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On November 07 2024 21:19 oBlade wrote: Wouldn't whatever the status quo is have more funding just by virtue of it being the status quo?
That's not how scientific research works. If a thing is already known, nobody is going to give you money to do it again.
So everybody is doing completely different things from each other and there is no consensus "what everyone else is doing" that you alluded to before?
??
Everyone is constantly innovating and trying new stuff. You base your interpretation of the new data based on stuff that is already established. When the new data goes against what is already established, you sit down and try to figure out why and you come up with an explanation that if it pans out, it becomes "what is already established" in future work.
@Ender: you look at academia through a very rose tinted glasses. Every professor disrupted their field? Really? They don't just need people to teach other people being trained in academia? Oftentimes using their own biased view from their own research to influence these people who are being trained to become unbiased? Are you sure you want to make that claim?
On November 07 2024 21:19 oBlade wrote: Wouldn't whatever the status quo is have more funding just by virtue of it being the status quo?
That's not how scientific research works. If a thing is already known, nobody is going to give you money to do it again.
So everybody is doing completely different things from each other and there is no consensus "what everyone else is doing" that you alluded to before?
??
Everyone is constantly innovating and trying new stuff. You base your interpretation of the new data based on stuff that is already established. When the new data goes against what is already established, you sit down and try to figure out why and you come up with an explanation that if it pans out, it becomes "what is already established" in future work.
Yeah I got the part that you don't reinvent the wheel and aren't going to get a million dollar grant to study whether the Earth goes around the sun, because it's already proven, except when you are valuably reproducing the results of an important study.
My question is your other claim that you won't get funding by doing what everyone else is doing. Is this a late to the party argument? For (a crude) example, say the string theorists have already cornered and exhausted the market, you're not going to be a better string theorist than they are, so your only chance is to move the paradigm - but aren't they still outperforming you financially if that trend is getting the bulk of funding?
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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
You're never going to get funding for research that proves that, indeed, the wheel works as intended. NEVER! Can we agree on that very simple, very obvious fact?
Therefore the publication bias is not so much that disruptive research is MORE likely to get funding, but rather that confirmation of existing research is LESS likely to get funding. This, in effect, creates a bias towards disruptive research, even if people don't inherently prefer it. The bias AGAINST unsurprising findings is in and of itself what creates the bias FOR surprising discoveries.
On November 07 2024 22:17 Uldridge wrote: @Ender: you look at academia through a very rose tinted glasses. Every professor disrupted their field? Really? They don't just need people to teach other people being trained in academia? Oftentimes using their own biased view from their own research to influence these people who are being trained to become unbiased? Are you sure you want to make that claim?
I very purposedly qualified that statement with "at every university worth doing research in". That's the tradeoff, go to a low-tier university because your achievements are not good enough to get you into a high-tier university. You get to teach a lot, your PhD students are not the best and your research will eventually be swamped by your other responsibilities because you will not be getting much research funding either. It's still meaningful work, it's just very unlikely that you will produce research that will impact your field in a significant way.
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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
That's the system working as intended though. At some point, the approach that disrupts the status quo crops up, disrupts the field and a new status quo is achieved. Sure, there is always pushback, and sometimes it takes too long -- the crisis of reproducibility is a prime example -- but science always gets there in the end. It really does not require everyone to be perfect all the time.
None of these posts really make a case for why doing disruptive research is going to get you blackballed or lose you research funding.
On November 07 2024 21:19 oBlade wrote: Wouldn't whatever the status quo is have more funding just by virtue of it being the status quo?
That's not how scientific research works. If a thing is already known, nobody is going to give you money to do it again.
So everybody is doing completely different things from each other and there is no consensus "what everyone else is doing" that you alluded to before?
??
Everyone is constantly innovating and trying new stuff. You base your interpretation of the new data based on stuff that is already established. When the new data goes against what is already established, you sit down and try to figure out why and you come up with an explanation that if it pans out, it becomes "what is already established" in future work.
Yeah I got the part that you don't reinvent the wheel and aren't going to get a million dollar grant to study whether the Earth goes around the sun, because it's already proven, except when you are valuably reproducing the results of an important study.
