At Times Higher: Scholars who examined “research opportunity guarding” – how some professors have lied, threatened and sought to sabotage the careers of those seeking to move into their topic – liken the behaviour to that of the maniacally possessive guardian of the Ring of Power from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth chronicles.
Peer review
J. Scott Turner: Scientific publishing as a scam
Readers unfamiliar with J. Scott Turner may wish to know that he is also the author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. And here he is, publishing at Real Clear Science… Maybe it took someone willing to quit worshipping at the Darwin shrine to bring this out.
Get rid of the science paper?
Richie: This [his proposal] would be a major improvement on the status quo, where the analysis and writing of papers goes on entirely in private, with scientists then choosing on a whim whether to make their results public.
Some things never change: Ridiculous attack on the surgeon author of an article on scientific gatekeeping
Let’s just say, 1) the author goes on at some length and 2) readers may find it useful to know that gate defenders are out there and some of them would appear to have a lot of time on their hands.
A surgeon protests scientific “gatekeeping”
Singer: “… a problem arises when some of those experts exert outsized influence over the opinions of other experts and thereby establish an orthodoxy enforced by a priesthood. If anyone, expert or otherwise, questions the orthodoxy, they commit heresy. The result is groupthink, which undermines the scientific process.”
How the COVID pandemic showed that evidence-based medicine is — at present — an illusion
Malone: The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
Universities? Do poor science career prospects contribute to far out theory and Cancel Culture?
Far out theory (e.g., “Advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang…) may be one way of standing out in the crowd — and Cancel Culture is definitely a way of thinning that crowd. Sutter’s suggestions are worth pondering.
At BMJ: Evidence based medicine running into many of the same problems as felled earlier reform movements
Op-ed: “Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs [key opinion leaders] appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers.”
Why has science begun to resemble the troubled crowd at school?
Why does a person who is University of North Carolina research chief need plagiarism? And why should journals ban Russian scientists. If Putin doesn’t care about them, we aren’t hurting him.
New Zealand’s Royal Society grudgingly lets off two scientists who critiqued “Indigenous ways of knowing” as conventional science
Jerry Coyne: As I said, the controversy over the hegemony of MM [Indigenous ways of knowing taught as science] in science continues, and if I know anything about New Zealand educational politics, MM will worm its way into science class. All the new RSNZ statement does is exculpate two scientists unfairly accused of misbehavior and harm for saying that MM, while worthy of being taught, is not coequal with modern science.
Would you believe? Science ghostwriting factories in China
Epoch Times: A reporter from Xinhua Viewpoint, a column of official media Xinhua, posing as a cardiovascular and cerebrovascular physician contacted numerous paper factories and was told that all levels of dissertation could be written and published for him as long as the delivery time was not too short, according to Xinhua in a Jan. 11 report.
As 24 nonsense papers are retracted, Daily Sceptic asks, What happened to peer review?
That’s what “Trust the Science” does. It enables a superstitious reverence for nonsense at best and corruption at worst. And only occasionally does anyone in charge need to pretend to reform anything.
L&FP, 52: Fallaciously “settled” (=begged) questions and the marginalisation of legitimate alternatives
Nowadays, we are often told “The Science is SETTLED,” as though Science is ever finalised or certain. To go with it, those who have concerns or alternative views and arguments are marginalised and too often smeared, scapegoated or even outright slandered. Sometimes — as Dallas Willard warned regarding moral knowledge — in this rush to Read More…
More on why people don’t “trust science” the way we used to
To what extent, today, does “trust science” mean no more than “sign on to whatever an increasingly clueless elite thinks?” Worth asking.
Mixing science with politics is like mixing mustard and ice cream
So far so good, Marcelo Gleiser, until we got to the part about “often giving equal weight to the opinion of the vast majority of scientists and to the opinion of a small contrarian group,” … There’s actually nothing unusual about the “small contrarian group” being right.