This legitimately is science, though. A scientist is characterized by their willingness to change their mind when confronted with new evidence. It's so contrary to the normal human response that we named it.
Thats how its supposed to work and in practice it kinda does, but the people with the money want positive results and the people doing the work have to do what they can to stay alive and relevant enough to actually do the work. Which means that while most scientists are willing to change their minds about something once they have sufficient evidence, gathering that evidence can be difficult when no one is willing to pay for it. Hard to change minds when you can't get the evidence to show some preconceived notion was wrong.
I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.
Well, one day he exclaimed, "Scientists don't know everything for certain either!".
So, I responded, "Yeah...? They don't claim to...?".And that left him absolutely confused. I don't know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.
So, I told him that it's not called a "scientific theory" for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.
After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of "That doesn't make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it's correct?".
Which, like, I get it. It's scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.It takes a lot of those moments to experience a paradigm shift. Unfortunately a person usually won't encounter enough of them to see clearly unless they're actively searching for answers. That's why churches discourage asking a lot of questions, or reading secular material. When my walls started crumbling it was a legitimately uncomfortable experience. Realizing that you've been living by a bunch of preconceptions that aren't universal truths, and understanding for the first time how another group perceives something differently than your entire core group does, is really confusing and difficult. Most people get scared when they hit that point and retreat back to their core belief system. It's very uncomfortable to keep pushing through for answers.
I wish somebody had told me beforehand that a degree of enthusiastic acting was necessary to spin my miserable results into a success like the superstars in the department, though.
"We have successfully disproven the hypothesis!"
vs.
"Yeah, so I did some experiments and it turns out I was wrong."
I personally like the latter, but I guess I'm in the minority.
Yeah Mr. Investor. By blowing up the the lap I have reached the groundbreaking Discovery, that the explosives are indeed explosive! Due to this phenomenal Results I have been able to determine both the danger AND the economic possibilities of explosives! Here are some definetly reliable graphs, that prove how my explosive is super nice and (in Theory) the most powerful explosive ever discovered!
Permanently Deleted
That's less on the scientists "with the letters after their name" and more on the funding sources for said scientists.
Lmao have fun publishing that kiddo
I had such a hard time explaining to my family why I was working on a project for two years, and ends up with nothing publishable...
Everyone can be wrong, solving problems is what my field is looking for (I m not sure if that is fortunate or unfortunate).
I'm not a doctor, and I'm not a researcher in any field, but I do recall reading plenty of null studies when I had access to the catalogs.
Are publishers only publishing positive stories now?
In my field they do publish results without success, but it must either be (a) something seminal in the field or (b) interesting in a notable way. General things aren't going to have the juice to get through the review process. One exception to this is the shotgun method. If you're testing a bunch of different things that get at the same question and they all miss, you might still get published, but that's because it's adjacent to (b).
It's actually a published problem 😅
Null results are results too 🥲
Is the creator of these still anti-abortion? It's marred my enjoyment of them since finding out a few years back.
Yeah. Imagine creating a comic strip of this subject, and being anti-abortion simultaneously.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
Well abortion is a philosophical debate more than it is a scientific fact.
Aww really? I didn't know about that. that's kind of a shame.
In April 2019, a Twitter post by Pyle from 2017 resurfaced regarding the pro-life rally March For Life. According to some reporters, Pyle's tweet expressed support for, or defended, March For Life. The tweet caused many[who?] fans to turn against Strange Planet and its creator, in a controversy described by at least one outlet as an example of the Milkshake Duck phenomenon.
Pyle released a statement shortly afterwards which did not mention abortion, but said that he and his wife "have private beliefs as they pertain to our Christian faith. We believe separation of church and state is crucial to our nation flourishing." He also stated they voted for the Democratic Party, and were "troubled by what the Republican Party has become and [did] not want to be associated with it."
I still can’t believe the dude landed an Apple+ show.
“The only difference between doing random shit and science is writing it down”
The legend himself.
If you made a poster out of some of my decisions it would be the ultimate science fair project
That's ideally science but you're gonna have low-impact papers if you don't do the "look at this new thing I 'proved'" song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, "everyone knows that method X works great you must've done something wrong".
There's a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of "the scientific method". In reality it's just humans trying things out and using "good enough" ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they'll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don't disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was "good enough" despite major flaws so the academy said, "it's actually 100% right" right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
Like Carl Sagan wrote, we should probably teach how messy science can be to show why it is the best method. Despite setbacks, human nature, persisting wrong ideas, and whatever else, the entire process of science eventually overcomes and on average, we inch ever closer to truth.
The anti-science people make arguments that clearly show they have neither a concept of how science works nor a sufficiently flexible mind to accommodate (let alone seek) updated information.
I am just a student and this makes me worry. How the heck can be scientific papers evaluated by some publishers? How should we make this paper and give it to publishers for the citations only and publishers make money off it? What about the unpublished but correct paper? What does publishing has to do anything with science and scientific growth? I can't use a sentence from my older paper again in the new one and they accuse it for plagarism?(Please keep bs copyright laws away in science because that could possibly hurt developement of science itself(i guess))
Sorry i'm just stressed at this thing
Publishers generally use free labor from professors and postdocs to do peer review. The only work the publisher really does is basic editing and marketing (to foster "prestige", really just building demand to publish there).
The issue of the actual epistemology of science in practice is much more widespread and is a wider social issue rooted in the structure of the academy, particularly the way it promotes competition and has a marriage with practice that brings pressures of capitalism to bear on it.
Yeah I think we need some more detail chief. Ive never heard of a paper being rejected because "everyone knows X" ever in my life...
With what you said all I am hearing is someone saying "here is why we live on a pancake earth with incredible detail and multiple homebrew tests/sources to back it up"
Post-hoc analysis like: hold my beer
If you haven't seen the animated series on AppleTV or the high seas, check it out. It's very sweet and life-affirming.
You could even say it's "pro life"
Tell me you like killing babies without telling me you like killing babies.
