for the greenhouse effect by Eunice Newton Foote in 1857. Her paper was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by magnetizing Joseph Henry with the following introduction:
What has already happened is one thing, predictions about the future is something else. One example is sea level rise. Yes, it is rising, but only around 2,3mm per year. There are scenarios of a more dramatic increase, but it is impossible to predict. Currents can also change to make it colder near the poles, but that does not fit the main narrative about a human caused disaster.
The actual scientists write stuff like
Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15 to 0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1]mm yr-1 between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr-1 between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to –4.2] mm yr-1 between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).
and when they come with predictions, it looks like this -
That some media chooses to report '1 meter increase in the next 50 years' isn't really on the scientists, here. But even the intermediate would see a 70 cm increase from 2000 to 2100 - well above 2,3 mm per year.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kampf, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
I will direct the same question to yourself as I did to L_master. Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives and that the self-correcting nature of the scientific consensus is not working? I would genuinely like to look at this.
On November 06 2024 18:36 Uldridge wrote: A surprising amount of things are based on how people feel about a thing. Weird how that works. Even science.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Are you talking about the scientific process or how non-scientists feel about science?
I'm talking about the process of how we, as humans - organisms that filter a highly selective part of reality - try to understand reality. Don't get me wrong, we understand a vast amount already, but it's possible we're limited in understanding only a fraction of it due to our limitations of the brain. Now, science is a framework that hinges upon the actors being, so to speak, completely objective and truth and reality, or our understanding of that at least, kind of depends on that. Time and time again it has been shown that history, personal and institutional biases, funding etc. get in the way of accurately finding out how things work. People abuse statistics to get more interesting results, replication crisis remains an issue, people try to get funding for potentially futile endeavors because it's trending right now, when other theories that could be as challenging get less because that's how hype and momentum works and humans are not devoid of that.
We can agree on basic facts. We can observe things on our world and we can describe them pretty rigorously. Often times, though, a narrative of reality is created that we adhere to because that's the current hype or does a particular thing in that point in time pretty well, but will then be torn to shreds because it was incomplete or because it was simply wrong. And none of it matters really because at the end of the day all you do as a human is sleep, eat, drink, shit, piss, socialize and if you're lucky fuck. It's a feelings based reality we live in. How much energy do you have today? How hungry are you? Our scientifically based jnfrastructure we have is nice, but... completely unnecessary. I'm starting to ramble now so I'll see myself out.
Thank you for the clarification, I get what you're saying.
The beauty of science is that it is a self-correcting system. If you have bad scientists or bad system implementation (which is what you're describing in the majority of your post), this leads to results that will not be replicated and research that will not lead to new breakthroughs. If you expect scientists to be accurate and correct 100% of the time, that's unfeasible. Mistakes in methodology happen. Data is misinterpreted all the time. It can derail the field in the short term, sure, but in the long-term, no scientist clings to an approach that doesn't work, flawed methodology leads to results that simply do not match reality and are eventually discarded. Scientific consensus emerges and we make progress -- it is designed to be an iterative process after all.
I agree with all of that.
But if the incentives are bad enough, it can lead to all kinds of bodies of horrible research, founded and built upon more horrible research, that people try to shoehorn into ever more aggressively.
Evolution wise, even if a civilization stuck to that, it's likely it would be outcompeted by a civilization that did better science in due course.
At it's worst, you're talking about essentially the next scientific dark age. (No, I don't think this is happening or will happen)
But it can easily set progress back a decade or three.
And cause tremendous pain and wasted energy and resources trying solutions based on science built on a house of cards. Not to mention the issues with creativity and the fact that funding very strongly rewards immediate results doing in paradigm science and shows less interest in studies that accept the null.
I believe we're in the dark ages of scientific research because it's all to do with funding and clout and unwillingness to reflect on biases.
Replication crisis, predatory journals, actual fraudulence in papers (made up data etc), peer reviews being shit at times because reviewers don't like the research due to it clashing with their work or they want to publish that type of research first. It's crazy. People lose faith in the framework because people abuse everything that's built on the solid foundations. In this aspect I don't think science a self correcting thing any longer.
More fundamentally I think it's one of the narratives on how we can shape society, just like religion. It's important becuase it's useful. Make science useless and it's existence stops.