My question is your other claim that you won't get funding by doing what everyone else is doing. Is this a late to the party argument? For (a crude) example, say the string theorists have already cornered and exhausted the market, you're not going to be a better string theorist than they are, so your only chance is to move the paradigm - but aren't they still outperforming you financially if that trend is getting the bulk of funding?
You have to understand that 'better' does not really translate here. It's more about the 'freshness' of your ideas and whether your research area is impactful. String theory was really popular a while back and received lots of funding. String theory kind of reached a dead-end, so you're not getting funding to do any more of it unless you have a new disruptive idea.
On November 07 2024 21:19 oBlade wrote: Wouldn't whatever the status quo is have more funding just by virtue of it being the status quo?
That's not how scientific research works. If a thing is already known, nobody is going to give you money to do it again.
So everybody is doing completely different things from each other and there is no consensus "what everyone else is doing" that you alluded to before?
??
Everyone is constantly innovating and trying new stuff. You base your interpretation of the new data based on stuff that is already established. When the new data goes against what is already established, you sit down and try to figure out why and you come up with an explanation that if it pans out, it becomes "what is already established" in future work.
Yeah I got the part that you don't reinvent the wheel and aren't going to get a million dollar grant to study whether the Earth goes around the sun, because it's already proven, except when you are valuably reproducing the results of an important study.
My question is your other claim that you won't get funding by doing what everyone else is doing. Is this a late to the party argument? For (a crude) example, say the string theorists have already cornered and exhausted the market, you're not going to be a better string theorist than they are, so your only chance is to move the paradigm - but aren't they still outperforming you financially if that trend is getting the bulk of funding?
People outside science doesn't really understand how it works that well.
Take cancer. That's a field of research that always has a lot of funding.
In general it's much easier to get funding for cancer research than in most scientific fields. But it's not just one field of research, it's hundreds, perhaps thousands of different areas. And every time you want to get funding in one of those areas you need to come up with a reason to what your research adds.
If you want to compare the outcome of two different surgeries for prostate cancer and there are already several studies doing that you will never get any funding. Perhaps if you switch focus to how the patients feel during the treatment process and how it impacts their quality of life and there are no good studies about that you could get some funding. But it's not the sexy kind of research that will make you a professor. Sometimes it's enough to do a study where you just go through and summarize the available evidence.
But if you want to make it you want to find something new and important, and the best way of doing that is proving the previous research wrong.
So even though we can say that a certain field has more funding on the individual project level it doesn't matter because competition for resources is still fierce and you can't just go about reinventing the wheel over and over even if you are in a "good" field. Comparatively even if you are in a very underfunded field if you make a splash with something groundbreaking you've made it for yourself, even if your field continues to suffer.
Then you have the influence of the private sector. Geology is typically not an extremely sexy field but if you have a theory on how to detect [any precious mineral] in a novel way you are about to get funded (but perhaps not published...).
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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
That's the system working as intended though. At some point, the approach that disrupts the status quo crops up, disrupts the field and a new status quo is achieved. Sure, there is always pushback, and sometimes it takes too long -- the crisis of reproducibility is a prime example -- but science always gets there in the end. It really does not require everyone to be perfect all the time.
None of these posts really make a case for why doing disruptive research is going to get you blackballed or lose you research funding.
Even if they were blackballed, science would still get there in the end.
On November 07 2024 20:08 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
That's the system working as intended though. At some point, the approach that disrupts the status quo crops up, disrupts the field and a new status quo is achieved. Sure, there is always pushback, and sometimes it takes too long -- the crisis of reproducibility is a prime example -- but science always gets there in the end. It really does not require everyone to be perfect all the time.
None of these posts really make a case for why doing disruptive research is going to get you blackballed or lose you research funding.
Even if they were blackballed, science would still get there in the end.
Indeed, people will always grudgingly publish their research even when it conflicts with their personal values. Scientists are pretty impressive that way.
On November 07 2024 23:02 Uldridge wrote: I hope it stays that way. I just hope the sheer volume can be sifted through to find and appreciate certain disruptive findings.
Looking for flaws in popular research areas is one of the easiest ways to make a splash and get funding. The system is incentivised to generate disruptive outcomes, not the reverse.
On November 07 2024 20:15 Elroi wrote: [quote] 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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
That's the system working as intended though. At some point, the approach that disrupts the status quo crops up, disrupts the field and a new status quo is achieved. Sure, there is always pushback, and sometimes it takes too long -- the crisis of reproducibility is a prime example -- but science always gets there in the end. It really does not require everyone to be perfect all the time.
