Science is not logiomancy. Consequently, like every form of pseudo-divination, it gets you the right answer provided the author already knows the right answer. Good scientist => good papers. Good science => wordcelibate nonsense.
If you have a good scientist, they sometimes produce a sea of pseudoscientific whatthefuck, with the right answer at the bottom. (It's okay, nobody can for real tell the difference between science and pseudoscience, so they're equally persuasive.)
If you have a bad scientist who knows the scientific [recipe] you get lots of rigorous statistically literate data, supporting the wrong conclusion, because statistical methods aren't anywhere near powerful enough to constitute logiomancy. (What a waste of effort - even other scientists only read the abstract then ctrl-f to see if they're cited.)
By the way, all working forms of divination except logiomancy are just asking someone who already knows the answer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a sense, logiomancy is the same, except there's no someone, it's asking unconscious material that already knows the answer.
People respond to incentives. Grad students want to have prestigious, stable jobs that use their training -- maybe as professors, maybe as highly compensated technicians. If they have to publish six papers of tommyrot just to get the Ph.D. that allows them to compete for the good jobs, grad students are very willing to get started on their horrible, unreadable, peer-reviewable logorrhea. To subject a bright young mind to this is evil -- and "those to whom evil is done, do evil in return" most of the time. Thus academic science degenerates and declines.
ReplyDeleteI hold out a spark of hope, however, because physical nature itself is the Muse of the aspirant to knowledge. To court that Muse is perilous, but not impossible.