Here’s a fun quote for those still holding to the belief that The Science is the solution to all problems in life:
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This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific ‘currency’ that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of ‘true’ science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers.
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This must be a conspiracy theory blogger. Everyone knows that The Science is trustworthy beyond any doubt. You can be sure of that because anyone who criticizes The Science is shouted down like a heretic awaiting a burning at the stake.
Peer pressure, censorship, and bullying are always necessary to make sure the truth comes to light.
… no, wait, hang on.
Let me check my notes.
Well shoot.
Seems there’s been a mistake.
That’s not a conspiracy blogger at all. That paragraph came from a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science and Engineering Ethics.
Well that’s no good, is it?
All that fresh hot new science published every year and all we get is “an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge”?
I feel ripped off.
Thomas Kuhn prophesied some of this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions way back in 1962.
Scientists are people. Most all of them work in universities, where they are tasked with getting money for their science. When they aren’t trying to get money for their science, they’re playing status games with other bureaucrats in the administration.
There’s a neat term to describe the situation:
POSIWID
Which means:
Purpose Of a System Is What It Does
If a system encourages status games and hustling to stack dat paper, then guess what the people in that system will spend most of their time and energy doing?
HINT: It won’t be the scientific method that you learned in your 8th grade textbook.
Behaviors follow incentives.
If your livelihood depends on staking out a piece of a scientific theory and publishing as many papers as you can get away with, that’s what will happen.
Kuhn famously said that science progresses by funerals, not by the rational growth of knowledge.
Only now, it is barely progressing at all. What is happening is very little growth of knowledge AT ALL even with all the new papers.
This line from the article sums it up:
“most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers”
Now let’s pause here to think for a second:
What does that mean for all the online influencers sharing “value bombs” about fitness and nutrition which they discover by combing the latest published research on Pubmed?
Not to make the room awkward or anything.
I keep telling those with ears to listen that “fitness” and nutrition are solved problems.
If your goals include building muscle, torching fat, and boosting performance, there are no secrets and only precious few mysteries.
We know what to do.
There are no revolutions coming in muscle gain, fat loss, or training for strength, speed, power, or skill.
The limitations are in desire and the will, not knowledge.
Science at its best can be a great friend. But even at its best it cannot tell you what to do. It can give you guidelines to work with and things to try out. It can help point you at solid principles that reliably produce the outcomes you want.
Otherwise? It’s a game of testing, experimenting, doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. (That last thing is worth writing down, by the way.)
The majority of published research today is far from science at its best. The status- and metrics-obsessed publishing bubble is one reason. There are statistical and methodological flaws in papers which pass peer review because the reviewers are as ignorant as the authors. Et cetera.
All of which is a gigantic problem if you’re accepting “the research” as your gold standard.
Imagine spending hours devouring all this work, believing you’re getting more informed… and even the scientists themselves admit that their “big” discoveries are sliced up 100 ways to pad out their citation scores.
What a waste of time and energy to chase a fantasy of knowledge.
You’ll be amazed at how far you can get by following this guiding mantra:
“I don’t know if this is true, but let’s pretend it is and see what happens.”
That’s how I do things these days. It’s what I suggest to anyone who will listen.
With that in mind…
You’re welcome to join us in the community where we’re practicing what I’m preaching… and getting pain-free, energetic, great-looking bodies for the trouble.
Matt Perryman