Science has a large scale academic infrastructure to draw on, wherein people can propose research that they want to get done, and those who argue sufficiently persuasively that their research is solid and productive receive money and resources to conduct it.
You could make a system that produces more knowledge than modern science just by diverting a substantial portion of the national budget to fund it, so only the people proposing experiments that are too poorly designed to be useful don’t get funding.
Besides which, improved rationality can’t simply replace entire bodies of domain specific knowledge.
There are plenty of ways though, in which mainstream science is inefficient at producing knowledge, such as improper use of statistics, publication bias, and biased interpretation of results. There are ways to do better, and most scientists (at least those I’ve spoken to about it,) acknowledge this, but science is very significantly a social process which individual scientists have neither the power nor the social incentives to change.
“There are plenty of ways though, in which mainstream science is inefficient at producing knowledge, such as improper use of statistics, publication bias, and biased interpretation of results. There are ways to do better, and most scientists (at least those I’ve spoken to about it,) acknowledge this, but science is very significantly a social process which individual scientists have neither the power nor the social incentives to change.”
I am an academic. Can you suggest three concrete ways for me to improve my knowledge production, which will not leave me worse off?
Ways for science as an academic institution, or for you personally? For the latter, Luke has already done the work of creating a post on that. For the former, it’s more difficult, since a lot of productivity in science requires cooperation with the existing institution. At the least, I would suggest registering your experiments in a public database before conducting them, if any exist within your field, and using Bayesian probability software to process the statistics of your experiments (this will probably not help you at all in getting published, but if you do it in addition to regular significance testing, it should hopefully not inhibit it either.)
Science has a large scale academic infrastructure to draw on, wherein people can propose research that they want to get done, and those who argue sufficiently persuasively that their research is solid and productive receive money and resources to conduct it.
You could make a system that produces more knowledge than modern science just by diverting a substantial portion of the national budget to fund it, so only the people proposing experiments that are too poorly designed to be useful don’t get funding.
Besides which, improved rationality can’t simply replace entire bodies of domain specific knowledge.
There are plenty of ways though, in which mainstream science is inefficient at producing knowledge, such as improper use of statistics, publication bias, and biased interpretation of results. There are ways to do better, and most scientists (at least those I’ve spoken to about it,) acknowledge this, but science is very significantly a social process which individual scientists have neither the power nor the social incentives to change.
“There are plenty of ways though, in which mainstream science is inefficient at producing knowledge, such as improper use of statistics, publication bias, and biased interpretation of results. There are ways to do better, and most scientists (at least those I’ve spoken to about it,) acknowledge this, but science is very significantly a social process which individual scientists have neither the power nor the social incentives to change.”
I am an academic. Can you suggest three concrete ways for me to improve my knowledge production, which will not leave me worse off?
Well...
Ways for science as an academic institution, or for you personally? For the latter, Luke has already done the work of creating a post on that. For the former, it’s more difficult, since a lot of productivity in science requires cooperation with the existing institution. At the least, I would suggest registering your experiments in a public database before conducting them, if any exist within your field, and using Bayesian probability software to process the statistics of your experiments (this will probably not help you at all in getting published, but if you do it in addition to regular significance testing, it should hopefully not inhibit it either.)