How scientists fool themselves and how they can stop

That's an oversimplification at best. Right now, NSF grant funding rates are so low that scientists feel they need to submit 6 good grants to get one funded, so they are forced to spend most of their time allocated to research writing grants. But if this environment went away, most of these people would love nothing more than to do the actual science.

I think a couple of bigger issues are (i) we reward the first person/group to reach a conclusion, so there's incentive to be sloppy and get your name on the research first and sort out the (hopefully minor) problems later and (ii) there's an expectation from the general public that scientists have to be "productive" all the time. Productive is of course defined as producing new and exciting results, rather than carefully verifying old results, or trying to fill the gaps in previous work. See how much pressure there is on scientists to do "transformative" rather than "incremental" research.

I don't think we as a society have a solution to these problems even outside of science. To pick a familiar example for HN, programmers who write overly-complicated messy code are often rewarded over those who write simpler, cleaner and well-architected code because the former looks like more work. Similarly, there's little interest in writing test benches or documentation in open source projects, because there's little reward or incentive for these things. OpenSSL pre-heartbleed era is a perfect example of all the wrong incentive systems working together to produce a steaming pile of bullshit that everyone involved in the field kept claiming as being the most secure solution out there.

Agreed -- would also love to see an incentive structure around publishing negative results. One of the areas of research I think is the most exciting is artificial photosynthesis, and it's currently at the phase where the researchers are trying to discover efficiency gains by just trying out a bunch of different materials.

Take this recent publication [1]:

> For water oxidation, the photoanode surface was protected from corrosion by a 62.5 nm layer of amorphous, hole-conducting TiO2 that was grown by atomic-layer deposition (ALD).

> The TiO2 layer significantly improves the stability of III-V photoanodes in a tandem structure for water oxidation while the tandem structure produces sufficient photovoltage to sustain the efficient, unassisted production of hydrogen by water splitting in aqueous alkaline electrolytes.

They discovered that coating the photoanode with 62.5nm of TiO2 helps stabilize the reaction. But who knows how many materials they went through to get that one? And how many different coating thicknesses they tried before settling of 62.5nm? This tech could be next-gen solar, would be great to see the global rate of discovery increase. Perhaps YC Research can start this trend?

[1] Joint Center for Artitificial Photosynthesis - http://authors.library.caltech.edu/59897/1/c5ee01786f.pdf

Another sacred artifact in Science is WWII gas chambers. Fred Leuchter (manufacturer of equipment for gas executions), Nicholas Kollerstrom (Science Historian) and Germar Rudolf (Chemist) amongst others, were all outcast and even imprisoned (!) for daring to bring Science into this much politicized subject.

No one benefits from censorship. Those listed above should have had their published findings refuted, not censored, if they are wrong. And they should definitely not have been thrown in jail for thought-crimes.

Rudolf's published paper was actually peer-reviewed before he lost his PhD research position. This is absolutely outrageous and no one here has the courage to talk about it. It is a travesty and a mockery of what Science should be about.