As far as reality goes, a thing I wanted to mention that is very apt right now: no matter the facts, if people feel a certain way, you won't change that by flaunting numbers in their faces. Example: people feel unsafe in public spaces, even though empirically speaking, the crime rate has gone down. Saying this won't make a difference. "Reality" in this case is that people, through a variety of paramaters, feel less safe than it actually is. The idea is the find out why that is, not saying that they're wrong.
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics1.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
A US-based biophysicist who is one of the world’s most highly cited researchers has been removed from the editorial board of one journal and barred as a reviewer for another, after repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to amass citations to his own work.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science.
The replication crisis[a] is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine:
The reclassification from an identity issue to a dysphoric issue was a direct result of the stigma and psychological distress of the idea that being transgender was a type of psychiatric disorder, and it absolutely is not.
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If the research pans out and is reproducible, it will become mainstream and he will be lauded as a pioneer and celebrated as a visionary. He got the funding to do what he did, did he not? Scientists are still people and nobody likes it when someone else claims that all the stuff you base your own research on is flawed. But they will grudgingly accept the results if the methodology is solid and there are no obvious flaws in the research. It's how the system works, other people will try it out and grudgingly publish their findings even if they contradict established dogma. It's how it works. 97% of scientists are honest and will not chicken out. Even in your example, the lady that did the work that found results that weren't favorable to her cause published them anyway.
On November 07 2024 01:15 Jealous wrote: [quote] [quote]
Disclaimer: This is going to be a big block of text and it's barely relevant to the topic at hand (election), so if you're not interested in following this line of discussion, just scroll down now.
A lot of what I'm going to be writing about in this post is based on my experience in the field of psychology. While I absolutely think that research in psychology is usually a science (as in, adhering to the scientific method), there are also situations where I believe it is not a science so it may not be the best fit for this line of discussion opened by @Ender. However, enough people believe in the validity of the field without digging into whether a "consensus" is reached through scientific or unscientific means, and I will be providing some examples which apply to the sciences at large.
I would also like to disclose that I absolutely have a chip on my shoulder about how research is conducted in certain areas of psychology and how conclusions within those fields are arrived at, but I will try to present my position as objectively as possible.
Based on my personal experience, this issue is definitely not exclusive to China or Chinese researchers. I could speak about this topic at length but the TL;DR here is that there are situations where social, societal, hierarchical, professional, and financial pressures all lead to "bad" science. "Bad" science here being research done in bad faith, more specifically methods which reject data that goes against a hypothesis that is socially beneficial to espouse.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of politics and ego involved in science, because science is conducted by humans who are often bound by politics and ego. This isn't as egregious as submitting entirely fake research and having it published, but it is still a factor in terms of what gets published, who gets published, etc.
5. As Uldridge mentioned, there is also the Replication crisis, which basically infers that a lot of the research we have been relying on for decades has been tainted by the aforementioned "bad" science. [quote]
6. At this point I'll go into one of the areas of psychology/psychological research which I was most familiar with due to my work as a research assistant within it. It is also what exposed me to the aforementioned elements of politics, ego, personal sentiment, social pressures, etc. being involved in science.
This was shortly after the reclassification of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) into Gender Dysphoria (GD). I was conducting literature analysis on the presentation of GID and GD in new editions of textbooks in order to determine whether they have changed structurally in order to accommodate this reclassification. In short, my research was inspired by what I would consider to be a "pro"-trans position held by the head researcher, as it sought to evaluate whether the stigma of their condition being a "disorder" was appropriately being mitigated. This is something that I was on board with, because I believe that textbooks should present the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, if one textbook simply changed the title and text of the subchapter GD without moving it out of the "Disorders" chapter, or if GD was squished firmly between the topics of drug addiction and gambling, then perhaps that publisher is not doing their best in understanding and presenting this change from GID to GD.
At some point, a question arose in my mind: "Why was this change made in the first place?" While the explanation offered by one of the people who was allegedly on the board* which made this decision does a great job of outlining the logic behind it, the under reason is even more simple reason: it offended people.
*I did some cursory research to try to see if I can conclusively place this person on the DSM panel which made this decision, but was unable to do so. However, this is because I'm not finding any comprehensive list anywhere. As it stands, I am inclined to believe that this person was indeed on this panel.
