Saturday, May 29, 2021
Surprisingly perfect article
This article was linked by RealClearScience, normally a pillar of genocidal orthodoxy. I started reading it with my eyes halfway averted as usual, ready to shut down the page before I needed to smash the computer.
Amazingly, everything in the article is correct and wise. No gotchas, no poke-throughs. The author is discussing the latest NSF appropriation, separating out the useful and useless parts.
Core of the article:
There is deep and ongoing disagreement within the scientific community about the nature and extent of the crisis — including whether it is a genuine problem and what, if anything, can be done about it. Nevertheless, the NAS report points to a growing consensus that the replication crisis is symptomatic of deeper flaws with the way scientific research is currently organized and conducted. These include obstacles to sharing scientific data, inadequate statistical training among researchers, problems with the peer-review system and grant culture, misaligned financial and professional incentives, and the corrosive effects of publish-or-perish.The last sentence covers everything, conclusively and comprehensively. None of this is new. My father saw it in 1959 and warned me about it. Ike saw it at the same time and warned the nation about it. I listened, the nation didn't. The author then suggests a path toward solution:
New Zealand, for example, has been experimenting since 2015 with a lottery system for scientific grants. Lottery systems set aside some portion of well-qualified government grant seekers to be selected at random, rather than through the traditional merit system. The underlying idea is that scientific discoveries often come from unexpected places and require breaking out of existing consensuses.Putting it another way: Big Science is uniformly Darwinian. So let's apply Darwin to science itself, instead of constantly using a grotesque parody of Darwin as a weapon against heresy. Create random mutations and let nature select them.
Labels: Not AI point-missing
¶ 8:19 AM
