What’s Your Ideas Why Science Is Broken?

Greed
Political Agendas
Stupidity
Media Headlines

Those controlling the purse strings decide the foci through funding, grants, board memberships, hiring practices, ….

Politics are everywhere – sometimes running interference, mostly creating kingdoms of power and wealth.

Stupidity is promoted; intelligence is decried.

Newsmakers are just that. Media decides the stories that get attention and then presents the information whatever way increases ratings.

The lying began in earnest here in the USA during the 1960’s, under the cover of the “civil rights movement”. Everything since is the inevitable response to the abject denial of reality, combined with the inevitable Cult of the Left purity death spiral.

@RT – You misspelled “presents the information whatever way reinforces the narrative.”

We have seen how former news agencies have been completely willing to throw away fortunes in service to The Narrative.

0. all malfunction is man-made, from misdirection by omission to inconsiderate consequences.
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1. citizens temporarily[!] lend their attention to those who they tolerate as messengers / instructors / trainers.
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2. but the acadæmlich [sic] organized irresponsibility abuses the earnestness-oriented, truthfulness-oriented, sincerity-oriented trust of the net taxpayers.
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3. for each statement, the messengers/ instructors/ educators would have to write whether/ how it is based on memory politics or truth-oriented history.
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4. I recommend starting with Ancient Egyptology and its peripheral subjects and highlighting the truth-oriented history.

Government funding of “The Science”.

Its pretty simple, the left’s “long march through the institutions” has been completed and now everything must be aligned to their politics. And their ideas are all based on lies so they lie constantly (even to themselves).

Science cannot be aligned to lies and still function.

“Long-time readers will know all my reasons I think science is broken, but I wonder what yours are?”

Science is broken for the same reason(s) that our culture is broken.

With admitted faults, our traditional culture was based on a combination of individual liberty and national unity, that rewarded excellence and sought truth. Solution-based, positive and ambitious, our culture was a petri dish that nurtured science-based exploration. Economic rewards were gained by adding value to society–inventions and innovations that revealed hidden truths, increased efficiency or met human needs were of great value. Each person was responsible for their own success or failure. By striving and achieving, with good luck, anyone could, and did, achieve the American dream.

Our culture today is a debased, degraded, decomposed shell of the culture that propelled America to the pinnacle of human achievement. A sinister, hate-based infection has destroyed our legacy culture, and the science at its core. No more are truth or creation of added value sought after or rewarded. Now rewards are showered on those who claim victim status based on race, sex, ethnicity, or choice of perversion.

This is the degraded and perverted cultural context in which your question bubbles up. Science is broken because our truth-seeking, liberty-cherishing American culture is in shambles.

Scientists stopped wearing neckties.

Real scientists wear bowties and mom pants.

Hi,
these are my suggestions about “Why science is broken”
1
You have to divide “science” first in about 3 or 4 different general area’s, say 4, because 2 of them are not affected at all, from the other 2 one is indeed completely rotten, and the other is not so much affected but there is a realization needed its general applicability is way less than hoped for. Still this “leftover true core” being pretty formidable and durable.
2
The descriptive sciences are still ok: they stand in general for the scientific curiosity, apart from the methodological dictates about the “how to”. Information collection, in one way or another, with also enough data about the methods, so as to value them for their selectivity and data filtering, which occurs always of course. Shouldn’t be a problem.
3
The general attitude of curiosity and adventurous fascination to explore new territory and stubbornly go on with it like a healthy addiction – this is with a lot of people both inside and outside of science, and is an absolute must. It is there and will never go away thanks to the diversity of the human procreation.
4
The scientific bureaucracy. It has nothing to do with science at all. It is a rotten corrupted structure with religious aspirations to compensate for their inner emptiness, having nothing spiritual to offer – alas! the science tool doesn’t offer ethical assurances.
5
The needed realization science as a tool always changes what it does study, even on the quantum level, and its finding are always limited to the artificial reality it creates and cannot escape from – its “laboratory”. To try to change the outside world into one big laboratory, in an effort to confirm the universal validity of science , as you now see happening with this “technical artificiallization of everythging” – this is not a solution but an impossibility.

