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247 points rntn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.881s | source
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drgo ◴[] No.43801699[source]
The crisis in science can only be fixed by addressing the slew of bad incentives built into the system. We can't predicate job security, promotion and prestige of every early career scientist on publishing as many papers as possible, and on obtaining grants (which requires publishing as many papers as possible) and then expect high-quality science. We can't starve universities of public funding and expect them not to selectively hire scientists whose main skill is publishing hundreds of "exciting" papers, and not overproduce low-quality future "scientists" who were trained in the dark arts of academic survival. Reform is more urgent than ever; AI has essentially obsoleted the mental model that equates the count of published papers with productivity and quality.
replies(4): >>43802447 #>>43803117 #>>43803266 #>>43803306 #
1. Voultapher ◴[] No.43802447[source]
I can't say this enough, independent reproduction must be a part of the process or we'll continue seeing this issue. As you say it's the incentives. One solution that's seems reasonably possible for 95+% of research would be to put 30% or so of the research funds locked away, to be then given to another team ideally at another university that get's access only to the original teams' publication and has the goal to reproduce the study. The vast majority of papers released don't contain enough information to actually repeat their work.

And since we are talking about science reform, let's start with the much easier and cheaper preregistration [1] which helps massively with publication bias.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)