It should be noted that the person who posted this is transgender, which may present a conflict of interest, but it's not a claim I will try to argue here. For example, I'm not sure that we should bar people who have an anxiety disorder from doing research on anxiety disorders. However, when it comes to classification and the writing of definitions, I think that there may be a greater possibility of bias seeping in.
Anyway, from Natalie Walker's explanation, emphasis mine: [quote]
On the surface, this seems very much in line with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM back in 1973. I could discuss the differences between these two decisions, but this is not the crux of the issue for me. The crux of the issue for me is that because the old classifications offend people, they are changed. What were the studies conducted to support this outcome? I can't imagine that there were any real experiments being conducted (due to obvious ethical restraints). As such, I find this to be - within the context of this discussion - not scientific.
Yet, research within this field seems to be at least somewhat curated by the governing bodies that be. In other words, if your research goes against the grain of the consensus, that research might not be supported by your university, funded, or published. Even if it is published, it may then be removed or censored. In my personal experience, even broaching the topic of conducting research on what may be a sensitive topic for the transgender community can at the very least be heavily discouraged by your research advisors.
For an example beyond my own experience, this article was written by a researcher whose research was allegedly censored because it went against the narrative. Naturally, this is a first-hand source and is thus almost assuredly biased, but I wanted to provide one concrete example within this specific field of research.
I'm not saying that research on these topics doesn't happen. After all, there have been some incendiary studies published which report on the prevalent comorbidity of narcissism and GID, as well as some research looking into the hypothesis that there is a prevalent comorbidity with autism (and thus that autism may be a contributing factor to GID). My point is that this type of research is difficult to get off the ground, raises eyebrows, and can receive significant negative backlash. I believe it was Uldridge that mentioned that publishing certain kinds of research can end a person's career. There are many self-reported cases of "blackballing" in various fields of academia for this very reason.
I want to be clear that this is not exclusive to the hot button issue of GID and transgender rights. For example, studies on the performance of women vs. men in various disciplines are also affected. I can't find the article now, but one researcher had their research approved for publishing but then the governing body retracted it before publication, meaning that the researcher cannot publish it in a different journal and that no one can read it, either. The were then fired from their position at a western university, which they alleged was because female researchers at their university went on a warpath against them. Why? Because they went against the currently established narrative that women are equal to men in all ways, and thus any findings which purport that women might perform worse in math-related subjects is seen as actively harmful to women, and thus the research has effectively been sealed. I wish I could find this article but I have to head out soon and am running out of time; I'm sure I have it saved somewhere, so if I run into it later I will add it here.
Now, I'm not saying that I believe that men are superior to women in math. I just find it unscientific that research which supports this position doesn't see the light of day due to politics and individual feelings, while research supporting absolute equality is incredibly well-represented. Science, in my opinion, should not be constrained by optics.
Anyway, I'll circle back to ask: why is GID present in the most up-to-date DSM while something like Body Identity Dysphoria/body integrity identity disorder - roughly, the desire to have a limb amputated - is not? Why do we perform gender-affirming surgeries on people and give them hormone treatments, while the idea of operating on someone with BID/BIID generally dismissed? Representation, politics, and bias are almost certainly contributing factors - and this is almost assuredly the case in other areas of academia as well.
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
Like I've said before tying yourself to only 1 culture and 1 country while speaking only 1 language is a bad lifetime strategy. It is the easiest and laziest though. And I am lazy so I get it.
Well, global warming is the reality, and the contribution of hoomans that free more greenhouse gases has been theoreticly and qualitatively proposed by big baller Joseph Fourier.. 200 years ago.
Lab results for the greenhouse effect by Eunice Newton Foote in 1857. Her paper was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by magnetizing Joseph Henry with the following introduction:
What has already happened is one thing, predictions about the future is something else. One example is sea level rise. Yes, it is rising, but only around 2,3mm per year. There are scenarios of a more dramatic increase, but it is impossible to predict. Currents can also change to make it colder near the poles, but that does not fit the main narrative about a human caused disaster.
Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15 to 0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1]mm yr-1 between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr-1 between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to –4.2] mm yr-1 between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).
and when they come with predictions, it looks like this -
That some media chooses to report '1 meter increase in the next 50 years' isn't really on the scientists, here. But even the intermediate would see a 70 cm increase from 2000 to 2100 - well above 2,3 mm per year.
Fortunately, Academia has lost so much credibility over the last few years that the general public is correctly skeptical of these projections.
Let's make America great again by burning coal like India does.
Ontario, Canada wrecked it's economy so it could lower worldwide CO2 by 0.1%... what a big dumb move that was. Meanwhile, in China and India...
Definitely some disciplines are more vulnerable to bad actors than others, with psychology being a prime candidate. Likewise with high impact fields such as anything to do with medicine, where success leads to lots of research funding and even possibly fame, creating an environment where lying to succeed becomes, if not commonplace, uncomfortably common as was pointed out in the study that Uldridge linked and the more recent one I found. Nevertheless, you're still talking about less than 3% of total scientists, or, in other words, 97% of scientists are honest. That's a pretty big number.
I would argue that the fact that stuff like the reproducibility project has sprung up as a result of the 'reproducibility crisis' is the self-correcting nature of Science taking direct action. A bunch of researchers realised that a lot of the stuff couldn't be reproduced and was built on very shaky foundations, so they came up with new publishing standards and methodology to ensure that future publications are proofed against this. Again, it's an iterative process. It does not require everyone to get everything right all of the time.
Regarding the discussion about research into hot-button topics like "are men better than women" and "should trans people be classified as having a mental disorder": If you actually look at the literature, it is absolutely chock full of articles comparing men vs women in every imaginable combination of tasks, etc. with many finding differences. What is your contention?
I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
On November 07 2024 20:32 KT_Elwood wrote: I think that the "victim olympics" part of genderstudies isn't helpful at all..and also not scientific.
True, women and men perform distinct and different roles. In any properly functioning civilization men will always perform more physically dangerous tasks and have a lower average life span due to the risks men must take. #1. American men must accept this reality. #2 American men need to stop crying "victim" when faced with this reality.
In a primary and ultimate sense a female life is more valuable than a male life.
On November 07 2024 20:46 Liquid`Drone wrote: That's a really dumb take. I'll happily go more in depth with an answer to a different poster. (to jjr, obv)
I left Ontario because of it. Actions mean more than forum posts. I will not suffer at the whims of voters making bad choices. Nuclear is way too dangerous. When we have another 3 mile island ... Ontario will have no power source.
my take is just fine and my decisions based off of it are just fine as well.
The dire "ozone layer will continue eroding" projections turned out to be incorrect. They had so much fancy math and great looking charts and diagrams. Turned out to be wrong. Lots of ominous talk decades ago though. All BS. You dig into these "climate scientists" and you find out how little they understand the voodoo math they are using to scare people. I guess it is good for additional funding though.
On November 07 2024 02:29 Jealous wrote: [quote] I was mostly addressing the first half of your initial queation ("Do you have any evidence that modern science is being misled by these perverse incentives") more so than the latter (self-correction working). I agree with basically everything you've written here.
The only thing I'd reiterate is that even if there is published research which finds a hypothesis to be true (A) and there is research which finds the same hypothesis to not be true (B), that doesn't mean that they both had the same journey toward publication. A may have received generous funding, tons of support from the university, and was welcomed with open arms by a publisher. Meanwhile the researcher behind B lost support when it became evident that their research was going against the established belief, they were ridiculed by their colleagues and superiors, they had to apply to a different university to conduct research there instead, then they were stonewalled by the top journals and could only get published in a minor journal with little recognition and reach. In fact, the researcher behind B wasn't the first one to try, there were many others before them who for one reason or another didn't manage to or didn't want to overcome all of these obstacles. That in itself is the evidence of politics and bad actors in academic research, though I do agree with you that some fields are naturally more susceptible to this than others.
I'd also like to posit that improvement/revision in one field or on one topic does not necessarily imply that it happens everywhere and always, again due to the potential difficulty of even getting approval for research which goes against the grain, much less have it be objectively peer-reviewed and published.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The dire "ozone layer will continue eroding" projections turned out to be incorrect. They had so much fancy math and great looking charts and diagrams. Turned out to be wrong. Lots of ominous talk decades ago though. All BS. You dig into these "climate scientists" and you find out how little they understand the voodoo math they are using to scare people. I guess it is good for additional funding though.
