Tag: Scientific Process

Nature on science’s perverse financial incentives

Paula Stephan, an econ professor at Georgia State and an NBER research associate has a comment in this week’sNature on perverse financial incentives in science. This includes the perverse incentives that govern the role of postdocs in research:

Consider the financial calculations that encourage universities to hire a series of postdocs rather than staff scientists. Postdocs earn around half to two-thirds of a staff scientist’s salary. They are young, have fresh perspectives and new ideas and are temporary, so can be let go when budgets decline2. But, in reality, postdocs are not cheap: substantial resources — both their own and society’s — have been invested in training them.

If a postdoc doesn’t get a research job, taxpayers do not get a return on their investment. Neither does the postdoc: someone who did not go to graduate school and entered the labour market in 2001 was earning about US$58,000 in 2008; a first-year postdoc who started graduate school in the United States in 2001 was making around $37,000 in 2008 on graduation3. During a three-year postdoc position, a scientist gives up more than $60,000 on average in return for highly uncertain job prospects. And many postdocs will not get a research job. There are few faculty openings, and limited numbers of research positions in government and industry. So even if individual postdocs cost less, from a societal perspective they can be expensive.

And here’s a suggestion many people won’t like, but it would certainly reorganize the financial incentives:

In addition, we should consider ways of making graduate students and postdocs more costly to universities, to discourage their overuse and reflect their social cost.

Social scientists argue that social scientists shouldn’t do science

Sean at Cosmic Variance is rightly upset over an op-ed by University of Rochester political scientists, who write:

Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world…

But we believe that this way of thinking is badly mistaken and detrimental to social research. For the sake of everyone who stands to gain from a better knowledge of politics, economics and society, the social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex, reject hypothetico-deductivism and embrace the fact that they are mature disciplines with no need to emulate other sciences…

This isn’t a matter of emulating other sciences – it’s a matter of actually doing science, any science. Science’s commitment to empirical support and hypothesis testing is why it works so damn well. And it is the track record of success that is the source of science’s cultural authority – not the fancy degrees, scientists’ IQs, or deep thoughts. People outside science also have fancy degrees, high IQs, and deep thoughts. What sets science apart is its devotion to testing hypotheses and revising your beliefs in response to the results.

Freeman Dyson on the rampage

Freeman Dyson muses on outsider science in the NYRB, “Science on the Rampage”:

In my career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs. I could not pretend to agree with them, but I could give them my moral support.

My main problem with Dyson’s view is that it doesn’t take into account those cranks and pseudoscientists who are actually acting in bad faith – peddlers of snake oil, front-men for deep-pocketed business interests threatened by research on tobacco, climate change, etc., and religious fundamentalists who can’t make peace between their faith and thoroughly established science. In fact, it’s likely that there are many, many more dishonest pseudoscientists than the deluded but honest amateurs that Dyson describes, and his knee-jerk sympathy for the scientific outsider makes him a potential sucker. Continue reading “Freeman Dyson on the rampage”

Mining industry takes on peer-review

It’s really not a new storyline: A big science study is examining whether some industry product or practice is harmful, and industry lawyers and scientists pull out all the stops to block the results. In this case, the question is whether miners’ exposure to diesel exhaust increases their risk of lung cancer. (Really, is there anything about being a miner that does not increase your risk of lung cancer?)

A post over at the Natural Resources Defense Council lays out the details (h/t Climate Progress). Several scientific journals received threatening letters from a mining industry lobby, warning these journals not to publish, or even peer-review papers from the diesel/mining/lung cancer study. The mining industry is trying to block publication of scientific studies they did not pay for, and whose results they did not like. A society in which any scientific study can be blocked by third party that possesses enough legal firepower is not the kind of society we should be.

According to Science, several journal editors received legal threats from a mining industry lobbyist:
Continue reading “Mining industry takes on peer-review”

Is science powerless to confront the supernatural?

Larry Moran praises a recent philosophical paper knocking the idea that science, by definition, cannot consider the supernatural:

Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman have an article coming out in Science & Education on “Grist to the Mill of Anti-evolutionism: The Failed Strategy of Ruling the Supernatural out of Science by Philosophical Fiat.”

It relates to the idea that science is limited by its insistence on adhering to methodological naturalism. According to this view, science cannot investigate the supernatural. The view is popular among some who oppose creationism since it means that creationism can’t be scientific, by fiat. It’s also important for accommodationists because it allows science and religion to co-exist in separate magisteria.

Continue reading “Is science powerless to confront the supernatural?”