Is science a meme?
>inb4 someone links me to /sci/
This board has no topic you faggot
Is science a meme?
Cameron Davis
Levi Wood
The temptation and pressure is always there to throw out the data that doesn't make a coherent narrative. Nobody wants to publish a paper that says "we tried a bunch of stuff but don't see any clear trends because there were too many complicating factors."
Christopher Davis
Isn't that the fascinating thing about science?, Trying things that always lead you to another question.
Christopher Barnes
it's because 90% of studies in modern times rely on extremely niche subjects to begin with and then they use statistics to bend the data in their favor. When I was in college, I took a class that taught you how to pick your statistical analysis and how to make it sound as significant as possible. In reality, most of these results barely imply anything or just use such a small sample size that the bias/lurking variables are incredibly difficult to avoid.
Joseph Watson
Science is controlled by capitalism now. If scientists can't get their article in a journal, because their hypothesis was wrong, they'll lose their job, so they have to fudge the data. And nobody is redoing published experiments to see if they get different data because it's not as exciting, despite being necessary. What you've got is a bunch of contradictory theses that haven't been checked by anyone else.
Isaiah White
Lol BS explain to me how the NSF is capitalist.
Whenever I've had research funded by a company you sign all sorts of NDAs and very little of the work is published.
Mason Morales
gravity's not real. that shits in your head!
Dylan Turner
Well an unfortunate number of people are in the field not because they have a passion for science but because they want to be scientists.
Gabriel Lewis
Also experiment costs can add up quickly, there's not enough time to run additional experiments, have to have data to publish before the end of program reviews etc.
Charles Nguyen
>did our experiment work?
>no, another failure!
>you fleshbag, you forgot to incense the pitri dish!
>Ah, there it goes; praise the Omnissiah!
Are we /chadmech/ yet?
Tyler Nelson
Yep, science is a meme. It's just the new religion now, mostly spouted by idiots who have no idea what they're reading, believing whatever they hear from their pastors("experts") without understanding a single thing about it.
As for scientists themselves, they are mostly underfunded and, but this is more a problem with non "hard" sciences. Those are the ones that are really easy to bullshit. You'd be wise never to believe anything about social sciences or psychology.
Adrian Myers
If you've ever been in a lab this bullshit will not surprise you, people are awful and statisticians are worse.
Jaxson Lee
it funds its operation by selling the journal, aka capitalism
and journals sell better when they contain mind-blowing results
so journals are more likely to refuse you if your conclusion isn't something cool and epic
Lucas Rogers
Everyone knows psychology is a joke, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Chemistry, physics, neurology, etc. are all still reliable sciences.
John Diaz
I thought neurology was fairly new and therefore not all that reliable.
Hunter Bailey
human brain might have reached its capacity of figuring shit out so many scientists probably just make shit up these days
Levi Wilson
>Chemistry, physics, neurology, etc. are all still reliable sciences.
Citation needed
Brayden Ross
Neurology definitely has a long way to go, but from what I've read they usually do a good job of taking that into account in their studies. They don't claim to have figured out depression or whatever, mostly just "we did X and saw increased activity in section Y." As such, neurology experiments aren't exactly groundbreaking, but also not false.
Leo Cooper
The reliability of science is directly proportional to it's hardness (i.e. use of math). Physics is the most reliable science due to it's intense mathematical rigor, and chemistry comes in second. I agree with you on neurology though.
Sebastian Ramirez
science isn't the be all end all of the universe. science isn't a meme but it's not 100 percent right.
Elijah Jenkins
The answer is simple: science tends to be on the cutting edge of discovering new things. The more novel your research, the harder it will be to replicate, because your findings are more likely to be the first. If scientists just went around writing papers about things we already understood really well, guess what? The replication rate would be 99%. Is that better?
Psychology only replicates slightly worse than the hard sciences, but it has a stronger statistical power.
Anthony Rodriguez
I see. However, I think there's a particularly strong incentive to fudge data in the field because of it's political/social implications.
Brayden Hill
Neurology is still objective, though. Measuring activity in the brain doesn't have room for bias. It's when people try to apply an interpretation as to why those increases / decreases of activity happen that you get bias.
Owen Morris
There is a huge issue with reproducibility with medical research.
Jeremiah Parker
>Psychology only replicates slightly worse than the hard sciences
Henry Fisher
And when don't they try to interpret the data? All science is subject to a degree of bias insofar as the data has to be interpreted.
Charles Lewis
Medicine and engineering have a 55% replication rate. So?
Alexander Cooper
publish or perish
you have to write papers or else you're considered ineffective so you write safe, incremental improvements or carefully play with the numbers
Kayden Cooper
>Is science a meme?
Science used to be cool and "reliable" but now it's some lab results with a bunch of manipulation. Especially if private companies pay for it.
This.
Henry Reed
Most people who fund research don't want to hear "yeah, it didn't work at all"
Tyler Adams
>Physics is the most reliable science due to it's intense mathematical rigor
that still leaves room to completely fuck up the scientific part. you can make equations for bullshit but its still bullshit
John Scott
even computer science should have rigor but people can't reproduce AI results