So it may help to know the limits of science, both in what it is, in what it does, and in what it should do. This leaves a healthy and realistic core of what traditionally goes around as science: a useful tool, if used wisely. You know, not the “Enlightement fata morgana” coming true, but just another handicraft trade.

Without faith in God, the simple or common or garden virtue of honesty is lacking.
And people today believe the end justifies the means in certain “important” issues: thus lies about climate science are justified in their minds because they believe it will lead to climate action. Lies about vaccines because it will lead to people taking the vaccine. Etcetera.
Also without a theology of original sin (eg St Augustine, St Paul, Aristotle) (instead believing like Rousseau and Voltaire that the child’s mind is a tabula rasa on which society writes) people cannot conceive that they might be sorely mistaken or even deceiving themselves about evidence, so instead they are always cherry picking evidence that suits their case, with little insight into how easily we tend to fall into that trap.
The peer review system that ought to challenge these papers is in many cases too infiltrated with so much (conscious) fear of being labelled politically incorrect that peer reviewers themselves often obey the unwritten rules rather than rock the boat and make a reputation for themselves as trouble makers then to possibly get shut off from grants, promotions, positions, and popularity.
Lack of honesty and integrity, fear, and peer pressure.
There was a time in Western universities when even atheists feared the consequences of being found out cheating, and even very wicked men feared the wrath of God if they were dishonest or lacked integrity.
Call it Original sin, call it Jung’s shadow, call it what you want, but every truly Christian writer in spiritual topics agree that every person sins and needs forgiveness. Thus a degree of self doubt and skepticism about one’s own goodness and ability to “see rightly” must inevitable go hand in hand with good science.
CS Lewis’ the Abolition of Man goes along with this.

The biggest reason is that the west is now a low trust society which does not value honesty or integrity. Science has always been vulnerable to data fabrication, and to charismatic figures setting a narrative which must be followed. If the majority of those involved honestly are seeking truth and can admit when they are wrong, then science can defend itself against these weaknesses. But this was already an iffy proposition in the days of Feynman, and now the vast majority of scientists only week to further their careers and their pet causes without any interest in truth. To the extent that science still uncovers truth it largely does it by inertia, i.e. people still using methods and models which were robust enough to still work even when greatly corrupted. But even that will run its course.

One way you can clearly see this is by how people defend science by the holy rituals of “peer review” and “falsification.” Anyone even close to the field knows that modern peer review at best catches spelling errors, and no one wants to set up an experiment which could falsify a “known” result (there’s no prestige in doing so and you make the person who “proved” the result your enemy.) These things only work if the people involved in them want to use them to find the truth; they can’t work when the people involved don’t care. But since scientists are not yet willing to admit the rampant dishonesty in the field, they point to these rites as if following the bare minimum of the ritual will somehow make science holy and unquestionable.

Scientists stopped wearing neckties. — and hats.

Replacement of reason by “feelings”.

Relativism: science as social construct, so everyone can have “opinion” on everything and all opinions have the same value (or “worth”? apologies, English is not my native language).

Reduction or elimination of humanities (History, Phylosophy) from the basic levels of school.

Schools and teachers adopting the so-called “inclusive” language, which violates centuries old perfectioned (and socially adopted) grammar rules, thus introducing ambiguity in the discourse, which becomes a muddled macedonia of words. And muddled words result from and result in muddled thought.

And many thanks for your initiative to explain that science is broken.

It is not new. Broken science has been around since Adam wore short pants. One example.

A secondary theme of Gould’s “Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle” document’s how generations of geology students have been taught an utter fabrication of the modern origins of this subject.

This bunch of baloney is spread across textbook after textbook. No effort is made to correct it. Students fed on lies are perhaps prone to spawn their own encouraged by the internal politics of insitutions across the globe.

I recall being asked many moons ago to act as an internal referee of a pamphlet prepared for public consumption by a senior “educator” at a museum. The subject was crystallography. One glance was sufficient to declare it utterly and absolutely wrong. It was based on a false premise. Yet I knew that as written the contents had been derived from a long-serving text book on the topic. The “educator” was singularly unimpressed.

