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Huge example of intellectual dishonesty in academia: you effectively can't publish negative results.
I suspect the problem is not rejections, but that people don't bother submitting them because it's not exciting. Has anyone here tried hard to publish a negative result and had it consistently rejected?
Huge example of intellectual dishonesty in academia: you effectively can't publish negative results.
What you can't publish are things that are not novel and things that are worst than existing methods.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the problem is not rejections, but that people don't bother submitting them because it's not exciting. Has anyone here tried hard to publish a negative result and had it consistently rejected?
Yes, that the researchers don't push to publish them is what is dishonest.
And if you do publish everything, then everything will be lost in a sea of noise... you'd need to create "ultra-publishing" to resolve that...
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
"Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a commencement address given at Caltech (1974) http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
Feynman: I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibi…
And from the HN article "intellectual honesty requires bending-over-backwards to provide any evidence that you might be wrong." The article is so close to a direct Feynman quote that it makes me wonder if the author was subconsciously plagiarizing Feynman. Normally, I wouldn't mind (subconscious plagiarism is everywhere). But in an article about intellectual honesty I would expect the author to "bend over backwards"…
Especially as while Feynman said that I highly doubt he was the first to think it. He was, very likely, merely distilling things he'd heard before much as the current author was.