Universities are in the business of creating/discovering truth and shipping it. A Positivist review quickly shows things like math are easy to prove true. As you work your ways down to the humanities it becomes increasingly difficult. And competitive.
Shipping truth that isn’t powerful isn’t as attractive to your customers as truth that is. So you’re incentivized to develop truth that is. And you do this by hacking the accepted standards in knowledge pursuit by starting with a conclusion and working backwards. You tell a story based on the evidence that’s useful.
Now it’s “the science” or at the very least “there’s studies” and this is useful to both the customers (NGOs, journals, activists, lobbyists, media, anyone that wants to influence policy) and the university (attracts money, reputation and status) and the people shipping it (tenure, book deals, speaking fees).
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just simple incentives. The poor guy who spends his time figuring out what the truth is not or that ships truth that isn’t immediately useful to the customers is looking for a new job after his grant dries up.
Exactly. In other words, there is a huge difference between science as "pursuit of knowledge through thoroughly applied scientific method" and science as "product of academic process".
Incentive structures make sure that the latter is dominant in published science.
Even if there was no intentional fudging of data, results and interpretations by scientist teams, the results of science as a whole could still be heavily (over time) influenced by simple biases in selection of grant applications. For example if you only fund researches of type "thing X good" and dismiss all applications trying to prove "thing X bad", you will eventually gather enough evidence for X to appear good, regardless of how objectively "good" it is.
The other level of problem is that truth in reality means consensus. You can argue about what truth is in reality, but functionally it means consensus.
So it's not even about what is or is not true, or what is recognized as useful in the short term, it's that what defines truth at any given time is what is popularly believed to be true.
This sounds very flaky but it has real consequences because the incentives aren't just to find positive results, it's to find positive results that are likely to be accepted by the majority of the academic field. This kind of positive feedback loop is bound to lead to pressure because science almost by definition has to get some things incorrect — it's how progress is made. So people are actively punished for going against the grain, or exploring areas where our knowledge is limited and therefore prone to lots of negative results because we just don't know.
Perceived truth is consensus. But greater truth, reality itself, remains true even if not a single person is able to perceive it. You can't actually modify reality with wishful thinking.
For these scientific papers, at a minimum truth==reproducibility.
For humanities and social sciences, it could mean consensus, but in hard science it is different. You are doing experiments that produce data. If someone else repeats the experiment, they should get the same data.
In this case, no one could reproduce the results of the papers in question.
I wonder how widespread this has become. How many scientists, driven to publish, know that it is too expensive to reproduce their experiment?
> The other level of problem is that truth in reality means consensus
That’s the job of the prestigious media. They manufacture consent to the masses. They propagate right-think. Again, not a conspiracy but simply incentives.
Anyways, there is objective truth. Not everything can be settled that way though and you’re right in that “truth” can mean consensus in many instances.
The problem with that is that in many things the dissent is tasked with proving claims untrue, because of the consensus, rather than those making claim to knowledge having to prove it is true. There’s a lot of this today.
Shipping truth that isn’t powerful isn’t as attractive to your customers as truth that is. So you’re incentivized to develop truth that is. And you do this by hacking the accepted standards in knowledge pursuit by starting with a conclusion and working backwards. You tell a story based on the evidence that’s useful.
Now it’s “the science” or at the very least “there’s studies” and this is useful to both the customers (NGOs, journals, activists, lobbyists, media, anyone that wants to influence policy) and the university (attracts money, reputation and status) and the people shipping it (tenure, book deals, speaking fees).
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just simple incentives. The poor guy who spends his time figuring out what the truth is not or that ships truth that isn’t immediately useful to the customers is looking for a new job after his grant dries up.