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Lightwave comments on Qualia Soup, a rationalist and a skilled You Tube jockey - Less Wrong
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It will be a sad day when fetishization of "science" takes over this site as well.
The word "science" should be taboo. It is used both for idealized pursuit of knowledge when you want to praise it; and then for a particular set of practice of academia which pretends to be about pursuit of knowledge, but it's really the most horrible waste of brainpower in history.
What about pursuit of knowledge involves shady statistics, obsession with "statistical significance", peer review to exclude "outsiders", massive publication bias, very little reproduction of anything (some estimates say that for 95% of published results, nobody bothered even once - but if it wasn't worth reproducing, was it worth studying at all?), hiding results behind pay walls, and focus on whatever lies within established disciplines instead of what's most important?
Not surprisingly nearly none of old discoverers of knowledge like Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, etc. would be even considered "scientists" by modern criteria.
As far as I can tell the main reason people are blinded to all problems of practice of "science" is the very word "science" itself.
I don't quite get what you're implying. Because the scientific method is somewhat poorly implemented we should do.. what exactly? Be more skeptical of current/new scientific theories? Not promote science? And more importantly, what alternatives do we have for a best estimate of how certain things in the world work?
"Somewhat poorly implemented"?
Try these two null hypotheses:
How confident are you they're not true, and the sign points in the right direction?
My overnight fix idea is impact factor tax - convince people scoring scientists by their publications to automatically slash citation value by some % (50% would be a good start, with clear understanding it will go up to 100% eventually) for every publication not openly available, to break their network effect, and at least make all results open.
That won't get anywhere near fixing science, but I cannot think of anything else with better returns on effort. I haven't heard anyone else proposing this particular idea, so if it turns out to be old it must be by convergence.
I'd estimate that including a lot more serious statistics in education would have more significant effect than destroying pay walls, but I see no realistic way of fixing that right now.