science+

Why are scientific papers difficult to read, even for scientists? A scientific paper from researchers in Italy and Finland shows that long sentences, jargon,...

"An Unscientific American" discusses the resignation of Laura Helmuth from her position as editor-in-chief at Scientific American. The author, Michael Sherme...

When magazines like 'Scientific American' are run by ideologues producing biased dreck, it only makes it more difficult to defend the institution of science itself.

Overcoming the tyranny of the scientific method through epistemic anarchy

Jonathan Pruitt was prolific, influential, and charming. Then academic sleuths started poking around

archived 24 Oct 2024 08:58:44 UTC

Three researchers who left academia share their tales of self discovery, course correction, and growth.

Government-funded grants favor research exploring ‘white supremacy’ and ‘non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analysis.

Science is built on trust. What happens when someone destroys it?

Tactical science in service of political ends

PhD students in Sweden accessed mental-health services at increasing rates as their studies went on.

Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists’ careers, not knowledge. While science communication has turned into a means of public indoctrination. In this essay, Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that real experts don’t know “the truth,” and that we should become pilgrims towards the unknown rather than the squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras.  Science is in trouble. The problem comes from within and from without. Not only has scientific publishing been gamed to advance one’s career rather than everyone’s knowledge, but scientific communication has turned into a mechanism of public indoctrination. We don’t seem to live in a world where people can “trust the experts” anymore. Worrisomely, the mantra “science says” either means almost everything or virtually nothing to most of us today. For instance, already at year 4 AC (After COVID), some citizens would never accept unconstitutional lockdowns or experimental inoculations again, while others still drive alone in their cars with the windows up and their masks on. Something is killing science softly. What is it, how is it happening, and why?Despite relentless technological innovation, scientific progress is stalling compared to the prodigious revolutions in understanding that our ancestors provided us a century ago. We seem to have fallen into the habit of living off such scientific props, burning such a legacy and credibility quickly and unwisely. We need to transfer new funds to the science ledger, or else our scientific credentials will soon become hardly more than a pseudo-religious credo.___Science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves.___I believe the key lies in the way we make science public. This entails a double-stranded path: the inner route of publishing scientific results and the outer route of publicizing them. Much like in M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands, thinking and communication are “a strange loop” (borrowing Douglas Hofstadter’s phrase), namely, a self-referential paradoxical system. Knowledge circulates via peer-reviewed publications within the walls of academia. Then, outside the citadel, we do science outreach which, in turn, directs public attention and funding to certain topics and ways of doing science back to academia. Both routes are severely compromised:First, science publishing has become a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme at the expense of taxpayers and scientists themselves. Top journals charge obscene fees to publish results already paid for by those taxpayers in the form of grants, while we peer-review there “for free”. Moreover, such “reviews” tend not to be the critical, objective, and dispassionate appraisal of the work one might think they are, especially when results threaten the dominant worldview or simply one’s tiny conceptual condominium or scientific business niche. The line between editorial curation and censorship is thin, even dashed.___We used to want to understand nature, but now our main concern is to understand how to publish in Nature!___In a similar vein, our “peers” aren’t often truly so, since we are not people of equal expertise, interests, values, agenda, standing, or power. The so-called “scientific community” is more of a euphemism for an actual scientific hierarchy of castes. Yes, personal ambition can drive discovery, and we certainly want credit for our ideas and work, but it’s the hunger games of academia: publish or/and perish. We used to want to understand nature, but now our main concern is to understand how to publish in Nature! Not to speak of the bureaucratic mind virus that has drained the vital force of our institutions which, in turn, have betrayed us and are crumbling. How can science progress in this way?Second, science journalism has become a significant part of the problem it was supposed to be a solution to. Let us dwell on this and dive into rough seas. There are, no doubt, great communicators of various sorts in the media landscape but some of the most notorious ones have steadfastly slanted towards promoting what could be called “the public misunderstanding of science”. Such professionals do not exemplify what they profess. They substitute certitude for curiosity. They throw stigma upon enigma. They conflate their myopic and dogmatic views of science with “the science”. They transmute a kind of inferiority complex into a superiority contest, making science digestible at the expense of making us swallow their covert ideologies. It is shameful, pathetic, and detrimental to us all.You probably know who I am talking about without indulging in specific examples but, if you don’t, lucky you (and stay tuned). Such sci-com gurus (and their minion wannabes blogging and trolling from their couches) conflate scientific outreach with scientific outrage. They hunt academic dissenters down and bully good-spirited amateurs. They think of themselves as the self-appointed arbiters of fact versus fiction, dismissing people’s exceptional experiences as illusions, delusions, or hallucinations (you are either crazy or simply stupid). They have a blast ridiculing half-witted flat earthers, fundamentalist creationists, and lovely old ladies who believe in spirits, but would not survive a round of debate with a grown-up heterodox intellectual. Similarly, they flippantly challenge frail positions but never dare to go after the big fish of the status quo (i.e. Big Pharma is your friend, but acupuncturists are dangerous). Curiously, they love the feeling of telling you that science does not care about your feelings. As it turns out, (their) “science is true whether or not you believe in it” (say hi, you have finally met your new masterclass indoctrinator). Confusing solemnity with seriousness, they make fools of themselves, as John Cleese brilliantly illustrates here.But that’s not all. At the risk of being scathingly clear, let me continue to say out loud what plenty of my colleagues have to think in silence. The self-aggrandised middlemen of “Science ®” are too quick to tell the public (and other scientists!) what they can and cannot believe in, investigate, or even entertain. They don’t bother to read the literature of those genuine subject-matter experts, the pioneers who have been at the real cutting-edge of science for decades. It is so wonderful to be a skeptic of everything except your own beliefs. Why spend the time checking the data if the phenomenon is impossible in theory? It is one thing to be dogmatic but another to be lazy (and being both is surely too much). They say they would change their mind (as they should say), but they know they won’t: their priors about the potential reality of certain important phenomena are so infinitesimally small that any Bayesian update of their beliefs upon new evidence, no matter how “extraordinary”, is chimeric. To cover that up, they are used to posing the two-alternative forced choice between their body of authorized truths or science denialism; it’s their way or the highway. But dilemmas betray trilemmas. There is life beyond real fakes and fake reals.How did science become so unscientific? To make a long story short, we have been sold a triple pseudo-intellectual flimflam for decades: if you want to be a respectable homo academicus, then you must embrace the unholy trinity of mechanistic reductive materialism, plus skepticism in its most dogmatic declination, and finally secularism in the mode of viciously naive atheism. In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris. Arrogance is antithetical to progress.___In fact, future scientists are the most indoctrinated of all, since most check-points in the stairway to academic heaven – from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers to tenured professors – select for such failings and implant us with an operating system stuck in our 19th century understanding of the world.___The distinguished Professors of the Public Pulpitry of Science have done a huge disservice not only to science itself but to the humanities (and to humanism writ large) by straw-manning philosophy and disdaining religion. Much like priests, however, they anoint themselves in the transmission chain of revelation. Paraphrasing a Freudian Morpheus, the return of the repressed, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. If God is dead, zombie New Atheists have ushered in a Walking Dead society. They first prune nature of wonder and then wonder how to reinfuse it with sham awe and the farcical wonderment at the astounding improbability of being alive. Beating irrationalism with unreasonableness, the limping horsemen of puritan reason have revealed themselves more like impostor truth-keepers than indomitable truth-seekers. If I may coin a word, they have “misscienced” reality!But there are silver linings. A growing wide range of independent young people, from Curt Jaimungal to Kehlan Morgan, to name two of my favourite ones, are acting as coronary stents to the as-yet narrow conduits of ideas. Some senior intellectuals and producers, such as Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Jeffrey Mishlove, have been transfusing insights into the zeitgeist lifeblood for decades. And then we have Joe Rogan, the Mothership (or Death Star) of real talk. Note how his recent conversation with Terrence Howard caused outrage amongst the intellectual elites; mentioning certain ideas can cause in them the “entertaining entails endorsing entails endangering” freak-out chain-reaction in their pasteurized intellects. Very few can walk the tightrope between woo-woo and poo-poo. Eric Weinstein and Garry Nolan are some of those rare but much-needed funambulists in the real circus of science.___Scientistic televangelism is alienating genuine truth-seekers, eroding public trust in science, and indoctrinatin...

