91–100 of 133 posts
Every physicist in this field would pick the paper apart (probably more so due to the history of the subject matter) and in the end it would not be reproducible.
And it would be a result that most labs looking into this would try to reproduce.
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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.
From the article -- "...after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, 'people who fake data tend not to do it just once'." 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.…
From the article -- "...after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, 'people who fake data tend not to do it just once'." 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.…
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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.
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When people talk about stories like this they're invariably discussing the numerator without the denominator. Count up every story about research malpractice that has ever been on HN, and you're not even in the vicinity of 1% of all the research done every year; a truly huge amount of research is published every year, in every field.
The question is how much of that stuff is fraudulent or at least suspect: you'll find that most scientists are skeptical of a large fraction of papers published in their field, there is a lot of crap that gets through peer review, and most will not get openly questioned because it's a lot of effort and quite high-risk, especially if it's a result that's of low importance.
I see that the mathematics ultimately provide the basis for a lot of that research, which can be summed up as measuring various things, recording the measurements, and publishing the whole thing. But it's all built on the same essential math at the foundation.
and the mathematics is duplicated a lot to, but this is hard to see, you'd need a 'real' expert, of the kind that can be hand counted
my wife spent a year trying to reproduce some data that her research depended on only to eventually find out that it was fraudulent. the original researcher even admitted this to their lab, and he retired and his lab was shut down. no retraction was ever published. my wifes lab tried to publish a paper showing that the original research was fraudulent and the journal was not willing to publish it. she has since left…
Or to put it another way, I understand the impulse, buy why not self reflect a bit to figure out if that impulse has merit (it doesn't)?
Surely the fact that, overall, we do make meaningful and real scientific progress over time (we may now have room temperature superconductors!) shows there is more value in the academic process than there is problem, though obviously the problems are substantial and create significant limitations.
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How can that be your takeaway from his post? You can really only get there by reading in very bad faith.
I'm finding the responses in this whole thread a strong argument for making STEM majors take more social science courses. Econ too, probably, especially behavioral. Way too many are a freshman-level bad "reading" of the situation & systems at play, and of the positions staked out by the more-reasonable posts. And some of the posts are even worse than that—straight-up basic reading comprehension failures. God's sake,…
Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right.
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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.
Feyerabend, for one, but that's getting quite above you...