Research is a credentialism field. The problem is how those credentials are bestowed.

Far and away it’s the summa cum laude who get into grad school. Which on its face seems reasonable. But the vast majority of those were the kind that cram for tests and forget everything the day after, put in all the effort, and actually care enough about pleasing the professor to not only do the homework, but also to do it in colored pencil and with proper margins and everything. They are good students, exceptional students, but not particularly bright and don’t tend towards originality or creativity. To the extent they started with one, their ability to think outside the box has been destroyed by the schooling process, which is more about the process than about the results.

So not only do these types become the major figures in what we now call research, they are also the ones training the next cohort.

1) Too many practitioners of science, way too many!
2) Too many people go to “college” making them vulnerable to the claims of academicians and intellectuals
3) Too much mathematization which places too much emphasis on theory as opposed to experiment. This leads, in turn, to the blurring the distinction between speculation and fact.
4) Pervasive materialism leading to a denial of eternal verities. (cf. Proverbs, 1:7)
5) The influence of big money.
6) The incorporation of the “behavioral sciences” and other forms of pseudo-knowledge into the mantle of science.

It’s broken because people have realized, consciously or subconsciously, they can make up data and pass it off as proof because few have the acumen or energy to call out their fraud.

Metaphysics. Positivism is the default position of 99% of “scientists.”

It all started with the demonization of butter to market margarine in the US, in
about 1908, which was fully endorsed by the American Heart Assoc. as better for you
than butter for heart health. This led to untold death and misery with billions of dollars in
surgery and medicines to combat heart disease and high cholesterol levels caused by the
triglycerides in vegetable and seed oils. Vegetable and seed oils are still found in most
processed foods today assuring a constant supply of revenue to the medico industrial
complex. The corruption of science is nothing more than an effective marketing ploy
to deceive the public for the ever present industrial scale pursuit of profits and your
health be damned.

I should also have included the demonization of lard and any animal fat
with the introduction of Crisco.

1. Peer review. This functions almost entirely as a gatekeeper to prevent new ideas from reaching other scientists.

2. Government funding. As in any field, you’ll always find lots of what you are willing to pay for.

3. Unwillingness on the part of scientists to call out media exaggeration of their results. Instead, they go with “all publicity is good publicity” and stay schtum.

4. Glory-seeking public “scientist” advocates for some policy position.

w.

Pretty much agree with what everyone above has said but I’ll emphasize this one point –

Science is broken because scientists are no longer trained in theology.

Back then during the glorious days, most scientists and learned men were priests or at least canons, trained in the Catholic created and run universities, brought up to at least know and understand the Catholic faith and moral law and the logos behind it all.

Now, no more, the Effing Protestants and Anglicans ruined it, paving the inevitable way for the woke atheists and non denominational deists to press the accelerator without turning around.

The dum-dums think the Galileo affair demonstrated the Church should stay out of Science. The dum-dums never proved the Church was wrong, and the dum-dums won’t talk about the mountains of evidence against their precious heliocentric system and hocus-pocus multi-universes that continues to accumulate any more than they’ll discuss masks, vexxines or Nord Stream 2.

Error compounds error. Pride hardens the heart and the dum-dums will not let their bad ideas go. Hence why they are powerless against the obvious like transexualism. Every stupid idea is acceptable, so long as it furthers everything anti-Christ.

The solution is to destroy the universities and dump government “accreditation” and form an entirely independent separate system and utilize it amongst ourselves, and raise men and the few exceptional women in the old tradition where they are as adept in theology as they are in science. The big deal against that is the government, which are hired thugs and middlemen working for the monopolies. This is why we ought to hide our time and encourage the breakdown of government and shatter nations like the United States into separate independent countries. Same for the EU, and also make European countries smaller if necessary. Make it extremely hard for the bastards to cooperate with one another. Then science can use the net to share ideas openly without regulation or patents and copyrights. We go back to making science a vocation, like the priesthood. Freely done for the good of mankind, and scientists should be like monasteries, supported by the people for practical contributions that benefit them.

Scientists should not just be sitting around musing and writing papers, but producing or manufacturing something practical to make a living whilst doing their research.

