Re:Bias Against Novelty in Science
by untilHellbanned on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @06:16PM
(#11866119)
Yep. Professor in molecular biology here. Been at numerous universities you know. I can confirm very unscientific groupthink as the main driver of science progress nowadays. Being a lone wolf, rogue isn't really a viable option given the funding climate. Perfect sheep extends all the way from college to the professor level. Think this would surprise most lay people given the conception of scientists as off in their own world.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I think a number of things contribute to the rise(?) of groupthink in the sciences (particularly in biology). One is the increasing age [0] of the peers in the peer review systems. Younger people are typically willing (and able) to perform more risky novel research. However, the biggest single factor is the drop in science funding, which leads to fear and an inherently conservative response (on the part of both grant applicants and reviewers).
[0] http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2009/12/03/nih-grants-by-...
There is also the whole NPM-ish attempts at using things like publication frequency and number of references to gauge the ROI on research, and therefore the performance of the scientists involved.
All this runs smack into Cambell's law.
wow, thanks, I had never heard of Campbell's law, and it really puts into a concise form what I believe about a lot of things (from science publishing to interest rate manipulation).
I think i originally ran into a British variant, called Goodheart's Law, while reading about reforms to their National Health Service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
The particular example being of how hospitals where given a negative rating based on how many patients were left waiting on stretchers (the rating system being introduced in an attempt at producing market like forces within the NHS). To get around this, the staff started removing the wheels on the stretchers while the patient was waiting. That way it was a bed, not a stretcher...
You can be rogue if you've been a famous professor for decades, by which point your ideas are stultified or just state funded intellectual masturbations... you might get lucky like k Barry sharpless and stumble on an old idea that works really well and was forgotten.
This is the beginning of the end of life sciences research.
Meh, "Science advances one funeral at a time", today is no different than it ever really was. Nice thing about science, though, is that it does advance and one funeral at a time is relatively quick, as compared to religions, governments, and DMV lines.