So I read a paper. They say we looked at 200 successful things. All of them had these four characteristics in common therefore for another thing to be successful you need these four characteristics.
I wonder how many unsuccessful things have the same four characteristics in common. I wonder, simply, because they didn’t look at any unsuccessful ones, or did not report on them, so…
Did they say that you need only those 4 characteristics for a thing to be successful? Or just that for a thing to be successful you must have a baseline of those 4 characteristics, without those the thing will not be successful. with the implication that there are other additional success characteristics that are unique to the thing.
Some is some is not.
There was a stunt pulled by some professors recently where they intentionally wrote bogus papers just to see how ridiculous they could make the papers and still have them accepted to academic journals.
As said above, some is really science, some isn’t.
The question is how do we define “science”?
In my books, social “science” or economics, for that matter, are not science at all.
I think these social ‘scientists’ need to first learn this:
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There was a stunt pulled by some professors recently where they intentionally wrote bogus papers just to see how ridiculous they could make the papers and still have them accepted to academic journals.
As said above, some is really science, some isn’t.
I believe this was done to expose bogus open access journals. The open access concept started with good intentions. Charge the authors of accepted manuscripts a fee of hundreds or thousands of dollars, but allow anyone in the public to freely download the articles. Great for the public. The problem… new online open access “journals” popped up. Let’s just say not academic journals. They accept anything (most certainly without any review), because that’s how they make money and they don’t care what’s in the “journal”. This is also the new science spam. Anyone who has ever been a corresponding author to a reputable journal, now gets bombarded from bogus journals to submit their work.
Quick point of clarification - closed access journals also charge the authors thousands of dollars to publish their work, and ALSO charge the readers thousands of dollars. It’s how they end up with 30-40% profit margins.
Generally, no. Page charges are much less. At least on biomedical areas. Some charge nothing.
Main point. Online only open access model is easy to set up a scam. Reputable ones definitely exist,
The question is how do we define “science”?
In my books, social “science” or economics, for that matter, are not science at all.
I think science can be defined broadly as some systematic study through observation and experiment. That certain social sciences may not be as precise, or that observations may be more open to interpretation, doesn’t mean that they’re not sciences.
Maybe in certain fields but generally it’s in the thousands for even closed access. Just grabbing the first that I could find info on - Cell charges $1000 for the first color figure and $275 for each additional https://www.cell.com/cell/authors. You don’t publish there without at least 5. JNeurosci is $1260 for a member. PLoS is ~$1500-3000.
Open access is definitely easy to scam. I’m really for a government journal system that is simply “Scientific Topic A”, “Scientific Topic B” that is then searchable on Pubmed and everyone has access to. Anyone accepting gov grants has access to publish there.
Our system now is just totally broken.
The question is how do we define “science”?
In my books, social “science” or economics, for that matter, are not science at all.
I think science can be defined broadly as some systematic study through observation and experiment. That certain social sciences may not be as precise, or that observations may be more open to interpretation, doesn’t mean that they’re not sciences.
Yeah it’s a social or soft science, it’s not a hard science. Just because it’s not a hard science doesn’t mean it’s something like philosophy or theology.
Generally, no. Page charges are much less. At least on biomedical areas. Some charge nothing.
Main point. Online only open access model is easy to set up a scam. Reputable ones definitely exist,
I’ve never been charged anything to publish. Now I’m not publishing in Science or Nature, but in some of the better (and not so great) journals of my field.
Maybe in certain fields but generally it’s in the thousands for even closed access. Just grabbing the first that I could find info on - Cell charges $1000 for the first color figure and $275 for each additional https://www.cell.com/cell/authors. You don’t publish there without at least 5. JNeurosci is $1260 for a member. PLoS is ~$1500-3000.
Open access is definitely easy to scam. I’m really for a government journal system that is simply “Scientific Topic A”, “Scientific Topic B” that is then searchable on Pubmed and everyone has access to. Anyone accepting gov grants has access to publish there.
Our system now is just totally broken.
Cell open access option is $5200. Plos is open access. Again it wasn’t as much about the cost difference as it was about any easy platform to be scammed where there are no editors, reviewers, review, just “you manuscript was accepted, please send money”.
The question is how do we define “science”?
In my books, social “science” or economics, for that matter, are not science at all.
I think science can be defined broadly as some systematic study through observation and experiment. That certain social sciences may not be as precise, or that observations may be more open to interpretation, doesn’t mean that they’re not sciences.
Yeah it’s a social or soft science, it’s not a hard science. Just because it’s not a hard science doesn’t mean it’s something like philosophy or theology.
Agreed. Science is all about the process, not the subject. We can certainly apply scientific principles and rigor to investigate social topics; it’s just much harder to achieve experimental control on a study involving an open (societal) system and/or human (free-willed) subjects, but that doesn’t wholly negate the entire discipline.
Economist here. Economics is not a science. In many ways it is antithetical to a science. I don’t drink but, if I did, there wouldn’t be enough booze in my zip code to really hash out the “why” in a post.
Edit to add: once you get outside of supply, demand, and price, it’s all downhill in Econ.
“The fundamental problem with the social sciences today is that they have severed the link between insight into what exists and imagination of what might exist at the next steps – the adjacent possible. To understand a state of affairs, for example in natural science, is just to grasp what that state of affairs might become under certain provocations or with certain circumstances that we impose on it. Well, what’s happened in the social sciences is that this vital link between insight into the actual and imagination of the possible has been severed. The result is that the predominant methods in the social sciences lead them to be a kind of retrospective rationalisation of what exists.”
That about sums it up
seems to me you’re doing some bad science here, andy.
“i once read a scientific article that said that vaccines cause autism. so is science really science?”
more seriously, the problem of reproducibility of published research in the ‘hard sciences’ is huge: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
for my part i think you need to ask a handful of deeper questions about what science is and why that matters. we’re talking about a systematic production of knowledge using a variety of (largely empirical) methods, and then sometimes using forms of logic (esp induction or deduction) to draw conclusions from the empirical data.
history, for instance, is not a social science insofar as it’s not experimental.
anthropology, on the other hand (and i’m biased here), is a science. why? because you use repeated observations to produce knowledge.
i think the better argument isn’t whether anthropology is science but rather, say, whether its knowledge is ‘valid.’ i’d say that a good chemistry experiment could have broad external validity (if true, the findings should apply to all such elements/compounds/etc,. but may be an experimental error) whereas the anthropology data could have very deep internal validity (ie., we’re very confident that it represents a Truth about the observed population, but it might not apply to other populations).
horses for courses, etc.
I should have been more careful in my choice of language
I think the point I am getting at is the illustration used by nasim taleb, where you take 10k traders and they finish the year up or down based on the toss of a coin.
You eliminate roughly half each round
You end up a small pool who finish at the top and you then explain their genius by looking for similar traits completely ignoring the coin toss
I appreciate it is an extreme example but…
What about Political Science?