Hence the new universities should be run like monasteries. And scientists akin to monks. Those men at the very least gave us alcohol, and what a fine thing it was!

First Fact Check–In spite of being an atheist, I’ll bet everything I have that I’ve got just as much of the garden virtue of honesty as you.

Steve–You make me feel inadequate for having studied hard, worked my ass off, done the homework, and graduated summa cum laude. I even made sure the margins on my papers were correct! When I got my first job in my field, I had a supervisor who once told me, in all seriousness, that my neat, orderly desk was a sign I wasn’t working hard enough. You two should meet.

I have sometime said, “My God is music, and J.S. Bach is his profit”.
Others might say, “God is Phizer and Fauci is his profit”.
Some say money or power the real god?
In John 1:1 it says, “In the beginning was the word . . .”
We used to believe western civilization is built upon the Christian idea
that God is Truth or Logos. From the concept of truth comes both trust and competance.
The post modern view( Foucoult, Derrida ) appears to be that truth is irrevelant and only power matters.
What is the likely result of trading truth for power?

One certain result is that Science is broken.

I’m going to go with the trite answer, “follow the lack of accountability”. It’s trite because it explains pretty much everything that goes wrong when humans are involved. Where it really shows it’s power is when it is used as a yardstick to judge proposed remedies. If anyone proposes a remedy to bad science that boils down to any variation of “do better”, you can be assured that remedy will fail. All humans, saint and sinner, respond solely to accountability in the long run; any exceptions will be fleeting. Humans are remarkably adept at twisting their perceptions of reality to see themselves as the good guy; humans practicing bad science are just as self-justifying as anybody else.

If I were tasked with improving bad science, I would look to human endeavors where the need for strong accountability is understood and well-managed. The most obvious example that comes to mind is casinos. Casinos have dozens of people handling significant amounts of money with no obvious oversight, yet casinos aren’t constantly plagued with mysteriously missing cash. Why is that? I only have an inkling of how they manage it, but I know for sure that it boils down to extreme accountability, implemented with some sort of extreme cross-checking system with no single point of failure. And I know for sure it isn’t handled the way credit card companies manage fraud, which is to tolerate some level of it and pass the costs on.

I imagine many people reading this far will protest something along the lines of “accountability can’t really be applied to science”. I don’t believe that’s true, but if it is, then science is doomed to forever be bad science, for accountability is the only effective remedy for faulty human endeavors.

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making science-based decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell, mostly.

Science is broken. The world is broken. All of this brokenness is due to the refusal of accepting salvation through Jesus Christ, His Life and Death and Resurrection!

And may we each receive the Holy Spirit’s leading and guiding us each, day by day, in all we think, say, and do, and in our every thought, word, and deed.

God bless, C-Marie

Science, like our legal system, is done in reverse. First the scientists decide what the conclusion is going to be. Then they go about setting up their scientific tests (models) to create their conclusion. They ignore any data that would contradict their pre-established conclusion.

Why is science broken?

Is it because we are producing parrots and not independent thinkers?

Everyone is so afraid to displease the latest science guru…do not stray from “group think” to upset the group is to be a pariah.

Innovative thinking not in alignment with the science guru is frowned upon.

Fields only progress when the guru is dead.

People are living longer…that includes science gurus.

@Cary Cotterman, “Steve–You make me feel inadequate for having studied hard, worked my ass off, done the homework, and graduated summa cum laude. I even made sure the margins on my papers were correct!”

That was me, too, first time through. Got out, started my own company, and realized just how little all that mattered. Hiring the 4.0 elite school grads was no guarantee of competence. The opposite, in fact. As I was lamenting my situation at a family reunion, a shirttail cousin told me C+ engineers make the world work. (That was back when C meant you were average.) Turns out he was right. Hiring B engineers did work out a whole lot better.

Exceptions and all that. And glad I’m out of the biz now that they are handing out A’s like they were candy. Got rid of that whole sorting mechanism there used to be, so hiring became a shot in the dark.

