I completely agree with your second sentence, but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds, so being perceived to be promising is hugely important. But at the end of the day I haven't really ever seen any explicit attempts to suppress uncomfortable results.

I agree, that's fair. I don't think it's an explicit conspiracy. However there are some practices that do end up suppressing results. One particular example is that lack of publication of negative results because there is no incentive for doing so. You can imagine a scenario where similar experiments are repeated over and over again in different laboratories because no one writes up the negative result. After all what's the incentive? Not so bad for a few wasted weeks of PhD students time but potentially more damaging for large drug clinical trials?

Ben Goldacre's bad science is a great book on this topic. He's an entertaining speaker too. He describes a solution to that particular problem which is registering a clinical trials beforehand.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacr...

Absolutely, but that's a form of self suppression, rather than a cabal of others suppressing results.

Science is incredibly broken in many ways. I think the big underlying culprit is the prevailing ideology that every human activity is best organized as a competition for scarce resources.

It's a good idea: have a fully-open repository where negative results can be documented. With the ability to tag on if a negative result is replicated.

Then gradually re-enculture review boards to expect any given author to have a substantial number of results published to said repository, if they're actively performing research.

> "...but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds..."

Can you resolve / flesh this out more? If the desire for funding is a key driver of behavior then it would seem most anything is possible, including conspiracy or related nefarious activites.

Humans, especially those with big ideas and big egos, in pursuit of fortune and fame have been known to bend and break the rules.

If you watched the NBA the top 5% of players/top 5 teams get 90% of the media attention. The rest who are still doing good and interesting things fight for the last 10% of the crumbs and are forever complaining they are being excluded despite performance and other factors.

It happens in a lot of places. And to be honest it’s what most of the people want and while places like r/nba are more neutral and give respect where it is due, ESPN knows the casual 12yr old knows Lebron James and Steph Curry and they recruit “talent” to only talk about them, not just what is going well for the sport as a whole.

It’s a difficult balance that is really up to the power players and the quality of leadership to get right.

With science though you’d hope far more meritocracy than big names, but sadly I believe this is a human and non-expert efficiency thing (as most people are not really experts). Some people might blame capitalism of the bio firms but they are just the sum of their people who run and fund them too.

Exactly, it's human nature. No matter what arena it plays out in we only have so many patterns of behaviour at our disposal and you'll see the same types of power plays, favouritism, backbiting, and underhanded dealing. We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy.

We're not good at thinking rationally about things that involve our own benefit. We'll more often than not only think things through to the point where we avoid breaking any existing rules but still go with the lazy choice that benefits us in the short term.

> We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy.

If you're in a modern, first-world country you get to decide which part of the Pareto 80/20 divide you sit on.

The world doesn't need more mediocre people.

Michael Crichton said as much and the community turned on him.

I tried to find more information and I'm struggling to find information that Michael Crichton said this exact thing and that turned the scientific community against him. I did find that he was a global warming skeptic and also believed in astral projection and auras and the like, both of which garnered scientific backlash. Could you help me clarify?

His talk 'Aliens Cause Global Warming' is about this phenomenon in all but name. Consensus science, marginalizing alternate theories and politicizing scientific inquiry. "your theories differ from mainstream" being a black mark rather than a point of inquiry.

Right, was the backlash against his global warming skepticism? I'm still confused.

The backlash against Crichton was well-founded. He used the grain of truth that it's sometimes hard to get new ideas in science funded to build a crazy denialist foundation on that made for exciting fiction, but terrible description of reality.

Yes, his stance on global warming was controversial at the time and as he died only a few years later is more well known for that, but for reasons he himself laid out in the linked talk.

Most relevant is that he was against consensus science, which was highlighted in the submission. Even if you are 'wrong' and in the group consensus, all is forgiven. If you are 'right' but not in the group, you are blackballed, and if you are wrong and not in the group consensus, you are crucified.

What do you mean?

Crichton called out the disturbing trend of politicizing science. His target was the elephant that is global warming but his reasoning was more general, it could (and would) have been anything that deviated from the pure scientific pursuit.

In academia it is tied to laurels and funding. The clue in the article was defender of the so-called cabal saying if it were true, it was because the NIH Alzheimers funding was too low, i.e. it was a fight for who would get what research grants. Go against the concensus and be blacklisted.