On account of stuff he said that is mostly correct and even obvious but exposes the cult of the science expert.
Peer review
Einstein’s lost hypothesis is being retested
There were setbacks.
The big COVID-19 retraction: Top people don’t notice the smell?
For the record, Uncommon Descent has no official opinion on this mess except to say, yes, a fumigator is badly needed at The Lancet.
Jonathan Bartlett: Twenty Years on, Aliens Still “Cause Global Warming”
Some people may still think that “science” is whatever gets published in a journal. Not any more, that’s for sure.
An ingenious proposal for improving peer review that would accentuate the biggest problem
Ramping up the current system would merely enable 10 dunces to do the work of 100 dunces.
Robert J. Marks: Time to change the peer review system
Marks: The assumption that today’s peer-reviewed paper has been vetted by experts and therefore has been awarded a blue ribbon for excellence is far from the truth. Peer review often does not do its job. Consequently, today’s collection of scholarly literature is exploding in quantity and deteriorating in quality.
Business prof argues: Journals these days are obsessed by theory
Marinetto: The fetishisation of theory does have practical payoffs for editors. For one Swedish academic, Pär J. Ågerfalk, the charge of “insufficient theoretical contribution” can be employed as a neat rhetorical brush-off for submissions that editors do not like the look of but “cannot quite put their finger on why”.
Is the planet really running out of frogs?
That seems to depend on who you read: Last year in the journal Science, a research review concluded that the chytrid fungus caused the decline of at least 501 amphibian species, of which 90 have gone extinct. That paper suggested that species losses due to the chytrid fungus are “orders of magnitude greater than for Read More…
Retraction fun: Fellow didn’t seem to know much about cats
Generally, never trust anything a cat tells you about how it hunts. That’s proprietary information and a lot depends on it. The cat is rarely trustworthy anyhow.
At Areo: How universities cover up science fraud – the details
A pretty hard-hitting article. Is it partly the secular god-like status that these “scientists” assume? The tax funding they receive? Whatever fixes all this will need to be pretty far-reaching.
Science media have strange standards for assessing corruption…
Berezow goes on to add something very significant: “The scientific publishing industry is thoroughly corrupt, and AAAS and Science are now also a part of the problem. If and when all government-funded research is mandated to be released free of charge upon publication, journals like Science may go out of business. Good riddance.”
Anyone remember psychologist Hans Eysenck? There’s now a retraction frenzy on his papers
The rap? Among other things, “the implausibility of the results presented, many of which show effect sizes virtually unknown in medical science.”
Steve Fuller in Times Higher: Academics are the last “feudal lords”
Fuller: Many if not most academics fancy themselves as “anti-capitalist”, but that may be because they are the last feudal lords. They alone take the metaphors “domain of knowledge” and “field of research” literally, which ultimately explains the fixation on plagiarism.
Is lavish taxpayer funding killing science?
Before you say no, at least read this.. One senses that the massive increase in research misconduct masks a deeper issue. Why don’t scientists want to be more honest? In most systems whose practitioners are distinguished for a high standard of integrity, integrity is actually a value. Can science thrive without it?
End of science prediction from 2014: Are we there yet?
Daniel Greenfield on the Saganization of science: This form of science measures itself not against the universe, but against the intellectual bubble inhabited by those who share the same worldview or those who live under their control.