The late James Q Wilson (he of, for instance, Broken Window Theory), wrote a book called The Moral Sense. I recommend it heartily. To unfairly summarize: Aristotle was a lot more right about the moral sense than the Enlightenment. But in passing he refutes by observation the claim (made also by the quintessentially Enlightened Voltaire, not just by Christian apologists), that belief in (the Christian) God Keeps Us In Line. By contrast, Wilson observed that Japanese society was far more law-abiding than the West; it was simply a fact that by Western standards, theft, violence, murder in major Japanese cities was practically nonexistent, and the Japanese did not need to Get (Wilson’s) Religion to accomplish this.

Mr Wilson did not Go There, but one could: if Religion is the answer to moral behavior, then the Japanese “religion” could be argued to be far better at it than Christianity.

(I add:many observers have remarked that China seems to be an East Asian high-achieving, but unlike Japan, low trust society. Chinese moral standards are … not the same… as Japan’s. So there’s that.)

Call me an atheist, call me a Commie, but them’s the facts.

It has becomed enmeshed in politics. It really is that simple. End the funding of research by the government if you want better scientists.

Things started going to hell when spanking became frowned upon.

JohnK,

That’s cause Japan has two things going for it –

1. Enforced discipline, via social ostracization and the death penalty. They don’t tolerate shit like we do. These are a people whose higher classes were historically honor-bound to kill themselves ritually if they screwed up.

2. A homogenous racial society – thanks to restrictions on immigration. There are no racial tension lines within. And those that do come in are expected to conform… or else – See point 1.

Christian societies have been too tolerant and patient and forgiving to a fault. It’s time that changed.

1. Science is hard. It requires logic, rational thinking skills, concentration, and other attributes of high intelligence. Not many people can do real science.

2. Funding for science has mushroomed thanks to the military-industrial-academia complex and the grafting political hacks who dole out the Treasury’s money. They don’t buy science; they buy political support.

3. Very little of the $trillions go to people who can do science. There aren’t many of those in the first place, and they aren’t favored. Instead the money goes to millions of charlatans, wannabes, posers, political hacks, trough suckers, and other scam artists — who claim to be scientists and go through the motions, the Kabuki Theater of Science, but never deliver any of the real thing.

4. The phonies pump out mostly garbage, a lot of it deliberate falsehoods. Their shtick is fear mongering, not unlike insurance salesmen. The sky is falling, fund me fund me. The tragirony is that the American golden goose economy is being strangled by the junk policies excused or “justified” by bought-and-paid-for junk science all driven by the shared goal of stealing even more money.

Gary Cotterman – you are clearly very proud of how honest and truthful you are and I truly hope that spurs you on to live up to that high bar! God bless you. But the scientist of the past I am talking about was more deeply concerned about how dishonest/deluded she/he might be, quite unconsciously – which makes such a scientist far more careful to avoid confirmation bias and to really test the data to make sure of what it says.
My own uncle is a scientist of this generation and calibre, exceedingly careful in everything he asserts. Dr Jessica Rose is a contemporary example I believe.
The other thing I didn’t mention – those who believe language is merely a means of expressing feelings and not a means to describe truth – those who do not believe truth is objective cannot come up with truthful results.

Science has always been broken because of human nature, amplified by leftist politics that uses junk science to gain power and control: Truth is not a leftist value.

The failure to replicate studies, and study retractions for fraud, are not new.

(1) There is almost always a scientific consensus unwilling to admit being wrong.

(2) Always wrong wild guess predictions of the future made by scientists are erroneously believed to be actual science –especially true for climate science.

(3) Financial conflicts of interest happen when government funding requires the “proper” leftist consensus scientific beliefs that support leftist scaremongering.

Private funding, such as funding by cigarette companies can have similar bias,

(4) Media cheerleading for leftist climate beliefs:
— The mainstream media has no interest in fact checking leftist consensus science.

(5) Censorship:
— The mainstream media has a strong interest in fact choking alternative views
— Peer review is censorship of non-consensus views

(6) Science history consists mainly of advances by brilliant individuals, or small teams, that opposed the existing consensus, which eventually turned out to be partially wrong, or completely wrong.

