- cross-posted to:
- nathanwpyle@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nathanwpyle@lemmy.world
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Lmao have fun publishing that kiddo
I had such a hard time explaining to my family why I was working on a project for two years, and ends up with nothing publishable…
Everyone can be wrong, solving problems is what my field is looking for (I m not sure if that is fortunate or unfortunate).
If you made a poster out of some of my decisions it would be the ultimate science fair project
Is the creator of these still anti-abortion? It’s marred my enjoyment of them since finding out a few years back.
Yeah. Imagine creating a comic strip of this subject, and being anti-abortion simultaneously.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
This legitimately is science, though. A scientist is characterized by their willingness to change their mind when confronted with new evidence. It’s so contrary to the normal human response that we named it.
Thats how its supposed to work and in practice it kinda does, but the people with the money want positive results and the people doing the work have to do what they can to stay alive and relevant enough to actually do the work. Which means that while most scientists are willing to change their minds about something once they have sufficient evidence, gathering that evidence can be difficult when no one is willing to pay for it. Hard to change minds when you can’t get the evidence to show some preconceived notion was wrong.
I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.
Well, one day he exclaimed, “Scientists don’t know everything for certain either!”.
So, I responded, “Yeah…? They don’t claim to…?”.And that left him absolutely confused. I don’t know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.
So, I told him that it’s not called a “scientific theory” for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.
After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of “That doesn’t make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it’s correct?”.
Which, like, I get it. It’s scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.I wish somebody had told me beforehand that a degree of enthusiastic acting was necessary to spin my miserable results into a success like the superstars in the department, though.
“The only difference between doing random shit and science is writing it down”
The legend himself.
That’s ideally science but you’re gonna have low-impact papers if you don’t do the “look at this new thing I ‘proved’” song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, “everyone knows that method X works great you must’ve done something wrong”.
There’s a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of “the scientific method”. In reality it’s just humans trying things out and using “good enough” ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they’ll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don’t disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was “good enough” despite major flaws so the academy said, “it’s actually 100% right” right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
I am just a student and this makes me worry. How the heck can be scientific papers evaluated by some publishers? How should we make this paper and give it to publishers for the citations only and publishers make money off it? What about the unpublished but correct paper? What does publishing has to do anything with science and scientific growth? I can’t use a sentence from my older paper again in the new one and they accuse it for plagarism?(Please keep bs copyright laws away in science because that could possibly hurt developement of science itself(i guess))
Sorry i’m just stressed at this thing
Publishers generally use free labor from professors and postdocs to do peer review. The only work the publisher really does is basic editing and marketing (to foster “prestige”, really just building demand to publish there).
The issue of the actual epistemology of science in practice is much more widespread and is a wider social issue rooted in the structure of the academy, particularly the way it promotes competition and has a marriage with practice that brings pressures of capitalism to bear on it.