None of these posts really make a case for why doing disruptive research is going to get you blackballed or lose you research funding.
Even if they were blackballed, science would still get there in the end.
Indeed, people will always grudgingly publish their research even when it conflicts with their personal values. Scientists are pretty impressive that way.
Tbf there are exceptions. Bret and Eric Weinstein for example, who falsely paint themselves as victims of academic persecution (which is only the least terrible thing I can accuse them of). There are always nothingburgers like that and conservatives will blow them up and use them for their anti-science propaganda.
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.
I think the difference is coming at it from the angle of a successful career, versus the angle of the successful case.
Absolutely, most academics who get to the top will have done something disruptive along the way. They won their cases, and most of them made plenty of strategic enemies doing so. They likely also put down other cases they believed in that they saw as politically unwinnable.
However, from the perspective of the case itself, perhaps being pursued by some dude at the second rung, absolutely convinced that a dogma is wrong, it doesn't really matter that some other person with a stronger CV, more political nous and a sexier field was successful in their own, different war with the establishment. That doesn't stop his own case being stepped on by a dinosaur, regardless of its actual merit.
I understand your point now. You're arguing that disproving bad theories is how you succeed in science. I agree.
I'm arguing that despite this, there are situations where the power structures of science and the shittiness of scientific funding can entrench a bad theory well past the point it should have been disproven.
That's the system working as intended though. At some point, the approach that disrupts the status quo crops up, disrupts the field and a new status quo is achieved. Sure, there is always pushback, and sometimes it takes too long -- the crisis of reproducibility is a prime example -- but science always gets there in the end. It really does not require everyone to be perfect all the time.
None of these posts really make a case for why doing disruptive research is going to get you blackballed or lose you research funding.
Even if they were blackballed, science would still get there in the end.
Indeed, people will always grudgingly publish their research even when it conflicts with their personal values. Scientists are pretty impressive that way.
Tbf there are exceptions. Bret and Eric Weinstein for example, who falsely paint themselves as victims of academic persecution (which is only the least terrible thing I can accuse them of). There are always nothingburgers like that and conservatives will blow them up and use them for their anti-science propaganda.
There are always bad actors that take advantage of the system. It's just much harder to do when your job is literally centred on asking "why?".
Noob question but isn’t academia always going to have some kind of issues?
Not to say criticism is also never valid, but in some quarters there’s definitely a dismissal of certain realities and an expectation of almost perfection that is de facto impossible given certain constraints?
I’m unsure how it else elsewhere, but UK universities have definitely pivoted from centres of learning and research, to being quite commercially-driven entities. They are also the former, but the latter has become more prominent.
One big earner here are international students. Us locals are capped, but institutions can charge many multiples per international student they attract. There’s also the issue of how universities are ranked in various ways, so institutions actively target certain metrics so they can climb those tables and thus be more attractive.
One big hook is ‘hey you can do research here’, so quite a few do.
Much of this is rather anecdotal, cobbled together from a few people I know in various positions, but you do end up with quite a lot of research for research’s sake as a consequence. Because it’s mutually beneficial for student and institution to do that in this particular alignment of incentives.
Now I will add that my unnamed sources did stress this research wasn’t bullshit, or flawed or bogus or anything. Just not especially useful
I’m curious as to if this specific structural clash between the research and the commercial incentives is something you folks see in your various nations, or is more a UK-specific issue
Pricing of goods depends on area and availability. If you're living in a rural area in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, it's possible these things that 'are not as bad for you', are way worse for other people. Your prices are not their prices.
I also regularly make trips into West Virginia to meet friends there, Im actually pretty aware of what prices can be in one of the bummest of fuck nowhere states, and most chains keep their prices pretty similar actually.
The real difference is West Virginia's top tier grocery store is a Giant whereas where I am its a Wegmans.
On November 07 2024 22:17 Uldridge wrote: @Ender: you look at academia through a very rose tinted glasses. Every professor disrupted their field? Really? They don't just need people to teach other people being trained in academia? Oftentimes using their own biased view from their own research to influence these people who are being trained to become unbiased? Are you sure you want to make that claim?