(7) The inability of scientists to admit “We don’t know that”, which is the correct answer for many science questions, and probably most climate science questions.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
— E Hoffer

Many of the PhDs that I know personally – and especially those in academia – lack significant general knowledge. Without context or broader philosophical basis, does your specialist knowledge amount to a hill of beans.

The other big one is in Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science – “We hope that you will pick this up by osmosis” – “You must not fool yourself.” And sadly, scientists are fooling themselves, and when lacking significant broader knowledge it is very easy to fool other scientists, because ‘you’re the expert over there’ and ‘I only know about my small little area.’ Could point to a lack of publishing negative results, tendency to discard or not collect embarrassing data (e.g. let’s get rid of the Covid19 vaccine control groups – because “they deserve to not die too”), a sundry of other difficult to break down egotistical unscientific problems with the human condition.

I won’t add much to what has been written above. Still…

I am a mathematical physicist. I do not need that much money, no special equipment, just libraries and journal access. But I can’t be free, livre under extreme pressure, despite being so far a priviliged person. I am 43 and am at the same station others just over ten years older when they were 25-30, after having finishes their Ph.D. These same people who got evaluated and worked diligently, but had no existential threats to their carreers now follow the fashion of accountability and meritocracy. In my field, of you have an idea of what to do, you have done half your work. No-one can say when the thing will come out.

Let us see: the idol of the age: Newton. Did he have to migrate? Nope. Accountability? Meritocracy? Let us laugh a little bit there. Did he always work on target? Nope. Alchemy, theology, numerology, etc. Then, after a social visit by Halley, after a kind of enthusiasm, the Principia. For good and ill.

How many works have really influenced modern science in the way of determining the curricula? There are millions of articles, many volumes by Newton, Euler, the Bernoullis, Lagrange, Cauchy, Kelvin, Maxwell, etc. How much is taught of it? Where is all the knowledge now? Pardon my French, are we not printing too much bad quality toilet paper?

Paper mania: why? What for? If you publish little, are you ispo facto incompetent? Why treat all people who want to be scientists as if they are looking for a sinecure? Is that not an admission that those in the secure positions are actually in that sinecure, which they feel threatened by the new guys? Who knows when something good comes out? Those who make an effort to teach well, invest a lot of their time in it. They publish less as a result. Are they incompetent?

So much to be said, but there much that stems from the petty human nature, no longer buttressed in the traditional christian morality. No morals, no science. No reasonable theology, no science. No magnanimity, no science.

This is an incomplete account, but will do as a commentary here.

Johnno said “and the dum-dums won’t talk about the mountains of evidence against their precious heliocentric system”

oh do share this mountain of evidence you claim to be privy to. Silly claims like this are why we have peer review.

Justin –

Start here:
https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch?v=_V_j30jQUnA

Also rent this. It features many of your favorite peers!
https://www.theprinciplemovie.com/

I look forward to your review.

^ Better url if the previous one is funky.

Dr. Robert Sungenis presentation on Geocentrism in Dallas, Texas
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_j30jQUnA

“Fact choking”? That’s good, I’m going to use that the next time a verbal opponent throws Wikipedia or Snopes at me.

The question “why is science broken” is simply a special case of the more general “why is western culture broken?” Professor Edward Dutton is a bit quirky, obviously hanging out on the autistic spectrum somewhere, but I think he is on to something here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjjvNEHPl7Q
(Visit Dutton’s YT channel for more recent videos on the same subject.)

Briefly, the last 200 years has seen a dramatic fall (in the west) of infant mortality, and with that fall an accumulation of genetic defects which have hobbled our ability to think clearly and to act in a culturally appropriate way. Most genetic sequences have SOME influence on our mentation. Note that the phrase “genetic defect” may apply to an outright mutation or even an undesirable set of genetic sequences which do not work well in conjunction with each other. Most people have at some point, picked up a school reader from the late 1800s and compared its rigor with that of modern pedagogy. I have seen a collapse of educational quality just in my lifetime. First year college books are roughly equal to those of my middle school or freshman high school.

Kudos to Uncle Mike above: “Not many people can do real science.” Absolutely! In fact, not many people can even think logically and non-emotionally. And that percentage is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

We are getting stupider on average.
We are getting less socially functional on average.
We are getting less emotionally stable on average.
The circle cannot hold.

