I think this tradition of authoritarian bullshit has some traction in the modern world still. Which in part causes all the silly pompous pseudoscientific bullshit.
The scientific method, when applied rigorously (!), is deeply uneconomical in the vast majority of cases, because the market has already eliminated most glaring inefficiencies by pure trial and error. Any possible gains are likely marginal anyway.
Doing a bunch of half-assed and meaningless experiments just to slap the prestigious "science" label on something on the other hand is very economical. So that's what people do instead.
If you're on the outside of that subset, it turns out that not only is it easier just to slap the label on, but your ideal customer (relative to your psychology) doesn't really care to do much more than a simple label check anyway.
From zero to 'rm -rf science-budget' in one marketing exercise.
A sad truth but coming around to it can help us understand why scientists need to work on social policy and outreach messaging as well. Scientific values simply will not sell themselves the way we think they should, outside of our little sphere.
Fortunately our cultural messaging has vastly improved in this domain recently. Bridge psychologies like that of Bill Nye are great examples of how this can work.
Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all.
The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded.
I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science.
The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit.
It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.
On the other hand, it is often possible to profit unethically and sometimes that is the most expedient way. There is a cost to this, which is reputational. That's why it's important to call out bullshit.
The problem with research is that the business risk is high so the potential rewards need to be equally high. So there is an argument to be made for large entities (up to and including the state) to fund research, but there need to be checks and balances. The ones we have may not be perfect, but that doesn't mean they're inadequate. It's all just overhead as far as I am concerned.
The business relationship among people is becoming flatter instead of deeper. Tooling is going to help individuals achieving more independently. At least it's the reality I would like to live in.
> Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
Simple shit like p -> q, orders of magnitude, independent probabilities, partitioning[0], and the classic correlation/causation go completely over their heads.
At the risk of sounding arrogant or elitist, there's a reason the peripatetic school inscribed "let none but geometers enter here". By and large, a mathematical education structures thought in a way that nothing else can.
[0] My personal pet peeves. People seem unable to break concepts down into component parts that both (a) cover the entire problem and (b) don't overlap.
Interviews at top business schools are nothing but partitioning and mathematical analysis. Google “business school case interviews”. Modern business is analytical and quantitative. Over 50% of my classmates came from software development or engineering backgrounds. This mix is not at all unusual.
I think your reaction may be to the PHB types — who aren’t good at any of that but they have soft skills (aka people like them) so they get promoted. Honestly the biggest truism in business is that it’s better to be liked than to be good.
That's an incredibly rare thing. To date, the only systematic exception to the above rule I've encountered have been from certain European schools (mostly French: HEC, ESSEC, etc) that have a math-heavy prep-school curriculum to get in.
From what I've seen though, this is very much exceptional.
I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up.
[EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.