Please do not use the ozone layer in this argument, it is ridiculous. The ozone layer is a massive victory for science and politics. We figured out a problem, figured out what caused the problem, stopped doing that, and the problem stopped.
And now revisionists take that and say "See, all the fuss about the ozone layer was pointless, it isn't even a problem anymore!". Yes. Because we acted. Humanity as a whole basically completely stopped using the chemicals that destroyed the ozone layer. That is why it isn't a problem anymore. If we hadn't stopped emitting those chemicals, it would kept being a problem.
Figuring out a problem and solving it doesn't mean that the original talk about that problem was just hysteria. That is such a stupid take.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
The professor from my post actually started his research following the Ferguson protests. Going out on the street and protesting wasn’t really his thing so he thought he could do his part by creating a study. So he actually set out to prove that police disproportionately use lethal force against black people which very much would be considered the status quo opinion.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
I think the grievance studies affair shows how easy it is to get published if you just slightly extrapolate and use the right in-vogue references and buzz words. But maybe we are talking about different things: this is in the humanities and the social so called "sciences". I am in the humanities (alas!).
On November 07 2024 08:25 Jealous wrote: [quote] While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
The professor from my post actually started his research following the Ferguson protests. Going out on the street and protesting wasn’t really his thing so he thought he could do his part by creating a study. So he actually set out to prove that police disproportionately use lethal force against black people which very much would be considered the status quo opinion.
You also are more likely to get funding for research that is 'timely'. He identified a key opportunity to test a hot-button hypothesis and got funded to do so. Whatever the results, they would then be able to influence policy, so it also hit the 'highly' important marker.
He got a result that went against what people thought, so he got pushback. He still published the results and he still gets to talk about his research, nobody censored him. I don't think this is a good example of people getting blackballed or the self-correcting nature of science failing. If anything, it's an argument for it -- researchers will publish their findings even when they go against their own beliefs. Could you make a stronger case for scientific integrity?
On November 07 2024 08:25 Jealous wrote: [quote] While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
I think the grievance studies affair shows how easy it is to get published if you just slightly extrapolate and use the right in-vogue references and buzz words. But maybe we are talking about different things: this is in the humanities and the social so called "sciences". I am in the humanities (alas!).
Fiddling some words and introducing buzz words will not make your paper influential, even if it gets it published, i.e. Getting something published is a requirement for it to be influential, but the vast majority of papers are not influential. In my experience, you can get almost any old shit past peer review, we do a journal club every week and boy some of the stuff is flawed. But these papers don't stand the test of time -- only papers that do something meaningful become influential and determine the future direction of a research field.
This is very vague. You only get in high impact journals if the result is surprising or explains some major mechanism, I.e. you've contributed a major insight. Researcher B that you're describing has a better chance of getting into a high impact publication than researcher A to be perfectly honest, assuming the methodology is solid. The funding system is designed so the cost is paid upfront, so if you got the funding, you get to do the research. To do more research, you need to apply for more funding. You don't always get that funding.
While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
I honestly don't think this is true. Yes, when you have already built a strong disruptive case, you are a rockstar. That's obvious. But the battle is long before that.
Disruptive research is a path of very high resistance. You find a thread and pick at it, you lose it, you try again, eventually one catches and slowly, piece by piece, you unravel.... a thing that many of your potential sponsors built their career on.
That first moment where you have nothing more than a hunch and the tip of the first thread between your fingernails, and you need to convince someone to fund your attempt to pull it.... that moment is extremely vulnerable. Especially when that thread is attached to the trousers of the eminent scientist who will assess your grant.
It seems very naïve to assume that they will not try to stop you, whether maliciously, or just because they believe in the thing you are unravelling so strongly, they can't even imagine that you might be right.
If it turns out you have the wrong thread, you have, at best, made yourself look dumb in front of people who will be assessing your work your entire career. At worst, you've made outright enemies of them. I know many people who've put themselves in a career cul de sac by doing this. My old supervisor certainly did.
I do believe that in the hard sciences, the truth will eventually out. Eventually there will be some corollary discovery that opens the cracks, or some new microscope that makes it so you can go from the first thread to half a trouser-leg on the leftovers of some other grant, and then they can't stop you anymore. But a committed dogmatist in a powerful position can slow this process very substantially.
