Dr. Angela Collier plays the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and talks at length about what went wrong with string theory, and how that affected science communication.

  • niktemadur@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don’t remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.

    • hglman@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Which is why the funding mechanism of science is so profoundly unscientific. Funding must be based on the quality of the experimental process, not positive results.

      • jarfil@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’d go further, and say that most scientific papers are profoundly unscientific: without the data and analysis process they base their claims on, most papers are no different than just saying “believe me, I’m a scientist”.

        There are some honorable exceptions, of papers which publish accompanying data and the tools they used to process it, but the vast majority don’t.

        The fact that negative results don’t get published at all, is just disrespecting the word “science”. One of its basic premises is that of falsability, so proving a theory wrong, is just as valuable as proving a different one right.