81–90 of 133 posts
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"If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters" Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat? This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
How is it a slap in the face? The point is the metrics by which academia judges science have been divorced from what actually produces good science for a while (and you'll find very few scientists who disagree with that), but it does reward cheaters quite well.
Sure in the short term dishonesty might work for a scientist but long term? Legacy after death? I'm not so sure on that.
Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
Just because we see flaws today doesn't mean that those flaws can not be 'fixed'. (Nor that we won't discover new flaws and new fixes: engineering is an interative process).
Science currently looks like somebody going to fish, with the purpose of caught the best fish in the sea. So first they put the bait inside a plastic box, to weed out all the dumb fishes. Then they put the box inside another sealed wooden box, with a combination lockpad. Because only a really smart fish with skilled fin-paws should be able to figure out how to open also that box. For better measure, they finally put…
"If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters" Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat? This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
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I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.
Show me someone that questions the scientific method. You would be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person who does. When people criticize "science" they are almost always criticizing academia. Getting pedantic isn't very helpful.
Doesn't it seem very irrational to fabricate data in materials science? If your result is interesting, people will try to replicate it; it won't replicate, and you'll have to explain why. If your result is not interesting, people won't try to replicate it, but then you don't gain much by publishing it.
For example, US census agency person for a county can just make up numbers based on his understanding of the place without actually doing a full survey. He believes that even if they check, it will be within reasonable tolerance and the final results will be similar. So he just sits at home keep making up numbers year after year. Until someday USPS opens a postoffice based on the numbers and get no customers causing a full investigation.
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"If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters" Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat? This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
How can that be your takeaway from his post? You can really only get there by reading in very bad faith.
God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.
I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam. The details are not particularly important but they were obscured by the fact that they involved 'foreign' students at an American university who were expelled (and lost their student Visas) after they were found to have cheated on an exam. The outrage was how these foreign students were "singled out" while "American students doing the same thing were just scolded".
There wasn't enough information available to address whether or not it was discriminatory but my assertion that all students who cheat should be expelled was rebuked as overly harsh and met with calls of "In that case Universities will have to expel their entire student bodies!"
My controversial (if you would believe the responses) take is that these sorts of "minor" infractions against cultural expectations are the basis for corruption. Whether it is telling lies to cover inconvenient (and perhaps inconsequential) truths or cheating to pass an evaluation for which one had not invested the time and effort to prepare. Habituating this behavior creates a stain on all future actions.
Doesn't it seem very irrational to fabricate data in materials science? If your result is interesting, people will try to replicate it; it won't replicate, and you'll have to explain why. If your result is not interesting, people won't try to replicate it, but then you don't gain much by publishing it.
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I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.
sure, but in practice when people use the word science (as in "trust the science"), they mostly mean research happening in academia
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I don't want to be pedantic or argumentative, but I think you've created a straw-man of the comment you're replying to. scientific institutions != scientific method Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.
>Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution. That's an opinion. Industry does a lot more worthwhile science than academia, and does it without tax money, in my opinion. Was the transistor invented by academia? You can argue that's engineering, rather than science. In my opinion the difference is semantics.