181–184 of 184 posts
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> What do paywalls possible have to do with the reproducibility > of results? Anyone who has access to a lab Actually, there's no institution subscribed to every journal. There are, in fact, many papers inaccessible to even the most funded labs. Spotty coverage.
I'm published in a highly-ranked journal that our university doesn't have access to. Sorta funny.
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You're assuming that only "reproducible" results are valid, which is incorrect. Results that are reproducible within a lab, but not when attempted by other people in different settings indicate that there's an unaccounted for variable, and that falls into the 89%. There's still something valuable there, it's just that we don't yet know all the variables. We could just give up, or we could try to continue study of som…
If its not reproducible it is not science.
The current test (if I remember my philosophy of science correctly is about falsifiability - it's not science if its claims can't be disproven. From this perspective, bad experiments are still science - someone predicted that similar experiments would behave similarly, and their prediction was falsified. This is how science is supposed to work.
It gets problematic when any failure to reproduce instinctively gets explained away as experimental error on the part of the second experimenter. Even worse is when experimenters (as in this case) work to have failures to reproduce hidden from the scientific community (the authors of this study had to sign contracts that they would not identify specific failing studies before they were given the necessary data about experimental procedure.
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At least those historical mathematicians acknowledged their gaps of knowledge. Cancer research is a far cry different.
You clearly are unfamiliar with the history. If you can find a copy, George Berkeley's The Analyst was a cogent criticism of the foundations of calculus in his day. (He didn't have answers, but he identified real problems.) A variety of books were written by mathematicians in response. Uniformly these were much lower quality, and consisted of defenses of the foundations of mathematics, rather than acknowledgements th…
I should have said some historical mathematicians then.
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Those are government entities, and the government's parent company is the corporatocracy that owns all the politicians and media. Science is a business in the service of global capitalism. Truth hurts. I will give you the MacArthur foundation and certain other non-profits. But most non-profits are also operated by the corporatocratic elite, like everything else on this planet.
You're right - if you define 'funded by corporations' sufficiently loosely (to include everything from governmental bodies to universities to charitable foundations) that the statement 'science is entirely funded by corporations' becomes a tautology, it becomes clear that science is entirely funded by corporations! I for one am shocked and appalled.
It would be ideal if science were "funded" (read: controlled) by the public in the interest of the public good, but in reality it is controlled by the corporatocracy.
Is Goldman Sachs "funded" by the government or is the government "funded" by Goldman Sachs? The best understanding is that the government is a corporate subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, a profit-centre that Goldman Sachs invests in and controls by means of investment, and those investments reap profits.
Technically you could say that GS is funded by taxpayers, but funding implies both investment and control. So it's more accurate to say that GS funds the government, because this makes it clear where the locus of control is. Citizens are indentured servants that pay tribute to GS via taxes. Academics are indentured servants that receive money and position in exchange for their services to the subsidiary of GS called NSF.
Having said that, I think many foundations are genuinely independent of GS control, but they still can't be said to be funded by the public for the public. They are just altruistic private parties as opposed to the megalithic non-altruistic faction that is the corporatocracy.