In a word: Statistics. The root of all “modeling”. The foundation of Artificial Intelligence. Correlations, interpolations, extrapolations. Studies they call them. Curve fitting polynomials to correlated data sets to extrapolate the future. It’s laughable.

It’s not Science. I call it Probablism. And it is very sad.

In reply to True Nolan, that is what I said in other words: the increased pressure on people. We answer to the environment around us, both natural and human made. Using examples, no one can honestly say that the demands on people even in the early to middle 1900s is the same as it is today in academia. Research is no assembly line, still we increase pressure. That’s gota give! Also, no triage: we should make some evaluation before sending someone to grad school. If anyone wants to learn, there should be advanced courses aplenty. But sending someone to grad school should only happen to those who are going to do research. The cut off will be sometimes unfair, but should also be freeing to those who now have to think anew and look for alternatives, ‘while still young’, not after they are in their 40s and then have to do something else. There is also the question of vocation. Not always the best student is the one best suited to pursue research. We should have the old guild system back. In fact, that is what a University is. a guild. But it acts like a sausage factory.

Peer-review and wee-p (as opposed to prediction).

Science is broken because scientists are no longer trained in theology.

Mega dittoes Johnno.

It has been said of Luther that he was the first man to create a religion based on his failings and he spawned uncountable imitators for whom novelty has become a species of genius and the scientist is now the mediator between reality and the chaotic cosmos in a way not dissimilar to how the priest is the mediator between God and man.

ALL is disunity and rancor and science is as broken as everything else because it has only the unaccountable state to which it must submit.

The state justifies all it does – even when it takes decisions completely contrary to decisions taken not all that long ago – and the state succors the scientific suckers because what they do strengthens the state or else that scientist is vilified and destroyed.

Men like Briggs are playing with fire and they know it.

I’m going with greed. It’s not that I disagree with other comments here it’s that greed is such a basic motivation. I want what others have and damn the consequences for the rest.

A lessor intellect decides he can lie and profit. That’s all it takes. I, me, mine. A lack of morals? Turning away from a higher power? Solipsism.

No one else matters.

The grammar of the question provides much of the answer.

In addition, much that is today labeled science is just the application of quantitative methods of the sciences to eberything that moves. There is no appreciation of the limitation of mathematizing everything. One does not really look into the nature of the things and models everything and applies statistics to everything. One needs to use statistics and groups, control groups, placebo in pharmacology, but no-one builds a car or an airplane the same way. There you test components and build prototypes, but simply do not throw 1000 in the air and compare with another 1000 on the ground. Disease is the same as sticking some glue onto someone else, human affairs are if they were just simple mechanics, the unfathomable elements are all treated as if now under control. Terrible philosophical mix up.

The NRx / Yarvinist theory. Academia is very competitive these days. Which kind of results will attract more grants? The results that look important. If there is nothing wrong with the climate, climate science is not important and does not get much funding. If the planet is on fire, climate science is very important, and it gets a lot of funding.

The way to look important enough to attract funding is:

1. Come up with something new
2. Say you just discovered a huge problem
3. So you need more funding to figure out how to solve it

If child psychology research says the traditional way to raise kids is okay, then child psychology is not important, because we already know how to raise kids the traditional way. If child psychology says our kids SUFFER under the traditional way to raise them, because they might be transgender, that looks important, of course child suffering is important, so it attracts funding.

The old adage “there is no such thing as a failed experiment, we always learn something, such as that it cannot be done this way” is simply not true under a condition of competing for funding.

Then consider the wider feedback loop. The media. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news. Abnormal, not normal things are news. “Trans kid suffers from trad parents” is perfectly abnormal man bites dog news. It sells.

Selling books. Which book sells better? “Everything you think you know about raising your kids is mostly right” or “Everything you think you know about raising your kids is utterly wrong and your kids SUFFER!” ?

NRx solution: state church under a King and censorship.

Hungarian solution: privatize state universities to private foundations whose curatorium is staunchly conservative and have the job, unfirable, for life. Especially sensitive research like about raising kids goes through an extra check getting its funding through a private, super conservative Center for Families.