The problem is that aside from ‘climate science’ telling which half is wrong kills people…
The crucial fact is that 88% of science is unused. (Best to use numbers with no pointy ends when pulling them from a tender place.) It is unknown and unimportant how much of the unused portion is incorrect or even deliberately fraudulent. The more important question is how much of the portion that is used is incorrect? There are clearly a lot of areas (e.g. dietary science) where myths can persist for decades without being detected.
The crucial fact is that 88% of science is unused.
Presumably you mean that 88 percent of science publications are unreferenced in later papers. Papers which are unreferenced are far from unused, they make it less likely that someone will follow a dead in theory in their research. What’s being discussed here is bad research that emits a false signal and results in wasted future research.
In biomedical science, it’s generally not corruption at fault. One failure point is the practical inability to control for a single variable. If person X does thing A, that person probably does B, C, and D as well. Also, if you split data into enough cells, you’ll have so many cells that by chance you’ll get a 3-sigma result, but maybe there are only a few data points actually in that cell. And then add PR spin from the university office of marketing and communications, and media spin of THAT spin, and you get some of the stupid ten-second blurbs you would see if you still watched the nightly news.
Now, if, on the other hand, you were talking climate “science…”
No surprises here. In returning to my old theme of monopsony,(single buyer in a market) many of these trends become surprise-free. In social hierarchies, of which the prototypical one is government, what is experienced is unacknowledged agency cost. That is, the difference between what the hierarchy expects if its purposes are adhered to perfectly, and what they actually get from each agent in the hierarchy. Not too surprisingly, this includes the point that agency cost tends to grow exponentially the higher up the hierarchy one goes. This is naturally the case, because at higher levels the hierarchy has fewer and fewer equal agents to form productive networks that would restrain individuals straying from the purpose of the hierarchy.
Science funding is dominated by monopsonies. Here, it is the Federal Government, through the various Agencies and Foundations like NSF, NIMH, NCI, etc. At the top are the funding committees, in Congress. At the bottom, are the individual researchers, chivied from pillar to post by their own academic hierarchy’s “funding grant helpers”, who transmit all too well knowledge of each new desire in Congress and the Agencies down to the researchers looking to get their associate professor grant funding extended for yet another year.
The only detectable amelioration of this is from unfriendly hierarchies. Neither Russian nor Chinese science funding hierarchies seem the least bit interested in making life easy for advocates of dominating human-generated “climate change”. Meanwhile, their other government hierarchies apparently do some funding of US political groups, to encourage political opposition to low-cost energy here.
If we are to go beyond these minor amelioration factors, we must break the monopsony. As long as we keep it, we will keep the agency costs, including the worst ones at the top of the governmental hierarchies. Social network funding is growing rapidly, but is still small, and scientists are very often less than comfortable with techniques to get funded through these means. Whether the 50 States of the US could form a sufficient amount of science funding to undermine the current monopsony is strongly affected by the domination of the information State legislatures get. That is, by the same channels mentioned in the article, progressive media itself, being dominated by the “cause of the day”.
I do not know if or when a phase transition in each layer of these alternatives to monopsony funding will take place. We are still at the stage of “cracks in the ice”, of a *very* big glacier. The great danger is that, by the time this glacier begins breaking up decisively, the pollution of the public’s mind against Science by the results of agency cost corruption in the Federal hierarchies will require decades to repair.
“Meanwhile, their other government hierarchies apparently do some funding of US political groups, to encourage political opposition to low-cost energy here.”
Oh, Democrats would never take money from foreign governments to engage in activism detrimental to our country, especially not when they accuse others of doing it.
“If we are to go beyond these minor amelioration factors, we must break the monopsony.”
“The great danger is that, by the time this glacier begins breaking up decisively, the pollution of the public’s mind against Science by the results of agency cost corruption in the Federal hierarchies will require decades to repair.”
Is it news that humans are corrupt?
The problem is that aside from ‘climate science’ telling which half is wrong kills people…
The crucial fact is that 88% of science is unused. (Best to use numbers with no pointy ends when pulling them from a tender place.) It is unknown and unimportant how much of the unused portion is incorrect or even deliberately fraudulent. The more important question is how much of the portion that is used is incorrect? There are clearly a lot of areas (e.g. dietary science) where myths can persist for decades without being detected.
The crucial fact is that 88% of science is unused.
Presumably you mean that 88 percent of science publications are unreferenced in later papers. Papers which are unreferenced are far from unused, they make it less likely that someone will follow a dead in theory in their research. What’s being discussed here is bad research that emits a false signal and results in wasted future research.
In biomedical science, it’s generally not corruption at fault. One failure point is the practical inability to control for a single variable. If person X does thing A, that person probably does B, C, and D as well. Also, if you split data into enough cells, you’ll have so many cells that by chance you’ll get a 3-sigma result, but maybe there are only a few data points actually in that cell. And then add PR spin from the university office of marketing and communications, and media spin of THAT spin, and you get some of the stupid ten-second blurbs you would see if you still watched the nightly news.
Now, if, on the other hand, you were talking climate “science…”
No surprises here. In returning to my old theme of monopsony,(single buyer in a market) many of these trends become surprise-free. In social hierarchies, of which the prototypical one is government, what is experienced is unacknowledged agency cost. That is, the difference between what the hierarchy expects if its purposes are adhered to perfectly, and what they actually get from each agent in the hierarchy. Not too surprisingly, this includes the point that agency cost tends to grow exponentially the higher up the hierarchy one goes. This is naturally the case, because at higher levels the hierarchy has fewer and fewer equal agents to form productive networks that would restrain individuals straying from the purpose of the hierarchy.
Science funding is dominated by monopsonies. Here, it is the Federal Government, through the various Agencies and Foundations like NSF, NIMH, NCI, etc. At the top are the funding committees, in Congress. At the bottom, are the individual researchers, chivied from pillar to post by their own academic hierarchy’s “funding grant helpers”, who transmit all too well knowledge of each new desire in Congress and the Agencies down to the researchers looking to get their associate professor grant funding extended for yet another year.
The only detectable amelioration of this is from unfriendly hierarchies. Neither Russian nor Chinese science funding hierarchies seem the least bit interested in making life easy for advocates of dominating human-generated “climate change”. Meanwhile, their other government hierarchies apparently do some funding of US political groups, to encourage political opposition to low-cost energy here.
If we are to go beyond these minor amelioration factors, we must break the monopsony. As long as we keep it, we will keep the agency costs, including the worst ones at the top of the governmental hierarchies. Social network funding is growing rapidly, but is still small, and scientists are very often less than comfortable with techniques to get funded through these means. Whether the 50 States of the US could form a sufficient amount of science funding to undermine the current monopsony is strongly affected by the domination of the information State legislatures get. That is, by the same channels mentioned in the article, progressive media itself, being dominated by the “cause of the day”.
I do not know if or when a phase transition in each layer of these alternatives to monopsony funding will take place. We are still at the stage of “cracks in the ice”, of a *very* big glacier. The great danger is that, by the time this glacier begins breaking up decisively, the pollution of the public’s mind against Science by the results of agency cost corruption in the Federal hierarchies will require decades to repair.
“Meanwhile, their other government hierarchies apparently do some funding of US political groups, to encourage political opposition to low-cost energy here.”
Oh, Democrats would never take money from foreign governments to engage in activism detrimental to our country, especially not when they accuse others of doing it.
“If we are to go beyond these minor amelioration factors, we must break the monopsony.”
“The great danger is that, by the time this glacier begins breaking up decisively, the pollution of the public’s mind against Science by the results of agency cost corruption in the Federal hierarchies will require decades to repair.”
+1