Pucksoppet wrote: ↑Sun Dec 01, 2019 6:40 pm
Following on from a few links in comments in the above, I stumbled across this:
Not even trying: the corruption of real science
It's why I think places such as this are
important, as are the efforts of Ben Goldacre and Nick Brown. We need more people like them in positions of influence.
Interesting, but yes, bitter.
I've not worked in lab science for a while, which is what I think he is addressing. I did work in fairly similar fields back then, and his time scale stretches back to my lab science days, so am not completely unqualified to comment.
Where I agree:
I think a major problem has been the rise of 'managerialism': the view that what people do is inherently sloppy/lazy, and they need to be 'monitored' or 'measured' all the time to bring them up to scratch. The Research Excellence Framework is a good example of this.
We had a Faculty meeting about REF early in the cycle, where it was laid down that we had to produce one 3 or 4 star paper every year. And we had to work on approved themes, to match the University narratives. Since I'm sufficiently successful in my current field that I meet REF needs (and don't give a sh.t about senior managers), I felt I had to intervene on behalf of junior staff, and point out that this is absolutely not how research works. Sometimes nothing works, even when you have the right ideas. Sometimes you have the wrong ideas. I spent about three years chasing something completely worthless in retrospect. Yet because research is frustrating and difficult, you have to work on something you love, wherever it takes you, not on a departmental theme. The pressure to 'get grants' (as opposed to 'doing research' ) doesn't help either. A colleague of mine who had just published a brilliant paper in
Nature was publicly described at a Departmental meeting as a 'research zero' because she worked in a very inexpensive field that didn't need grants. The only way to guarantee you would meet your departmental REF target - would be to fake the data. And in the long run, you would probably still be found out.
Where I don't:
As far as I can see, the people entering science (and it is not easy: it takes real dedication and effort, unlike the jobsworths Charlton seems to be describing) are the same curious, interested and honest people they ever were. Most of them could make more money in other occupations, with less work. But they want to know what reality is, and that keeps them curious, and, as a by-product, honest.
And I disagree strongly with his comments about narrowing specialisation. On the contrary, the fields I worked in have undergone a massive convergence. Where there was once molecular biology, cell biology, cancer biology, developmental biology etc., there is now just one massive overlapping field, where everybody's work informs everybody else's.
It's true I think that we are in a period of 'normal science' in lab biology, rather than a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift' phase, so much of the work seems a little boring. (This is why I changed fields). But that is what science is mostly like. A paradigm shift only comes along at an interval of decades.
If Shpalman is reading this thread, I'd be very interested to know what he thinks, from a very different field.