added by Johanna · updated 2y ago
The deluge of crappy papers must stop
- Funding is an especially acute pain point for scientists, who spend up to half their time writing grant proposals. Success in getting funding is heavily tied to metrics such as the h-index, which quantifies the impact of a scientist’s published work. The resulting pressure to “publish or perish” incentivizes the pursuit of novel research over work ... See more
from A Guide to DeSci, the Latest Web3 Movement - a16z crypto by Sarah Hamburg
Yishai Ofek added
- Ultimately these structural problems with science funding and publishing have arisen from centralized control – a small pool of power-players sculpt the scientific landscape and have created a deeply imbalanced industry from what should be a public good.
from DeSci: The case for Decentralised Science | Gitcoin Blog by Joseph Cook
sari added
- academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progressi... See more
from How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation - Alexey Guzey by Alexey Guzey
Johanna added
- The barrage of crap we see on the Web is a direct consequence of the current economic model, where Google sucks all the money from the space, leaving only spoils to content creators. If there is no good money to be made on a single article, people will be forced to make up for this with 100 worse ones, exacerbating the problem.
from Interview with Brave Search by Dmitri Brereton (dkb)
sari added
- Most scientists strongly favor more research funding. They like to portray science in a positive light, emphasizing benefits and minimizing negatives. While understandable, the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. That evidence demands a large-scale institutional response. It should be a major subject in public p... See more
from Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck by Patrick Collison
Johanna added
Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been runn
... See morefrom The Rise and Fall of Peer Review by Adam Mastroianni
sari added
- bad cultural and institutional incentives can deaden creativity as surely as Netflix’s algorithms. A flood of research dollars and prescriptions going in the wrong direction, because everyone wants to imitate everyone else, is the scientific equivalent of everybody making the same dress because that seems to be what the consumer wants — no literal ... See more
from Can We Resist the Age of the Algorithm? by Ross
Keely Adler added
- Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up wit... See more
from Is America Really Running Out of Original Ideas? by The Atlantic
Johanna added