These days I only believe large effects- like smoking causes heart disease
But today, academia is a victim of organizational and political capture, making it less competitive for talent.
https://apholt.com/2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusad...
John Shertzer Hittell– Estimates 1,000,000 total dead for the crusades to the East covering the period from 1095 to 1291.
“In the two centuries of this warfare one million persons had been slain, but it had not been without some compensations.” John Shertzer Hittell, A Brief History of Culture (1874), p.137.
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John M. Robertson– Estimates 9,000,000 total dead for the crusades to the East covering the period from 1095 to 1291.
“It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries from the first crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished, in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of human beings, at least half of them Christians. Misery and chronic pestilence had slain most; but the mere carnage had been stupendous.” John M. Robertson, A Short History of Christianity (1902), p. 278.
Otherwise my point stands that your comparison is ridiculous, because religion has killed millions more people than academia, despite Jesus's teachings and the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" commandment.
Religion has diverged vastly and diabolically further from the teachings of Jesus than academia has from the scientific method. There's no comparison.
You're being extremely anti-intellectual while whitewashing and rationalizing the slaughter of millions of innocent people, misery, carnage, and chronic pestilence, if you think academia is anywhere near as bad a cult as Christianity.
Buying a nice car with other people's labor isn't as bad as killing millions of people but it is straying very far from the original declared mission.
You seem to believe that murder is the metric that can be used to measure how well an organization is doing as far as following their mission.
While people praise the scientific method, the majority of achievements we attribute to “science” are not derived from guess and check grad students doing their thing.
The standard paper is not very good. And a lot of the reason is that our scientific model is largely designed to find tiny effect sizes. Which is fine for like… medical stuff. But the juice is in large effect sizes. Stuff so obvious you don’t really need the stats to evaluate it. It doesn’t really matter if you followed the scientific method or not when you discover penicillin. It just works, clearly. And you can demonstrate it working again.