Item — HN Reader

> I agree with this article, but think that by singling out social sciences it fails to reveal the bigger picture: that all scientific fields are subject to these same mistakes.

I actually prefer them writing about a single (or a group of related) field(s) of study. There have been lots of articles asserting that all of science has these issues, but it's not clear to me that they all suffer to the same degree. For example, It's not clear to me that physics or astronomy suffer as from this type of behavior. I'm sure it does happen, but it doesn't seem to be as pervasive as in the social sciences and medicine. For social sciences it seems like it is happening often enough that it's affecting the trajectory of the field. To my knowlege, this isn't the case for most of physics and astronomy (for example).

Also, a lot (but not all) of the "mistakes" noted in the article were deliberate fabrications or unethical tampering of data. So I think labeling them as "mistakes" risks being too forgiving.

1 comments

Psychology tends to be picked on more because it's easier to understand and communicate. Researchers in psychology tend to be in areas that have names that are meaningful to humans (like "short term memory" or "interpersonal violence") rather than jargon ("systems" or "finite mass spectroscopy"). Really, psychology has the bad luck of having jargon that maps to lay knowledge -- imperfectly, but the reporters don't care.

Overall, most scientists are ethical. Very few people are deliberately falsifying their data.

But in every field, the incentives are not set up to do good science. That's a fact, and until it's understood there won't be any progress. Until then, you'll just see a slow grind of academia eating itself.

> But in every field, the incentives are not set up to do good science. That's a fact, and until it's understood there won't be any progress. Until then, you'll just see a slow grind of academia eating itself.

I think this depends on what you mean by "doing good science". I agree that incentives in every field are not set up to do the _best_ science, but in many fields the incentives are not such that people are drawn to doing _bad_ science. So if academia is "eating itself", I don't think it can be universally attributed to incentives regarding good vs bad science.

No, it's the same in every field, because the process of getting tenure in about every field is the same: publish lots of times. "Lots" might be different in different fields, but it still comes down to "publish a lot." Publishing a lot is actually a lot closer to incentivizing bad science than not.

I'd encourage you to look past your pre-existing notions of what makes a "hard" science branch and actually talk to people who are the boots on the ground about what is really going on in academia.