this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
41 points (83.6% liked)
Technology
59300 readers
4609 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Finally... Scientific publishing really needs a dramatic change. It is an awful, corrupted mess (source: I have written papers published in high impact factor journals)
It's terrible but AI tools can only make it worse.
Worse than now? Is it even possible?
I am an optimistic, let's see in few years and finger crossed
The main probably with scientific publishing is that our threshold for statistical significance is way too low.
If we allow the threshold to sit at a 1 percent chance that results of the study were random chance, it means that 1 percent of all publications at that level of certainly are going o mislead the public if the media reports on them. And with the volume of research published every day, that adds up to a LOT of misinformation.
It's not even bad science, it's bad reporting and widespread scientific illiteracy. But neither of those are going away.
Also certain fields (cough cough medicine) needs to consider more than just the p value. With any large sample size you're almost guaranteed to find a "significant" result in some test, but the effect sizes are often so tiny to be basically meaningless.
Deleted comment
That might largely be a rephrasing of the same problem.
That's the exact problem OP is referring to.
Problem of science is corrupted funding, toxic environment, mafia-like organizations and practices, exploitation, widespread corruption.
The current amount of bad science is due only to that. Even before reaching mainstream media, of which I don't care. Unmanageable excess of meaningless published work is just a side effect of all above. Clearly it cannot change from inside, as current system selects only those who agree or compromise.
A revolution must come from outside. Tools and platforms like arxiv, github, hugging face are already demonstrating that alternative way of working exists, better ways to spread science and facilitate collaboration, increasing quality. Unfortunately they do not currently represent a real alternative outside niche fields, were quality, reproducibility and speed of evolution are critical. But also alternative tools such these can alleviate a minimal part of the huge problems.
I am honestly curious too see how "scientific" system will evolve, because it will. Because as it is now it is doomed to miserably continue falling down even further...
+1, same source.