The acceptance of bad scientific practice to the benefit of productivity
I think this article is looking at the effect rather than the cause. Why might it be that so much of science has started to edge away from well... science. Today nearly 1 in 8 people have a masters degree or higher. And in one in 33 have a doctorate or professional degree. [1] And these numbers seem to be increasing. That&#x27;s really insane if you think about it. We now have more people with postgraduate degrees than had any degree in 1970, and postgraduate education generally implies a necessity to publish. But discovering genuinely new and novel information is not easy. So what do people publish instead? Enter the current state of science and academia. I think the most informative paragraph in this article was:<p>&quot;<i>Or look at Brian Wansink, the Cornell Professor with the bottomless soup bowl experiment. He recently drew unwanted attention to himself with a blogpost in which he advised a student to try harder getting results out of data because it “cost us a lot of time and our own money to collect.” Had Wansink been aware that massaging data until it delivers is not sound statistical procedure, he’d probably not have blogged about it.</i>&quot;<p>Physics is one of the least susceptible to this issue, but no field is immune. The issue is that &#x27;science&#x27; has become more about publishing than actual discovery. The two should be synonymous, but they are not.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#General_attainment_of_degrees&#x2F;diplomas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Educational_attainment_in_the_...</a>