Re: [A-List] How "scientific" is science?

[grok@xxxxxxxxx]

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> 1) If they do that, and that becomes a tradition, others
> may start to check their numbers in the same way and
> things may go out of control: after all, in this "science"
> business, at least as it is conducted in these days,
> almost everybody "lies" here and there and some of these
> lies are unforgivable by any standard.
>
> 2) The pay off of replicating someone else's work is next
> to zero, if it is not negative. Nobody in the academic
> world gives you any credit for replicating other people's
> work in the first place, and, secondly, if you keep
> replicating other people's work and reporting their
> mistakes, you have no hope of surviving in that world, as
> is the case in every other world.

Some time ago, it came to me that this pernicious problem
with reproducibility, peer review, and just plain
fact-checking *had a natural complement with science
education* as a solution. Maybe even a perfect correlation.

What I see is a "learning[-checking] ladder" where, from
gradeschool to gradschool, groundbreaking research of the
past or present (or anything which needs checking) is
reproduced as part of the learning process, further down the
food chain, on as regular a basis as is required. Perhaps
rotated as resource availability dictates.

Schoolkids can do ancient, Renaissance or 17th-19th-Century
experimentation; higher and college students can do the more
technically-demanding 19th-20th-Century experimentation; and
grad students can be nipping at the heels of today's
bleeding-edge researchers -- thus overcoming this
reproducibility problem to a large extent, or maybe even
completely. We'd have to see how this would pan out in
praxis. Of course, something like this is always being
attempted, even on some scale and regularly, but it's never
on more than an ad hoc basis AFA being a fundamental
approach to the problem, and generally probably only
benefits the elite few and their support. I'm also talking
about *real* experimentation -- not the regular "science
class" fare. REAL reproducibility with REAL instruments --
hand-manufactured if need be.

IMO, while we wouldn't expect any "surprises" at the junior
levels (knock on wood!), the tight feedback at the advanced
levels would alter the project of Science in a fundamental,
qualitative way most likely. And all for the better,
needless to say.

Even more, I see this higly-recursive process as being part
of the fundamental structure of a future socialist-communist
society, since it could be one of those strong links which
relentlessly convey high kultur from one generation to the
next, over and above its more immediate corrective and
pedagogical functions. Of course, I don't see such a method
ever becoming part of bourgeois kultur, since the relatively
larger amount of society's resources which would be required
are, as of now, still jealously and pettily hoarded by and
for elite use only.


- -- grok.



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