Depends on the country you're in.
Professors in the UK will normally have done something notable to be given that title. Most lecturers are not professors.
On November 07 2024 23:40 WombaT wrote: Noob question but isn’t academia always going to have some kind of issues?
Not to say criticism is also never valid, but in some quarters there’s definitely a dismissal of certain realities and an expectation of almost perfection that is de facto impossible given certain constraints?
I’m unsure how it else elsewhere, but UK universities have definitely pivoted from centres of learning and research, to being quite commercially-driven entities. They are also the former, but the latter has become more prominent.
One big earner here are international students. Us locals are capped, but institutions can charge many multiples per international student they attract. There’s also the issue of how universities are ranked in various ways, so institutions actively target certain metrics so they can climb those tables and thus be more attractive.
One big hook is ‘hey you can do research here’, so quite a few do.
Much of this is rather anecdotal, cobbled together from a few people I know in various positions, but you do end up with quite a lot of research for research’s sake as a consequence. Because it’s mutually beneficial for student and institution to do that in this particular alignment of incentives.
Now I will add that my unnamed sources did stress this research wasn’t bullshit, or flawed or bogus or anything. Just not especially useful
I’m curious as to if this specific structural clash between the research and the commercial incentives is something you folks see in your various nations, or is more a UK-specific issue
If your institution is mid to low tier, you're just milking the international students for their money. They get given boring projects that will guarantee results so they can graduate. By definition, this means the research they're doing is not disruptive since the end result is pretty much expected. Note that the students themselves know exactly what they're getting into and normally just want to have a "degree from a US/UK university" so they can get onto a graduate programme elsewhere.
You will find that high tier universities will not be doing this and the research carried out at all levels will be of high quality, innovative and potentially very disruptive. I've had master students that have produced papers that have accrued over 1,000 citations. That means that 1000 other research teams looked at the findings and went like "yeah, I will use this to explain or guide my own work".
On March 18 2024 06:05 Gorsameth wrote: You keep trying to imply Biden can't speak in full sentences. I thought we dispelled that myth with the State of the Union.
There's a difference between giving a once-a-year prepared speech that you have plenty of time to rehearse for than being on the campaign trail, answering questions and speaking off-script. Let's not pretend this is some hot take just because it's coming from me. It's a widely held opinion that Biden lacks the mental sharpness for another term. If you think that's untrue why don't you think his advisers do more to put him front and center to prove otherwise? Why do they decline interviews and press conferences? Why won't they commit to debates? Seems like his advisers agree more with me.
Can you commit to us here that you think trump has more mental sharpness than biden?
Just want to save it for when the dimentia gets even more out of control.
Trump clearly has more mental sharpness right now than Biden. Not sure what you hope to accomplish by getting this on the record. You know that you can't rate the truthfulness of past statements based on some changes that may or may not happen in the future, right?
On October 27 2023 00:58 KwarK wrote: This is a few days old now but I just saw Trump’s nuanced and reasonable speech in response to the Gaza attacks. + Show Spoiler +
People who sympathize with this are sick, they're sick and they're evil and they're not going to be fixed. You're not going to make them into wonderful people one day. I didn't know you had flies in Iowa. I HATE FLIES! Now I'll get in trouble for saying that, cruelty to animals, no, it's true. You know I said the other day, wee I was at a place, it was a beautiful place, but they had like flies and I said "GET FLY PAPER" they said "they're not allowed to sell it anymore because of cruelty to animals" they actually said that but I don't know can you get fly paper it used to be great right but "you can't do that anymore sir it's cruelty". What the hell is going on with this country?
Found the snippet you’re quoting. A fly buzzes around him on stage so he does some half-serious ad libbing about flies while pandering to his base by implying that the red meat republicans can’t harm flies because of pussy liberal animal rights activists. Ok… that’s pretty on brand from Trump. Hardly incoherent.
Once again this just reinforces my point. Trump gets up and talks off the cuff for hours on end and tweets every thought that comes through his mind. If Biden goes off script for 2 minutes it’s a disaster.
It’s not incoherent, it’s deranged.
You lost the presidency, the senate, the house, and the supreme court. You're losing the culture war and don't really even appear to understand why. Instead of listening, as you so evidently should, you continue to lecture. Who's deranged?
EPT
