While it's true that conservatively performed science does lead to more consistent results (so not every correlation would be claimed as a brand new discovery), nowadays we have two basic problems.
1. Science has become so abstract that it's very easy to cheat with statistics and methodology. This is both due to the enormous complexity which makes it hard to verify, but also because there are few low-hanging fruits, and people are pressured to show a result. I even had that pressure in high school in some classes to show results from nothing!
2. There are many areas which are so advanced that the overwhelming majority of us, and even experts barely comprehend any of it, but simultaneously there's many things which we barely know anything about. Sadly or not sadly, many of these areas are simply neglected because universities and companies aren't interested in them. That doesn't mean that these areas are useless or impossible to research, they are just either niche or non-existent. Now, people in those areas obviously won't use the "new" scientific methods since they don't even know themselves what will happen or how it works, so it's not possible to theoretise it in a similar way, unless if they randomly make them up.
Also, many (I would even say most) publications can safely be cut down by 50% without losing anything of value. I am saying this because you mentioned science is cutthroat - but it isn't cutthroat in coming up with new experiments, tools and making observations, it's mostly cutthroat in academia politics, falsifying/p-hacking data and writing eloquent bullshit in the form of shibboleths designed to be read by other peers in academia.
> 1. Science has become so abstract that it's very easy to cheat with statistics and methodology. This is both due to the enormous complexity which makes it hard to verify, but also because there are few low-hanging fruits, and people are pressured to show a result. I even had that pressure in high school in some classes to show results from nothing!
I agree with the diagnosis, I don't agree with the cause. It's not because science has become abstract. It's because we haven't adopted modern computing yet.
Back in the day it was impossible to share data. You collected data and you reported summary results. And we had to trust that you did it all right, and since the space of methods wasn't that big, we were mostly ok with one another's methods. That's not the case anymore. Much of science is using woefully outdated statistics.
The reality today is that pretty much every single study in the universe can and should share all of their data and methods. Raw, unfiltered, data. And we should have a standardized format for describing it, its properties, and the properties of the experiment in a machine understandable way. And every scientist will have their own toolkit for analysis that runs automatically when they open the paper. So we'll each get to see our own analysis, as well as whatever opinions the authors might have. We'll get there in the next 100 years.
> 2. There are many areas which are so advanced that the overwhelming majority of us, and even experts barely comprehend any of it,
This I would disagree with. For every field you'll find people who are so dedicated they really get it. In so far as humanity gets that problem at all.
> but simultaneously there's many things which we barely know anything about. Sadly or not sadly, many of these areas are simply neglected because universities and companies aren't interested in them. That doesn't mean that these areas are useless or impossible to research, they are just either niche or non-existent. Now, people in those areas obviously won't use the "new" scientific methods since they don't even know themselves what will happen or how it works, so it's not possible to theoretise it in a similar way, unless if they randomly make them up.
Universities by their nature attract people who are interested in a lot of crazy things. The reason why those areas aren't explored isn't because people don't want to. Or don't know how. Or anything lke that. It's because science budgets are obscenely low. We spend worldwide $5B on cancer research. That's like 1/20th of the ad revenue of Facebook. If we want to go level up as a civilization we need to spend more on more crazy science.
> Also, many (I would even say most) publications can safely be cut down by 50% without losing anything of value. I am saying this because you mentioned science is cutthroat - but it isn't cutthroat in coming up with new experiments, tools and making observations, it's mostly cutthroat in academia politics, falsifying/p-hacking data and writing eloquent bullshit in the form of shibboleths designed to be read by other peers in academia.
I don't agree at all. Yeah, some people p-hack or distort facts or whatever. Some because they just want to get ahead and don't care. Most simply because they don't know better. The reason why say, a lot of the scientific output of some countries is basically junk, isn't because those people are evil or stupid. It's because they don't know better.
Your opinion is that 50% of the content of papers can be deleted. But how many papers have you tried to replicate in your life? It's easy to skim through and say you get it and move on. But, when you're trying to reproduce a paper all of those details you want to take out matter.
Most scientists just want to figure out how things work. They're smart people who make a conscious decision to give up millions of dollars of income over their lifetimes in exchange for working far harder to find new ideas.
> writing eloquent bullshit in the form of shibboleths designed to be read by other peers in academia.
The fact that you can't understand a paper simply means you need to level up your skills in that area. Often we need to be extremely precise with our language, and that results in papers that are hard to read. But if we weren't that precise, we would never make any progress because no one would know what anyone else is saying.
At the end of the day science works. Your phone gets better all the time. Cancer survival rates are getting better. ChatGPT gets better. etc.
It's just become a fun activity for a lot of people to dump on a group of people who are doing their best to make everyone's life better at their own expense and that of their families. I can hardly think of a better description of the direction our society has been moving in for the past decade.
1. Science has become so abstract that it's very easy to cheat with statistics and methodology. This is both due to the enormous complexity which makes it hard to verify, but also because there are few low-hanging fruits, and people are pressured to show a result. I even had that pressure in high school in some classes to show results from nothing!
2. There are many areas which are so advanced that the overwhelming majority of us, and even experts barely comprehend any of it, but simultaneously there's many things which we barely know anything about. Sadly or not sadly, many of these areas are simply neglected because universities and companies aren't interested in them. That doesn't mean that these areas are useless or impossible to research, they are just either niche or non-existent. Now, people in those areas obviously won't use the "new" scientific methods since they don't even know themselves what will happen or how it works, so it's not possible to theoretise it in a similar way, unless if they randomly make them up.
Also, many (I would even say most) publications can safely be cut down by 50% without losing anything of value. I am saying this because you mentioned science is cutthroat - but it isn't cutthroat in coming up with new experiments, tools and making observations, it's mostly cutthroat in academia politics, falsifying/p-hacking data and writing eloquent bullshit in the form of shibboleths designed to be read by other peers in academia.