A survey at one of the biggest UK research universities finds that staff often end up flying to meetings despite a preference to avoid air travel.

My Website: petejudo.comFollow me:Behavioral Science Instagram: @petejudoofficialInstagram: @petejudoTwitter: @petejudoLinkedIn: Peter JudodihardjoGood tools...

The withdrawal after 22 years of a controversial stem cell paper highlights how perverse incentives can distort scientific progress

Unpacking the story of Fauci and painful experiments involving dogs Documents… — White Coat Waste Project 🥼🗑️ (@WhiteCoatWaste)

archived 15 May 2024 16:08:14 UTC

For nearly 25 years, we thought we knew how the Universe would end. Now, new measurements point to a profoundly different conclusion.

Academic journals and the researchers who publish in them are increasingly engaged in naked political advocacy rather than science. It's time we cut off public funding to peer-reviewed publications

Misconduct vs Malpractice in Science – A Primer.

archived 3 Feb 2024 17:18:46 UTC

archived 21 Mar 2024 09:22:14 UTC

Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.

Let’s face it: science has gone woke. What used to be an ideological virus afflicting the arts and humanities has now spread through the entire university, STEMM fields included. That’s why Minding the Campus is renewing our focus on the sciences through a new, ongoing article series called Minding the Sciences. Here, we’ll cover wokeism in STEMM, scientific integrity, research funding, climate science, scientific associations, and much more.

Why I Believe Academia is Dead: A Personal StoryWhen I was a postdoc at @wur, I supervised a PhD student who participated in a sandwich PhD program in Brazil and the Netherlands. She was married to a man who was also pursuing his PhD at both universities. Their conduct was… pic.twitter.com/Wm8ctZNwUg— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) January 24, 2024

Researchers accused of manipulating data images with copy-and-paste.