On November 07 2024 08:25 Jealous wrote: [quote] While what you have written makes sense to me and I've known it to be true in some cases, what I wrote has been true in other cases, too. Limitations on funding may be systemic or prejudicial. There are some topics which may be the wrong kind of controversial and results which may be the wrong kind of revolutionary if accepted as the new gospel, so to speak.
I don't mean to assume too much but I suspect that we come from different academic backgrounds and thus anecdotal evidence is bound to be different, both first- and second-hand. In at least my case and the stories told to me by former colleagues, as well as articles written by disenfranchised, ostracized, and blackballed researchers in my former field of study, it seems that having world-upheaving, incendiary research often leads to your becoming a pariah rather than a celebrated revolutionary.
This is still super vague. One of my coworkers gets millions in funding from extreme Christian organisations explicitly to prove that life could not have arisen organically and must have been designed. He clowns it up on X posting extreme content regularly. Yet, he still publishes his findings without issue in high impact journals and he is not blackballed.
Do you have specific sources I can look at that substantiate your point that incendiary research gets you blackballed?
I don’t know about blacklisted but this Harvard Professor speaks about the external pressures to not publish research that tells an inconvenient truth
There’s also the NYT article that came out recently where a researcher studying transgenderism basically admitted to delaying publishing their findings because they weren’t favorable to her cause
Doesn't sound like either of them is blackballed and the research got funded and published anyway.
I know. I addressed that in my post. Just because he wasn’t blackballed doesn’t mean there aren’t negative pressures related to reputation and ostracism that could lead less brave people to self censor themselves.
And you can flip that coin around - it is easy to be a conformist leftist in academia. For example, just take a passage from Mein Kamp, switch the word "jews" to "men" send it in to a journal and you're done.
Doing what everybody else is doing and just following established protocols is the surest way to never get any more funding to do research ever. You guys have no idea.
I don't claim to know everything about that but I have managed to get some 100s of thousands of dollars in research funding.
If you have done any funding application then you damn well know that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more like to get funded, not less.
The whole premise of these posts is flawed.
I honestly don't think this is true. Yes, when you have already built a strong disruptive case, you are a rockstar. That's obvious. But the battle is long before that.
Disruptive research is a path of very high resistance. You find a thread and pick at it, you lose it, you try again, eventually one catches and slowly, piece by piece, you unravel.... the thing that many of your potential sponsors built their career on.
That first moment where you have nothing more than a hunch and the tip of the first thread between your fingernails, and you need to convince someone to fund your attempt to pull it.... that moment is extremely vulnerable. Especially when that thread is attached to the trousers of the eminent scientist who will assess your grant.
It seems very naïve to assume that they will not try to stop you, whether maliciously or just because they believe in the thing you are unravelling so strongly that they can't even consider that you would be right.
If it turns out you have the wrong thread, you have, at best, made yourself look dumb in front of people who will be assessing your work your entire career. At worst, you've made outright enemies of them. I know many people who've put themselves in a career cul de sac by doing this. My old supervisor certainly did.
I do believe that in the hard sciences, the truth will eventually out. Eventually there will be some corollary discovery that opens the cracks, or some new microscope that makes it so you can go from the first thread to half a trouser-leg on the leftovers of some other grant, and then they can't stop you anymore. But a powerful dogmatist in a powerful position can slow this process very substantially.
Academia is cut-throat at all levels. What you are describing is pretty much the pathway every professor has taken in every university worth doing research in. Nobody gives you anything for free and you don't get to be a professor if you didn't do something hugely innovative that disrupted (influenced) the field in some way. You literally will never progress to professor if this does not happen.
And yes, your funding depends on the old dinosaurs on the panel that will keep on pushing their own research above all else. The system is very crooked and is heavily weighted towards people that are already established. You will never hear me defend the academic funding system -- it is so so so very shit.
Nevertheless, it remains true that disruptive research that challenges the status quo is more likely to get funded than run of the mill, just doing the same old shit, kind of proposal.
EPT
![[image loading]](https://tl.net/staff/LiquidDrone/graphs/sea_level_rise_prediction.png)
