= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ricketson comments on How to Fix Science - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (141)
This, I think, is just one symptom of a more general problem with scientists: they don't emphasize rigorous logic as much as they should. Science, after all, is not only about (a) observation but about (b) making logical inferences from observation. Scientists need to take (b) far more seriously (not that all don't, but many do not). You've heard the old saying "Scientists make poor philosophers." It's true (or at least, true more often than it should be). That has to change. Scientists ought to be amongst the best philosophers in the world, precisely because they ought to be masters of logic.
Saying that people should be better is not helpful. Like all people, scientists have limited time and need to choose how to allocate their efforts. Sometimes more observations can solve a problem, and sometimes more careful thinking is necessary. The appropriate allocation depends on the situation and the talents of the researcher in question.
That being said, there may be a dysfunctional bias in how funding is allocated -- creating a "all or none" environment where the best strategy for maintaining a basic research program (paying for one's own salary plus a couple of students) is to be the type of researcher who gets multi-million dollar grants and uses that money to generate gargantuan new datasets, which can then provide the foundation for a sensational publication that everyone notices.