But Brusatte said there remained some legitimate concerns about the integrity of the fossil. “There have been doctored fossils from this part of the world before, and the scientists did not dig up this specimen themselves. The skeletons are no doubt genuine, but I suppose the poses of the bones could have been altered, although I have no direct evidence for this,” he said.
The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.
> The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.
All this era has shown us, is that we should never have been relying on trust in anything even close to science. Trusting people to put the truth their own career advancement is how we got into this mess with the replication crisis.
But there's a difference between trusting two rival institutions that come to the same conclusion, and trusting a single research team that stands to advance quite significantly from a particular publishing.
I'm not anti-science. I'm saying we screwed up bigtime trusting people within the institutions we put up to manage science. Especially in the soft sciences.
We let things go without serious peer review or replication far too long, and allowed far too dodgy statistics, resulting in the replication crisis we see today. Science is amazing, but we haven't been doing science in certain areas for a number of years. We're going to be sorting this out for at least the next decade. We should start again at some point, and that starts with clearing out all the crank theories that have made their way into journals that either don't replicate or have no predictive power.
We shouldn't have been relying on trust in the beginning. We should have been doing replications.
So if I’m understanding correctly: no structured sharing of scientific ideas until they’re replicated? By what mechanism do you propose people find novel studies that seem interesting enough to replicate?
> So if I’m understanding correctly: no structured sharing of scientific ideas until they’re replicated?
No, you don't. I'm actually struggling to think of a more extreme interpretation of my words.
Trying something novel is fine. But trying something out, getting a single result, treating it as gospel, and not even trying to find the flaws in it isn't doing science. A lot of federal grant money has gone into institutions that do just that, and I think it should be re-directed elsewhere. To, y'know, institutions that are actually going to do science.
Putting something in a journal is literally just publishing a result. It explicitly does not intrinsically carry notions of validity for the exact reasons you point out.
How are scientists supposed to share results in a way that doesn’t run the risk of someone else taking it as gospel, or even more likely: of someone on the internet thinking that the scientific community is taking it as gospel (which they’re generally not… again for the exact reasons you mention).
> How are scientists supposed to share results in a way that doesn’t run the risk of someone else taking it as gospel
Could not care less, but federal funding should be shifted to institutions that spend >X% (politically negotiable) of resources on replication.
And as a consideration for federal funding, groups that get federal funding, should be required to give first crack to journals that devote >X% of space to replication.
If people still want to only do novel studies, fine. I can't stop them. But we don't have to fund groups that don't go back and double check their work.
I agree with the target you’re shooting for here but I think it’s not nearly that simple to get there.
For example, you’d just have labs doing extremely expensive replications of extremely simple or well-established experiments. Why not?
IMO maybe an alternative solution: a government-run journal that 1) pays researchers handsome sums upon publication, 2) only publishes high-quality replications, and 3) only publishes replications that increase marginal confidence on a defensible important question.
That way this journal could pick up “negative results” and other “not-blockbuster” results that might come about as a byproduct of pursuing other research goals, and there’s no incentive to replicate meaningless work, and there’s no central planning required of the scientific endeavor (of which there’s already too much due to the funding mechanisms).
> For example, you’d just have labs doing extremely expensive replications of extremely simple or well-established experiments. Why not?
You're making grants sound like a cost-plus contract. I don't think grants currently work like that. Why would they be changed?
As to why that wouldn't happen under the current system. Because that lab would go under and before they published the replications (these things do get reviewed).
And after a certain number of replications, you would (presumably) stop funding those replications. Maybe re-visit it once every decade or so in the softer sciences. You never know what's a product of the current moment in something like sociology or psychology.
> IMO maybe an alternative solution: a government-run journal
I'd worry about inertia in a government run program. You can just point funding at a different institution when you're only talking about government funding, but when something is government run, it tends to be harder to kill than just re-directing funding.
I think you'd have to set up an entire ecosystem of government run journals, but that still makes it harder to pivot if one of the non-government run journals starts doing way better work.
This is disingenuous. Glorifying 'science' (which can be entirely shoddy to 'gold standard' and cover the whole gamut of garbage to spot on, which can change weekly) and dismissing cultural knowledge (i.e. how certain plants remedy ailments), generational knowledge (i.e. what weather changes mean), lived experience and non-accredited research because 'it's not science.'
You have to be critical of everything (reasonably), do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Or you can just believe that everything not 'published science' is wild internet crackpot theory if that makes life easier for you.
1. Science as an institution of academics, some of whom have demonstrably prioritized their career over doing their job (and even when that's not the case, has been shown to be wrong if you go back far enough to various scientific theories that were disproved by later discoveries), and...
2. Science as a process of inquiry that begins with an observation which leads to a hypothesis which is then put to the test through experimentation. This needn't be a process limited to academic science, either, but can be exercised in many areas of life.
I suspect we all generally agree that Science #1 should usually be taken with some salt (even in the best scenario, once you take science at its word, you've stopped doing science, though there are times, like gravity, when for practical purposes you can accept a high degree of technically-non-perfect certainty is close enough), and Science #2 is generally good for either reinforcing or correcting our understanding of the world.
The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.