Science
Related: About this forumScience Isn’t Broken
Its just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for.
By CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
f you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.
Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were rubber-stamping their own work, circumventing peer review at five high-profile publishers.
Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given that the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List, whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.
Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCours influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCours co-author could find no record of the data.
Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But Ive spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and Ive learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but its plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard really fucking hard.
more
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/
Nay
(12,051 posts)above, society needs to have a conversation about how stupid it is to expect everyone to acquire a STEM degree in order to get a decent job. It really IS rocket science, folks. Half of the populace is below average, FFS, and we can't ignore that. Sure, we can dumb down education so everyone can get a fucking degree (and this is happening in all non-science education), but all that happens is we have a bunch of dummies with fakey degrees. It doesn't help.
We need to recognize that most people are NEVER going to be scientists or doctors or actuaries, stop giving away degrees that are worth nothing, and recognize that there is a lot of work that needs to be done that has no prestige attached to it. And that ppl who do that work should make a living wage, even if everyone looks down their noses at them.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)xocet
(3,872 posts)I prefer the simple thesis addressed in D. Zongker's paper on Chicken:
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)...from my dog.
eppur_se_muova
(36,289 posts)There's your problem, and it ain't science. It's $$$$$$$$.