TheLowlyEngineer wrote on Apr 29
th, 2025 at 4:22pm:
Morphy wrote on Dec 11
th, 2024 at 12:11pm:
I once believed that all science was performed by people that were somehow above the petty greed and selfishness of normal human beings. Scientists must be above normal people, after all they wear really official looking long white coats. Their only goal was truth through verifiable, repeatable experiementation.
Well that's the idea anyways. And those people absolutely exist. But there's also a lot of ugliness in the scientific community. People get entrenched in ideas out of ego and then try and destroy new ideas without any sort of dispassionate observation. Quite the opposite in fact. Read the history of scientific advancement and it's one ugly fight after another. Massive egos with massive amounts of money on the line at times.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. Science is awesome! But this fact I think hit me harder due to my blind faith in it's completely unbiased motivations growing up.
Had similar thoughts until I witnessed it, sort of. When I was in grad school I had a geology professor I really enjoyed. I used to joke that his mind was like a hoarders house, full of a bunch of stuff and it might take a few minutes for him to find it. One semester he led a field trip out west. His area of expertise/study was the Kaibab Plateau. He had previously taught at UNLV. We flew into Vegas and spent the next fives days visiting Zion, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and several other stops in that NV/AZ/UT junction. Anyway he got to talking about papers he had published and intended to publish. Something he proposed questioned the current narrative and because of that he was having difficulty getting certain papers reviewed/published, I don't exactly remember. I do remember thinking, how is this a thing. Suggesting a layer of sandstone was deposited differently gets you censored? Seriously? It might have significant meaning to six people in the entire country.
Fast forward a few years and I'm listening to Randal Carlson and Graham Hancock on the JRE podcast. They start discussing their feuds with academia and I think I have an idea what they are talking about.
Another for me was thinking that people with experience were actually good at their jobs.
Having been through the PhD grind has certainly changed my view of academia.
I still have much appreciation for many of the academics, very bright people and by and large good at what they do, at least the ones I interacted with.
I also see how the lumbering machine that is academia moves and how the incentives in the system drive all the various behaviour that go on. Overall, I see it work. Peer review, at it's best is a good quality check from people you don't know and who don't have any particular interest in your success. Standards and rigor is upheld, at least in my scientifically tangential field.
Critically though I see something which I believe is common to any group of people, which is... a certain 'way of doing things', things that aren't really thought about or things that are ignored. Things that aren't really questioned. A sort of conformity of viewpoints.
Add to that a certain 'playing the game' mentality which is common, and a lot of pressure to produce good results. This obviously can lead to poor outcomes..!
I think it would be better if it was more widely acknowledged that academic/scientific bodies are still vulnerable to going wrong as a community or missing things, as with any group of people.
The scientific method and the institution of science do work, but are certainly not an immunisation against going off the rails as many people think, and as I used to think.
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Something you once believed but now reject (Read 854 times)
